Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

Categories
Diversity

Change begins at home

The effects of my gender posts recently are starting to thread their way around, slowly but slow change is usually the most lasting change.

Julia Lerman posts on an article with the deplorable title “Why can’t women keep up with men in high tech”. Julia writes:

t’s more like this – most agree that in our programming world – at work, user groups, etc, there are about 10% women. Go to PDC or TechEd and that percentage of women drops to about 5-7%. Then look at the top layer of our own (conference speakers, authors, etc and that percentage drops to maybe 1-2%. Those are the numbers that are driving the question. Why aren’t there also 10% up there?

I checked the speakers list at ApacheCon being attended by so many faces we know and know and know. Of the 50+ speakers, two are women. Just two. There were a couple of photos of of guys with long hair that got my hopes up a bit, but it was a false alarm. However, I wasn’t surprised by this – women have traditionally steered clear of open source technology.

I also had a long and terrific email from a relatively new blogger, Ingrid Jones, who blogs at blogspot under the name, Me and Ophelia. Ingrid pointed out to me a London Times article about the use of rape as a weapon in the Bosnian war:

A week ago this newspaper carried a harrowing account of the children born to the tens of thousands of Bosnian women who were subject to what the United Nations later described as mass genocidal rape by their mainly Serbian captors. The report, in the Magazine, recounted how these women, perhaps numbering as many as 50,000, were held prisoner for months and raped repeatedly, often several times a day. Most, unsurprisingly, suffered permanent psychological scars. When children resulted from these brutal and unholy unions, most were abandoned at birth. They are the permanent legacy of a bloody and vicious civil war. Those guilty of these appalling war crimes, meanwhile, have gone unpunished. Today, some even hold public office.

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paid subscription wall. Does anyone have access to the material for Christine Toomey’s article A Cradle of Humanity that isn’t behind a paywall?

Update: Ingrid sent me a copy of the article in an email, of which I pulled the following excerpt:

“This will do little, however, for women such as Sahela, 46, now so frail she looks more like a woman in her late sixties. In the picture that she treasures of her handsome teenage son slouched smiling beside her on a sofa, she is totally unrecognisable. A few months after the picture was taken in 1992, Sahela’s 15-year-old son was beheaded in front of her as he begged Serb soldiers not to drag his mother away. After ordering Sahela to bury his body on the spot, the soldiers then raped her in her own home and did so again repeatedly after that in a rape camp, where she and other women were kept tied to beds. Sahela recalls how one young woman she describes as a noted beauty managed to break free from her captors and, crying out for her mother, killed herself by hurling herself through a closed upper-floor window to end the continuing torture.”

Finally, Liz at misbehaving.net wrote a post clarifying the purpose of the blog in response to several people, including Anne of ‘purse lip square jaw’ who wrote:

Personally, I self-identify as feminist and was most marked by my riot-grrl phase (this also points to my age and girlhood inspirations). But I also like this Rebecca West quote: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” All of which is to say that I am interested in women’s experiences, and am happy to read more women’s voices on technology.

Given my firm conviction that there is no-such-thing as (the essential) WOMAN, I shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t recognise myself – and all sorts of other women – in this weblog. What I mean is that, despite the explicit claim to represent many voices, I don’t see much difference on this site. In other words, the site content strikes me as pretty straight, white and upper-middle class.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. I am going to treasure this quote for some time to come.

Among other things, Liz wrote:

At the moment, I think one of the best things we’ve done is collect the list of names “misbehaving elsewhere” in our sidebar. It’s a wonderful retort to the “where are the women?” question. It’s an affirmation of the number of articulate women in the tech sphere. And it’s an incredible jumping-off point for seeing a range of women’s voices.

I wrote in a couple of comments:

As for the blogroll: I would still rather discover women’s voices because people link to their writing, rather than them showing up on a blogroll. There’s no harm in the blogroll – it is a positive thing – but that won’t generate change. As you’ve said, though, that’s not what you’re trying to do with this weblog, and isn’t a task you’ve asked for. You want to highlight women’s contributions, and that’s cool. Perhaps all of us should focus on that.
…
I agree with both Elizabeth and weez about pointing to the women on the right more and less to major publications and stories. These _are_ the women in technology – most of the other stories are about things and places far too distanct for most of us.

Then, we who read these stories should follow suit. This becomes a spark, a flicker of flame that allows Women’s Writing to grow beyond the shadows cast by far too many men linking in and among themselves.

Doc Searls, in response to the article It’s a little too cozy in the Blogosphere wrote:

This isn’t high school here. We don’t have to suck up to the popular kids, or try to be like them. If we want our blogs valued, if we want Google juice, we only have to try to say something worthwhile – meaning worth a link. It’s not a lot more complicated than that. Just a lot harder to understand than a popularity contest.

