Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

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Diversity

Pop!Dicks! Oh, I mean Pop!Tech!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

In the comments to Frank’s post at the Kitchen, Barbie Baywatch (Sherry), writer of Stay of Execution, wrote about attending the Pop!Tech conference, and how there was one woman presenting out of 30 presenters. She also details the experience in her weblog .

Since yesterday afternoon I’ve been pretty troubled by a pattern emerging from the speakers. First of all, our speakers this year are overwhelminly male – only one of 30 is a woman. This wasn’t intentional, but feels worse now that the program has begun. Because the male speakers have had a bunch to say about women, and I’m getting really depressed. I’m desperately wanting to see some strong women onstage (there are some really cool ones in the audience) but that’s not to be. As the program shaped out we as a group noticed that the speakers and performers were overwhelmingly white and male, and our program director worked to shift that, but didn’t make it a central factor in inviting folks.

I can’t help thinking that if gender or gender issues were featured prominately in this conference, this would become a central factor driving out the invitations. As it is now, you have a guy standing up at the front of this room talking about alpha male chimp behavior, and another about how we’re not having enough babies. If Sherry was depressed, two guesses as to how I would be reacting – and the first doesn’t count.

Interesting, but from her comments it would seem that of the ten women who were invited, nine had to decline. But then, if several men also declined, and they still managed to get 29 men, this shows that the conference issued several times more invitations to male speakers than women. Perhaps if all these conferences wouldn’t invite the same ten women, they might get more acceptances. Or gosh, be daring and maybe even invite eleven. Or even go all the way and invite twenty!

One weblog that responded to Sherry was Anthony Citrano who says that we shouldn’t be angry – after all, true inequality exists in Saudi Arabia. He also wrote:

What I want is a world where men and women have equal opportunity and (of course) equal rights – but we all need to realize that our gender differences are as special as our interpersonal differences. Men and women have very different physiological/psychological skills, desires, and priorities. They are fundamental, they are the reason we are all here, without them the species would have died off long ago. Now, to appreciate our biological differences does not mean we should be limited or trapped by them. We must accept our limbic differences – we cannot change them – while also growing upon them and using this fancy new cortex we grew recently. Men & women operate from very different perspectives, are generally better at some things than the other gender, and prioritize very differently.

Getting respect. Paid equally. Getting respect. Having access to opportunities. Getting respect. Receiving invitations to speak. Getting respect. Control over our reproduction. Freedom from stereotypes. Choice of roles and vocations. Did I happen to mention, getting respect? Now, which part of these is specific to men, and which specific to women? In what way are our priorities different?

Or is the male/female thing role dependent, and why don’t we all face it: technology is a guy thing. So is politics. But women make great nurses – so compassionate.

The topic of “Where are the Women” is featured the last day of the Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog clinic (on November 5th), which also features the topic weblogging ethics among others. Should be a smash ending.

A must-read writing on Pop!Tech by Mary Hodder:

Oh wait, again. A speaker just announced that for Poptech 2005, Caroline Porco, Dame Julia Pollock, and some space ship guy have agreed to speak. Well, they just doubled the number of women from one to two, at least in announced speakers for next year over this year. Bravo. But I think they need to work a little harder to reframe the world as both masculine and feminine, in order to even attract women, because who wants to speak at an all male party, were the world is framed in male dominated power structures? It’s demoralizing. It’s like a liberal going to a conservative party. The liberal will never be taken seriously there because everything will be on conservative terms.

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Diversity Weblogging

No, that’s not true

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

From David Weinberger I found out about a “Blogging for Women and Girls” workshop in Boston. According to the event description:

Blogging is emerging a powerful opinion-making force, but though the technology is fairly cheap and widely available, most blogs are still written by men. This workshop will teach women and girls the basics of blogging, from the technical aspects of blog publishing and maintenance, to developing a personal voice, style, and area of focus, to how to drive traffic to your blog

…most blogs are still written by men No, this is emphatically, and unequivocally NOT true. This is based on rumor and hearsay and people’s ill-formed opinion, and that unfortunate and biased Technorati 100 (and other Bloated Ego lists) and I for one am getting sick and tired of this myth being perpetuated.

At LiveJournal, the ratio of women to men is 2 to 1 or some such thing. According to statistics of weblogs outside of LiveJournal, the ratio is about 1:1.

We’re not being heard, or being linked. Why? A lot of factors are involved, but one of them is NOT that there are fewer of us! What does it take to get this communicated? A bloody act of God? Do we need to part the male sea?

We don’t need hand holding and a sensitive, nurturing environment. We don’t need little group blogrings made up of Progressive Women webloggers. Progressive Women – what is that? Liberal People with Breasts?

We don’t need to be ghettoed because of our gender, and categorized as some form of tech deficient po’baby, and helped along like pathetic half-lives just because we don’t have a penis. “Ewww, computers. Hold hands, ladies. Don’t let the bad technology scare you.”

