Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
My appreciations for Frank Paynter for including me with other fine company in his recommendations of women webloggers for the Women’s Media Center. I, like others, was also left rather breathless by the sweeping arrogance of the site’s byline:
The WMC website is the only place for news on women; links to women columnists, bloggers, media organizations, and more…
The links to women webloggers are primarily to those that might be labeled ‘pure feminist’ weblogs, which I guess is the dividing line between women worthy of inclusion and those not. I read several of the ones listed, and they are terrific and should be included: in WMC and everywhere. It isn’t this that leads me to sigh, and feel tired; it is the lack of depth in the list, which shows an unspoken but very real bias among feminists against those of us in the technology field.
What these fine ladies seem to forget is that while they are busy writing about the bias against women, we’re busy out there being the women suffering the bias. We’re the ones in fields that have, if we’re lucky, one woman in four workers. We’re the ones showing that women can aspire to fields and jobs other than mommy, wife, nurse, teacher, and social worker in a women’s center.
Many of us are professionals in media, too, though we’ll not get Nobel prizes, or offered chairs at Harvard. We write on technology, and add that odd feminine element now and again to conferences and book shelves. We help keep the myth alive that any little girl can grow up to be anything she wants. We do so in many cases by having to fight men who don’t want us around. Worse, who don’t even see us when we are.
This we accept as part of the job. We don’t like it, but we were once the little girls who believed we could grow up to do anything we want, and we’re not going to give it up because of some adversity. What truly hurts, though, is we usually do this fight alone, because many of the outspoken feminists are snobs, and to them, we just don’t count.