It is more complicated than that in this weblogging environment where Women’s Writing is concerned. But I cannot do much about what other people do – I can only control what occurs in this space, and therefore gently point you to these fine folk and write “Listen: they have something to say”.

Categories
Diversity

Hands gloved, legs crossed at the knees

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I appreciated the folks that commented on the Gender Ghetto and G Quotient postings. I am lucky to have thoughtful readers.

I have to admit, though, that I am disappointed by the lack of feminine response to the writings. I received honest, interested, humorous, even slightly angry responses from men, but few women, other than terrific posts from Maria and Elaine, and a comment by NetWoman. I don’t value less the comments made by men, particulary the excellents one that have been made; but this was an issue about women, and if they’re not interested, why am I wasting my time or energy.

(Perhaps the women think this is nothing more than a way to generate links for myself. A hell of a situation when one can’t start a conversation — or try and start a conversation — and be seen as nothing more than a link whore.)

More likely though, most women believe that the issue is either not of interest, or that my bitchy, non-feminine ways are not the way to go for women to make an impact. I’ve been told that my strident ways are off-putting to the men, and the men have been kind enough to let me know that my bitching isn’t going to win points with them. All that I’m doing is feeding their ego, and not helping the cause of women. Perhaps they’re right.

Today’s woman, at least in the countries where women have an illusion of control over their lives, wants to get ahead by focusing on women’s positive contributions, rather than men’s oppressive behavior. You catch more flies with honey and all that rot.

I am not a modern woman I guess. Or perhaps I’ve read too much history and seen that rarely does change occur by appeasing those in control. However, I am also not one to throw my good time away on bad causes, so to the appreciations of one and all, I’m sure, this will be my last posting on women and weblogging and women and technology and women in the Western World.

Rather, I’ll focus on those women for whom the issue of equality is one of life and death, rather than trying not to be strident or to offend the nice men.

Categories
Diversity

The Gender Ghetto

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The sun is out and I’m heading out to get pictures of flocking birds while I can, weighed down by three cameras, six lenses (including one 300mm), and various stands and other accoutrement.

Speaking of flocking, the email conversation yesterday that led to the G Quotient posting, ended up generating an interesting conversation, at least among the women on the group. And a few men, but most of the men on the list were noticeably silent. Normally I don’t like to reference external communications in this weblog because it makes it seem like I’m going, “I was there and you weren’t! Neener, neener!” But in this case, yesterday’s conversation should have taken place on the weblog in the first place, and hence the move.

The power of weblogs is that anyone can have one and post their thoughts online. There is a true democracy at work. However, a democracy isn’t always the best form of group organization within a heterogeneous body. What happens is that the majority tends to hold all the influence.

Supposedly within weblogging, women form over 50% of the webloggers, and yu would think that they then receive 50% of the links. However, what I’m finding, at least in the weblog circle that I tend to traverse on my daily prowls, is that links to women occur much less frequently than links to men. I’m not talking blogroll links; I’m talking about links to posts, with associated commentary.

No big deal, you say. After all, anyone can have a blog and yadda yadda ya.

The big deal is that if within the new semantic web we talk about, we’re saying that the link is where meaning arises and discovery occurs — so what happens when 50% of the population receives 25% of the attention? Or more specifically, what happens when women, to get more of this attention, form groups of webloggers linking to each other, but get scant attention from the males hereabouts? My friend Sheila had the perfect word for it — the women are effectively becoming ghettoed.

I wrote in an email yesterday (edited to fit this format):

If it’s through links that we discover each other, and within the new web, the semantic web we’ve discussed recently it’s through the link where meaning is discovered, then what happens when women are not linked? Or are only linked within certain contexts? This isn’t necessarily about individuals; this is about how women are ultimately being ghettoed online, by link and by association. Or lack thereof.

It shouldn’t matter who we link to, and how we frame that link, but it does. Can’t we be honest enough with ourselves about this?

Baldly stated, women are second class citizens in weblogging, and this classification is enforced through links. We can say good writing is all that matters, but thats the same as saying there’s less women in the technorati 100 because women can’t write. Or if politics is the issue, then women never talk about politics. I don’t see this within my own reading.

But do we talk about these things differently, in such a way that male writing has more appeal? And since men have most of the link power, like goes to like? I don’t know. Would be a fascinating study, wouldn’t it?

The buzz sheets, who cares, but influence, yeah I care about that. And not only are women not as represented, but the women who were in the sheets have been dropping. About the only ones rising are the warbloggers — so maybe this is really about politics.

As Kevin pointed out in my comments, at first glance women may not seem as represented in the buzz sheets, but if you start looking at all of the group weblogs, there are more women then first appears. So I went snooping among the Technorati Top 100.

