Category: Diversity

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dori Smith pointed to a Kottke post where he took on several conferences and their lack of diversity. I find this topic lately to be exhausting, when one considers we’ve been laboring on this issue for several years. I’d be more sanguine about the lack of women speakers at conferences if most people would at least agree that a more diverse conference, field, profession is a better one. But I don’t see it: I see white guys looking around going, “Hey, I dun see no problem”.

People like Eric Meyer, who wrote today:

In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don’t feel that I have anything to address next time around. What’s important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That’s it. That’s always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

You know, Eric has a point: why should we worry about diversity in conferences? Or within technology, as a matter of fact?

After all, the field is gradually heading to being completely male and a mix of asian and white, and that should be good enough, right? After all: people make choices not to be techs.

Of course, the field is designed by white men, and the value system is based on white male values, and the school curriculum for computer science was created by white males, and the guys are really good about giving each other kudos and recommending each other for jobs — not to mention also defining the tests given to job candidates, determining who gets the grants, the awards, the accolades.

I mean, just because women have to work twice as hard for half the recognition, what makes us think that we’re being deprived? After all, it’s all a matter of choice.

Come to that, why do we have to screw around with standards? I mean, Internet Explorer dominates in the browser market–so let’s just code and design for IE, and tell the W3C and that irritating buzzy group the WaSP that thanks, but no thanks, we don’t need to have a ‘better’ way of doing things: all we need is a market-driven way of doing things.

Men drive the tech market. IE drives the browser market. Ipso facto: we don’t need women but we do need IE.

But let’s now stop there: I don’t about anyone else who works with JavaScript and Ajax and stuff, but I’m really tired of blind people being on the internet. I mean, who do they think they are, wanting equal access to all the web pages and applications? Don’t they know that because we have to worry about screen readers and magnifiers, we can’t create the best web pages and applications?

This counts for all of you damn cripples, too. So what if you’re paralyzed and you have to use a keyboard, and can’t use a mouse? Whiner babies: why don’t you grab a tin can, fill it full of pencils, and plant your butt on the corner and beg for a living–let the rest of us do the web the way we want to–the best way. And isn’t that what matters? What the market determines is the best?

That’s what Eric says about the A List Apart conference:

…remember that An Event Apart is a web development best practices conference. Our brand promises to bring you the biggest names in the field of standards-oriented design and closely related fields, and to have those people talk about what they see next, to push the envelope just a little further out, to show the audience old things in new ways, and so on. Therefore, it relies on populating the stage with widely known and respected people, on having speakers who are instantly recognizable as relevant to what the attendees do and what they want to learn.

See? It’s all about brands, it’s all about the market.

Oh, let’s not bring in that old chestnut about women making up over half the users on the web, and our combined buying power and all that tedious maundering. I mean, really, why should Eric let something like not having half his client base represented stand in the way of a real kick ass conference on web design. Right? Right?

What’s important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That’s it.

No, what really matters is marketability. Maybe I’ve been weblogging too long, but it seems to me that a lot of people are doing a lot of crap in the name of ‘marketability’. If you want to be self-serving jerks, that’s fine with me, but at least be honest about it: don’t wrap it in ‘marketability’ and think it noble.

Where does it end, Eric? Where does one draw the line, and say that we’ll let the market determine what’s important to this point, but not to that? If we just relax and not ‘worry’ about diversity at conferences, it makes it so much easier…but why stop there?

The market also tells us that the blind don’t matter, the crippled don’t matter, the poor certainly don’t matter, the gay don’t matter, the blacks don’t matter, the Hispanics don’t matter, the Chinese matter (but only when they’re working, not when they’re voting)–hell, about the only ones that do matter, Eric, are people like you. And from the comments attached to your post that’s about who you’ll get at your conference.

Congratulations! I can see your conference is going to be exactly what you want: a great marketing success.

The weather is warmer and with it a lightness of spirit.

Today, in the email, I received links to two stories the senders knew I’d be interested in. The first was to the story about Frances Allen being the first woman to win the prestigious Turing Award:

Allen spent her entire career at IBM, winning several of the company’s top awards. In 1968, she won an corporate award for her research. The prize: a pair of cufflinks and a tie clip.

 

“No woman had ever won that award before,” Allen said Tuesday, chuckling, from her home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Two decades later, when she was named the first female IBM Fellow, her award certificate recognized the recipient for “his accomplishments.”

“These anecdotes are funny, but they do represent having to break through a lot of walls that still exist today,” Allen said. “I believe we’re moving into a whole new era for women in our field.”

We can hope so. Of course, this story didn’t rate a ripple on techmeme and the other online tech rags. Regardless of the field and it’s lack of women, or appreciation of women, Ms. Allen deserved this award and all the recognition she’s gotten through the years.