Do you know how much this demeans us women?

What we need is to be visible. To be heard, and to be visible. And this starts with both men and women opening their eyes and their ears and treating women with equal respect; adding a thousand more women, ten thousand more women, isn’t going to make a difference. We have to make a difference, by being seen, and being heard, and listening and seeing each other. Not just those liberal politicos who write critical and thoughtful essays. Not just the people who write about social matters and other Things of Great Importance. And not the city dwellers who talk about this play or that great and profound book. All of us, babe. That means you’ll have to slum it with us non-political webloggers. You know, those people who write about something other than the American election.

The fringes.

If the women like Ms. Davis didn’t ignore the other women–those not on the Progressive Women’s Weblog Ring– and what we’ve been saying for months, years, perhaps we wouldn’t be having these conversations again and again and again.

Am I angry? You damn right I’m angry. Let’s solve the one problem we don’t have – get more women involved in weblogging. Yeah, more women to be ignored. More women to be be invisble.

update

What is frustrating is that I tried to get more women involved in the Kitchen effort; tried to bring both sexes in equally–make this as open and equal environment as I could. But what response did I get? As grateful as I am to all those who are helping, and I am tremendously grateful, the ratio of men to women is still about 4:1 or higher.

Does it take involvement from people like David Weinberger or Dave Winer or Joi Ito or some socially acceptable and sophisticated and ladylike venue to get women interested? We bitch about wanting to be seen and to be heard, but from what I’m experiencing, only if it’s being seen and heard by the right people.

So maybe what I’m feeling now is great disappointment rather than anger.

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Diversity

Please notice me in the corner

Gina, who I like and respect, wrote a post at Misbehaving about how she doesn’t …wanna fight anymore — she doesn’t want to have to be louder online in order to be visible. She references helenjane.com who wrote:

See there’s been this ongoing discussion on the Internets over where are the ladies? They’re not involved in conferences, their blogs aren’t pushing the technical envelope blah blah blah.

And where are the ladies?

They don’t feel like making everything a fucking argument.
That’s where they are.

I can understand and sympathize with both ladies. It’s not pleasant having to yell, get into people’s faces and scream out, “Why can’t you see us!” Doing so usually irritates people in power, and loses us jobs and opportunities. What’s the old saying? You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar?

Of course, in the past, the women that fought for equal rights for women (and blacks, the early sufffragettes also promoted equality in race) didn’t stay quietly at home. No they usually dressed in their black business suits or white summer dresses with their sashes and marched through the streets yelling out for equality. And they would get spat on, and hit, and jailed, and force fed, so I can see why there were many women of the time that didn’t want to get involved.

Several decades ago more women marched for equal rights for women, and for the right of women to control their bodies. They were labeled bitch, and their femininity questioned. Some of them have gone on to be killed when abortion clinics have been exploded or shot down. Others still keep up the fight, but they’re considered anachronisms now — you know those shrill feminists who hate men?

In fact, many women would rather quietly sit and chat in a corner and wait to be noticed. After all, we have primary care giving responsibilities for our families and kids — we can’t afford to spend the time to get into tech user groups or conferences and make our presence known. It’s up to the men to notice us.

Still, for every three women who sit in the corner quietly writing or talking or doing good work, there’s one tough broad who still believes we have to get into people’s faces and demand to be heard. You’ll know her easily because she’ll enter political or technical threads and be one of the few women slinging mud with the rest; or she’ll submit her proposals to conferences, or write about the lack of visibility of women. She’ll call even the most popular guy out when he makes a sexist joke, or generalizes based on sex. She can be unpleasant to be around; most will say she can’t take a joke.

Of the three women in the corner, one, who is primping in a mirror and putting on lipstick, will look at the tough old broad and shake her head, saying something about those ‘crazy feminists’, and how if you want to get ahead, you have to make the guys feel good about themselves; after all, these big, tough men don’t want some shrill women yelling at them. Let’s face it: women have used sex and sexiness to get ahead for years — what’s wrong with using what works?

The next woman is the proper woman and she looks in disdain at both the primper and the tough broad because both are, frankly, rather distatesful: the primper because she uses sex, and the tough broad because she gets angry and makes a lot of noise, and that’s just not very professional. Not to mention ladylike. No she looks down her nose at such messy behavior because all it takes is connections to get ahead. You have to make connections. So what if you don’t call this guy or that on his behavior? Once women are in power, then we can call the guys on how they act. In the mean time, you have to play the game to get ahead.

The third women is a lot like you and me and every woman. She wants to be respected for her work and her ability. She gets frustrated that being a woman means that she’s less likely to get notice, or to get recognized for her achievements. She speaks up from time to time, but each time she does, she gets slapped down, and no one likes to get slapped down. She wishes that a lof the guys she respects would speak out more, and would stop making sexist generalizations –but she likes these people and they do a lot of good, so she holds back. She doesn’t really want to argue. She just wants to be respected. To be noticed for her work.

