BurningbirdRecovered from the Wayback Machine.
Oh god, please, won’t someone notice the irony of this post, and the accolades heaped on this white boy?
I can’t be the only human being on this planet who sees this as absolute proof of everything we’ve been saying for years about the invisibility of women.
I am silenced. I have nothing more to say.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Interesting. The Ajax Experience no longer has the dubious distinction of have no women in its speaker list. It now has Molly Holzschlag.
Since I know absolutely squat about JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest other than what they do, it’s rather humorous I’d get picked up for such a seriously geeky conference as The Ajax Experience.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Interesting. The Ajax Experience no longer has the dubious distinction of have no women in its speaker list. It now has Molly Holzschlag.
Since I know absolutely squat about JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest other than what they do, it’s rather humorous I’d get picked up for such a seriously geeky conference as The Ajax Experience.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Women have gone to space. Women have led nations. Women have died for their countries. Women have invented, pioneered, and broken barriers and boundaries. They’ve had babies and buried husbands while they did these things, too.
And on the eve of the very overdue day when a woman will lead a network’s evening newscast by herself — which in the scheme of things is important, but not in the same league as finding a cure for hunger and poverty — what mattered to some nincompoop minding the network photo store was The Babe Factor.
Even Katie Couric couldn’t escape that.
This – this! – on top of the recent Time magazine cover of Hillary Clinton, which was set up like a middle-school popularity contest, or one of those online, red-carpet fashion polls: Love her, hate her. These are our choices when it comes to a complex woman who may or may not run for president of the United States?
The double-whammy made me wonder:
What has it all been for — the quiet work, the public actions, the incremental advances, the meteoric successes, the doors broken through before the doors were held open — if, in 2006, many in the world and at least some at two major media outlets still regard older, accomplished women through a prism of cute and popular? Will we ever, ever graduate in life?
I think it’s worth asking the question — whether you’re older and broader in the beam than Katie Couric (as I am), or whether you’re younger and about to embark on a future that I hope will not be mucked up by such outdated but persistent (and potentially debilitating) cultural clutter.
In honor of the shoulders I stand on, I still ask what gives and why.
Some of my friends regard my outrage as a museum piece.
I sure hope it isn’t. I hope people still care about things like double standards and objectification, and what they do to all of us.
Pam Platt Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
The conference organizer for Office 2.0 has added three more women speakers. Actually, three very impressive women speakers. To address those who think that achieving diversity means giving up quality–you’re a putz.
Speaking of putz, Dennis Howlett wrote the following in comments at Robert Scoble’s weblog related to this issue:
Sadly to say Robert, when you engage the castration crowd, you ain’t never gonna win an argument. Not even come close.
One question to those who agree with Howlett: what are you afraid of? Why is attempting to add 5 or 6 women to a conference of over 50 speakers scare you so much? Are you afraid that the women will have bigger dicks than you? We already know they have more balls.
(And on that note, time to take hands off of keyboard, and back away slowly.)