Category: Diversity

Adam Green writes on two snapshots of the copyright/RSS discussion on Tech Memeorandum:

One reason why much of the heat has dissipated, and the battle has morphed into a search for a middle ground may be that women have entered the discussion. While this started with the men riding out to shoot up the cattle rustlers, the womenfolk are now asking questions and looking for answers.

 

Is this sexist generalization? Perhaps, but based on the two Tech Memorandum snapshots I’d much rather read a discussion dominated by Shelley Powers, Susan Mernit, Denise Howell and Jeneane Sessum, than Mike Rundle and Om Malik. No offense meant guys.

Adam has discovered something really amazing: if a dialog is extended to a diverse audience, it ends up being a lot more interesting. In this case, women joined the discussion and the dynamics of the discussion changed.

We women have gotten men to link to us now and again; the next step is to get them to actually talk with us. Hopefully, eventually they’ll reach the same epiphany that Adam has.

I’ve adopted a term I discovered from Catarina Fake to describe the phenomena of linking to women webloggers, while reserving debate primarily to the menfolk: chicking the women. Catarina has been reading a biography of Martha Stewart and found that the author had gone out of his way to trash Stewart, without acknowledging all of her rather impressive accomplishments. The only really positive voice in the book had this to say on Stewart’s interaction with Time Warner about a television show:

Sheingold came to sense something else about the way Martha’s colleagues handled her at Time: There was a slight but unmistakable–and ever-present–tone of condescension in their words, as if the members of the Time Inc’s boys club wanted her to know that they still regarded her as nothing more than the fashion model she once had been, instead of the business executive she’d become.

 

In time, Sheingold invented a word for what they were doing to her. He didn’t share the word with anybody, but it popped into his head every time he heard them belittling and dismissing her, in that certain way that would make Martha’s jaw set and her face go cold. …’Chick-ing’ her.

Jaw set…face cold…I hear that.

Speaking of cold, after this discussion about RSS the following represents the chances of me ever providing full feeds again.

Lest anyone think that I’m hoping to get listed in the weblog roll of the Women’s Media Center, perish the thought from your mind. If anything, this just demonstrates, to me, the evils of blogrolls–their divisiveness and their arbitrary exclusivity (those with friendly neighborhood weblog rolls excepted–don’t hit me). Especially when used with a site purporting to be the only place for information on women.

I’m still amazed that a site starting in 2005 would dare to imply it is the definitive expert on any topic, much less one as immense as women and women and media. However, it’s what I would expect from an organization led by Jane Fonda–another reason why I would not want to be listed at the site. I have a very low opinion of Ms. Jane Fonda.

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.