First, I found that only about 55 of the Top 100 are weblogs in the true sense of the term. I also found that people don’t update their blogrolls because more than one site had moved and the link was dead (what does that say about the Top whatever sheets that we see? That blogrolls are more a matter of habit than use?)

Secondly, my reaction was: who are these people? I have never heard of several of them, but then a quick look at the writing showed me that they’re primarily within the ‘warblogging’ domains, and I only visit these circles when I’m feeling particularly pugnatious. There was also more than foreign language weblog (which I put into other if I couldn’t determine the gender) and several LiveJournal weblogs.

However, doing a count and placing weblogs into male, female, both, and other, I came up with the following counts:

Male – 38

Female – 7

Both – 3

Other – 7

Feel free to check my facts. Even if all the others resolve to female, which I don’t think they will, women are represented in only 31% of the top weblogs — and that’s throwing in the influence of the women in the group blogs.

The Blogging Ecosystem seems to have a better distribution of women to men, but closer inspection shows that women are still badly underrepresented in the upper ranks.

Why? If we do link to women less than men, why?

I know for myself that coming from a technology background, I tend to link to other technologists and most of them are men. Or at least, that’s what I thought. What I’m finding is that there are a lot more women technologists online, but they don’t necessarily get the focus or the attention.

Hmmm. Now, why is that?

I wondered if it was because men tend to write about specific uses of technology, which women tend to talk about the human influence of the technology. After all in the semenatic web discussion recently, that was my contribution.

(Which so traumatized the Guys of Geek that they’ve since spent their time since comparing each other’s….early geek experiences.)

But then there’s Julie Lerman’s .NET blog (good lord, do you see how few women there are that are .NET bloggers?), or Scripty Goddess. Betsy Devine did the code thing today, with an interesting segue into The Graduate.

However, one big difference is that the women technologists rarely venture into technologies that are, bluntly, focused around one of weblogging’s Big Dogs — Dave Winer. In fact, aside from myself, the only women I know of who have waded into RSS or Weblogging APIs or Atom or any of these discussions has been Dorothea Salo and Liz Lawley and I believe Betsy and Meg Hourian have also in the past. If there are other women involved in these discussions I don’t know of them because they’re not being linked!. I only know about Dorothea and Liz because they’re part of my neighborhood, not because they’ve been linked by the tech community overmuch.

Hmmm. Now why is that?

Here’s a thought: Perhaps its because neither of them calls Dave Winer an asshole enough to generate attention. In other words, its not that women aren’t talking tech, it’s that few women are joining the religous battles about technology, and it is these that generate the buzz.

In fact, if you look at many of the top linked women webloggers on all the the lists you see three significant factors that could explain their prominance:

1. The weblogger is an early adoptee, for instance Meg Hourihan, Rebecca Blood, and xeni at Boing Boing.

2. The weblogger is emotionally charged, many times pugnacious.

3. For all, the weblogger has been linked more than once by one or more of weblogging lodestones, people with significant influence.

The early adoptee women tend not to be pugnacious, but the women entering the weblogging circles after the initial founders to tend to be. I don’t mean this in a negative sense — just that they have strong likes and dislikes and few inhibitions about expressing them.

Most importantly, though, and a characteristic shared by all the women is that they are linked, sometimes frequently, by one or more lodestone weblogs — Scripting News, Boing Boing, Instapundit, Doc Searls, and Jason Kottke, give or take another lodestone weblog or two.

(The only weblogs that defy this characteristic is the LiveJournal weblogs. If anything, true weblogging democracy is demonstrated within the LiveJournal weblogs more than within any other inner circle within weblogging. )

Do women then have to take on the guise of handmaiden to the gods of virtuality to be an influence?

This then returns me to my original thought about links and influence, and the gender ghetto. Yes weblogging is open to all and anyone can publish online, but one’s reach, one’s influence is directly related to how much one is linked. You may be an inspiration to your circle, but if you circle has three readers, your influence is not as great as someone linked by a thousand readers.

Most times this isn’t an issue — who cares if you’re linked or not as long as you’re satisfied by your readers and what you write, and I agree with this. But what happens as weblogging becomes more influential in politics and social reform? Women’s voices have not not been heard as loudly as they should in these areas in the past — is this same lack of influence now going to be taken into the communication media of the future?

Think about that picture of President Bush signing the new abortion law and you all wrote, “Look there are no women present.”

Are women linked less because our voices are different? Are we not as confident when making our assertions and are therefore less quotable? Are we not as aggressive in our opinions, and therefore less interesting?