The second story was, of course, about the big squid caught today!

This is a really exciting story for cephalopodophiles everywhere. This baby weighed in at 990 pounds, and 33 feet long! Think of it: long as a three story building. And what a wonderfully beautiful, massive body.

This is the colossal squid, not my favorite architheuthis dux or giant squid. The colossal is a relatively new discovery (1925), lives only in the waters off the Antarctic and points south, and is heavier, possibly longer, and seemingly more aggressive than the giant.

The story about Ms. Allen is more important to me as a woman in technology, but gosh, I jumped up and down when I read about the squid.

Two stories that delighted me–and not even my family would have thought to call and let me know about them. No, that’s a mark–a good mark–of this odd little online world.

Thanks so very much to Allan, Alan, and Michael. You made my day.

According to Melinda Casino, I gather my response to Mary Hodder’s post is a case of my doing a “Cartman”. Since I don’t watch the show, I checked what Wikipedia has to say on this character:

Cartman’s personality has notably changed over the course of series. While always self-centered and bigoted, he was portrayed as more of an immature brat in the earlier seasons. As the seasons progressed, his personality became more aggressive and cunning, eventually crossing the line into outright sociopathy, while his bigotry morphed seamlessly into Nazi-like hatred. His abilities to manipulate other people into doing what he wants have become keener, along with his overall intelligence. He has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler in several episodes. Cartman’s pet peeves throughout the show have been hippies, whom he despises for a number of reasons, and Jews (especially Kyle Broflovski).

I really do appreciate the comparison. Perhaps Melinda will follow this clever bit of journalism with something more substantial, because I’m not sure if I earned the comparison because I was critical of Mary Hodder’s post, or because I could not throw aside my book, and my only source of income, in order to lead a session at a BarCamp.

Mary Hodder writes on women speaking and has this to say:

If you aren’t in the loop you aren’t as important as others with similar skills sets and expertise in the eyes of those who fund, engage for consulting, hire for leadership positions, take in PhD candidates or whatever it is that requires discernment between people.

I’m not in the email group consisting of ‘women in technology’, but if I were, I would have emailed Mary with the following:

 

I look around at the people who are at these conferences, and after a time I wonder if that’s all they’re particularly good at: go to conferences, and speak.

It’s going to take more than a few women showing up at conferences to change this industry. The very fact that there aren’t as many women speakers is a symptom of the problem, not the problem, itself.

However, for those of us who are in the field, who don’t live in California or Boston or New York, by putting yet another burden on us as to how we are somehow failing in the industry because we’re not meeting the requirements of a privileged few, shows how absolutely out of touch the women in this mailing list are.

I was asked to give a session at the Madison, Wisconsin BarCamp, and as much as I appreciated the invite, it’s also in a couple of weeks, and about one week before the draft of my book is due. I need to finish the draft, I’m two months behind. It’s exceptionally important to me that this book do well, because I hope that there might be others that follow.

I have ridden hard on conferences for not having enough women speakers, but it has only been in the last year or so that I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot more wrong with the tech field than not having enough women at yet another mostly useless gab fest; where the ‘insiders’ that Mary seems to think so highly of, can preen themselves in front of the cameras and feel good that they’re above the rest of us.

But then, what the hell do I know? I live in St. Louis, I write books, I help friends who have problems with their weblogs, and I tinker with tech quietly on my own, putting it out for those who are interested. To Mary, or should I say, the important people, I’m not in the loop and therefore, I don’t matter.

(Via Anne, who lives in Colorado and sorta matters.)

The next president of Harvard is going to be Drew Gilpin Faust, respected Historian and currently Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

She’ll be participating in a growing change in today’s universities, becoming one of the 23% of college presidents who are women. Considering that women make up over 50% of college attendance, I would say this is a healthy trend. From the many sources on the story, the reason she was picked was less that she was a woman and more that she’s a consensus builder; not following in the footsteps of Summers, who was aggressively competitive and whose tenure one person said was a “…wasted five years”. According to the New York Times:

Faculty members and officials familiar with the search said Dr. Faust’s leadership style — her collaborative approach and considerable people skills — would be vital for soothing a campus ripped apart by the battles over Dr. Summers, whom many accused of having an abrasive, confrontational style.

“She combines outstanding scholarship with an uncanny ability to administer both well and with a heart,” said Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Most of the weblogging commentary so far is among the Righteous Right, who clamor about feminism and shake their heads at the decline of civilization as they know it, but you know something? No one really cares what they have to say.

I see this as a good step forward: for Harvard, for women, for all of us.