It could be that women in weblogging share much with our sisters in ancient Japan, where women wrote in one language while men wrote in another and Women’s Writing was tantamont to being a derogatory statement. But it was the Women’s Writing that survives to today; perhaps this new form of Women’s Writing will the only writing that survives into the future. We know that quality of writing or subject matter is not a factor in any of this — quality exists across gender, and subject matter ranges far and wide with both sexes. Perhaps our influence will stand the test of time.

But then I look at that photo of all those men standing around the President signing into law a bill that could effectively condemn some women to death; I think about women’s lack of representation as tech workers and CEOs in this country; women being denied equality in education, employment, health care, and even justice in other countries; women being stoned to death for adultery while men screw with impunity; and I am not content to be an influence in a thousand years.

I want to be an influence now.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

What’s your G Quotient?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I initiated an email discussion today that ended up focused on women and weblogging. Without going into particulars, I challenged the members of the group to find their G Quotient, or Gender Quotient:

For the last one hundred posts, count the number of times you linked to a male weblogger, and the count of times to a female weblogger.

For each link, what was the context?

Was it:

  • Political (not weblogging political, but politics in the real world)
  • Metablogging
  • About sex or romance
  • Environment (family, friends, home, pets)
  • Professional (about a person in a professional sense)
  • Technology (related to computer tech in some way)
  • Scientific (physics, math, biology, medicine)
  • Academic (formal studies)
  • Writing (about literatur or weblogger as writer, not including linguistics)
  • Linguistic
  • Other art (including music and photography as well as performance art, painting, and so on)
  • Issues of self, including a person’s exploration of what makes themselves or other people tick
  • Religious
  • Cultural
  • Historical (about history)
  • General (none of the above

Supposedly there are as many or more women bloggers than men. Do we link to women webloggers are much as men? Does the context change? In other words do we link to women on more humanistic issues, and men on professional or tech issues?

Do we care?

Are webloggers Martians?

Categories
Diversity

Bitches Club

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I swear I’m going to start a Bitches Club. And it’s not going to be for women only.

I’ve been researching the extent of offshoring in this country in the last week; I’m appalled by what I’m finding, especially offshoring as related to the technology field. The more I read, the more I find myself siding with the protectionists who believe we should penalize companies for moving jobs offshore, or for bringing in workers from other countries. But then I remember the great people I’ve worked with who were in this country on H1Bs from India, Russia, Vietnam, Australia, and other countries. I think about how much richer my life is, how much more open my understanding is, thanks to these people who learned a new language and stepped into a country and a culture where not everyone welcomed them.

I look around and see unemployed tech workers and I say to myself, we need to keep our jobs here, in this country; take care of our own. But then there are the webloggers from other countries who have forced me to think beyond my borders; who have screwed around with my vision and hearing, leaving me irreversibly damaged beyond Patriotic repair. People who just won’t let me think within the box.

Globalization is happening, and I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to fight against it. Or that we should. But too often corporations and countries invoke globalization and we don’t understand the implications – either the possible benefits or the potential for abuse.

It’s like technology: too many people just go with the technical flow without understanding what’s happening. Then something like a DDoS happens, and words like packet and SYN get thrown around and they haven’t a clue if something positive is being done to help them, or if someone is just yanking their non-tech chains.

I think that’s what defines a bitch to me. It’s not that you fight all the time; it’s that, at a minimum, you don’t accept what’s happening around you without at least trying to understand what that ‘acceptance’ means in the long run.

Tough decisions need tough talk and even tough actions at times . When the going gets bitchy, the bitches get going.

(I am going to die at a relatively young age from stress, aren’t I?)

Speaking of bitchy folk, Sheila Lennon introduces a new radio broadcast called Outrage Radio. What happens if you put Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter* through the Looking Glass? You get a new sport called Extreme Liberal Radio.

Sheila interviews the Outrage gang, and the responses show that amidst the passion, there might also be vestiges of humor. My favorite response back to one of her questions: “If you want a nanny, move to Sweden.” I hope this humor, and its associated perspective, continue because if I can’t handle conservatives who take themselves too seriously, liberals with flecks of foam at the corners of their mouth and a demonic gleam in their eyes also turn me off.

I hesitate when I see something like ‘liberal radio’, because I don’t think we can use labels like ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, or even ‘libertarian’, the same again. I know so-called warbloggers who are extremely liberal when it comes to social issues and internal politics. I know fiscal conservatives who are pro-choice. And there’s even a few libertarians who believe that maybe machine guns aren’t really necessary for deer hunting.

Today is a rich and complex time. It’s not the same black and white hat, good guy/bad buy world, and cookie cutter labels just don’t work. I hope that Outrage Radio goes beyond just being ‘liberal radio’, or why listen? We’ll already know what they’ll be saying.

*Speaking of Ann Coulter, where’s the Ann Coulter of Liberal Radio, guys?