And who could blame her?

But that fourth woman, the tough broad; the one who keeps up the fight, who barges in, who calls the guys out, no matter how nice? Well she’ll just continue doing what it is she does, until the day she no longer needs to, or, more likely, the day she just gets tired. When she does get tired, she’ll probably join the ladies in the corner–if they’ll have her. But she won’t sit and quietly talk. No, chances are, she won’t say a damn thing.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

That “Where’s the women” thing again

The folks at Misbehaving noted the lack of women in the photos from the Web 2.0 conference. As Liz Lawley wrote:

Via Anil, I just saw Jeff Veen’s post on “What do these pictures have in common?” Be sure to click on the “See what you’ve won!” button. Like the first commenter, I wish he’d write the whole rant.

And please don’t post any comments about how there aren’t any women to invite; that’s part of what our sidebar’s for. If you ask, you’ll get recommendations. (Look what happened when I posted about the Microsoft event.) Clearly, the people making the invitations see what they want to see–and they don’t see the women. We’re becoming increasingly invisible.

What’s most depressing is that in every other profession in which women have been in a minority, percentages have been gradually climbing–including technical fields like engineering. Only in computing-related professions have the numbers been dropping.

Actually, according to the NSF, women are dropping from engineering, too, and that’s in some ways the problem – a close affiliation between computer technology and engineering.

Returning to the post, I thought the title was interesting: Even the men are starting to notice. The reason why is that among the political weblogs, the running joke is that some highly ranked male political pundit will write a Where are the women post every three months and is soundly trashed for thinking that he’s invented the concept; that he is the first to have noticed. He’ll then be not so gently reminded that if he hadn’t ignored the women that existed right in front of him, he would have seen that this is a topic that’s been brought up, again and again.

And again. Like now, among the technology weblogs. Having toes in both worlds means I get it from both sides. Where are the women.

Liz and Anil may have noticed the lack of women at Web 2.0 but at least there were some women at this conference. What they didn’t notice, or at least not that I’ve seen them notice, is that there were absolutely no women speakers at Gnomedex. Gnomedex that fabulous little meeting that bills itself as the geek heaven.

I examined the speaker list several times, and found that nope, not a woman (unless CJ is a woman…). Barely any women in the audience, in fact. Is it that we only notice the lack of women when the meeting revolves around industry leaders, rather than hands-on geeks?

Odd, regardless.

Joi Ito (who was just appointed to ICANN – sympathies and congrats, Joi) noted today that whatever lack of visibility women have in weblogging doesn’t extend to all online communities. He’s found that women have a strong presence in the Wikipedia and ponders:

I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog voices seems to be quite high. I wonder what causes this difference in gender distribution?

I wrote the following in comments:

Participation in the wikipedia isn’t controlled by anything other than the person’s own interests and involvement.

Studies have been made of blogging and have found that 50% or more of all webloggers, journalists or ‘bloggers’ implied categorization aside, are women; however, men are given disproportionate attention. Why? Good question, someone let me know when there’s a good answer.

In blogging, there are many different factors that generate attention, including a person’s name (how well they’re known), wealth, status, etc –above and beyond the quality or amount of participation in the weblogs. In the wikipedia, attention is based on involvement and quality, no other factor.

What we’re seeing is probably the same amount of participation of each sex in both activities, but women are getting proportionate attention in Wikipedia.

Joi asked an interesting question in his post: …is it something about Wikipedia that attracts powerful women?

I think what’s more likely is that a powerful woman can’t be shut down in the Wikipedia community, but can be effectively ignored (or dismissed as ‘bitch’) in the weblogging community.

Not good, but I will say this: this isn’t just a ‘guy’ thing. If women didn’t work against other women in this community, and actively supported each other more, we wouldn’t be as invisible as we are.

Seems to me, we all have a lot of work to do to correct the inequities.

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Diversity

Bad girls must pay

I tried to watch the movie, “The Magdalene Sisters” but had to stop, not because the movie was bad but because the movie made me so angry. If you’re unfamiliar with these spots from hell, they were convents run by the Catholic Church in several countries, and devoted to the ‘penance’ of wayward women. In them, women would toil over laundry 6 days a week, usually from 5 in the morning until they went to bed at 7 at night. If this sounds like something that must have happened a hundred years or so ago, think again: the last laundry closed its doors in 1996.

The worst of these were in Ireland, but there were Magdalene convents in Australia, North America, Scotland, and England. Women were put in these, many times without their consent, because they had a baby out of wedlock, or their families felt that the girls had ’sinned’ by having sex (or they thought the girls had sex). In some cases, the were intered if the girls were Catholic orphans and the Sisters thought them too pretty and therefore wanted to save them from themselves.

At the Laundries, they were forced to strip naked once a week as the Sisters taunted their bodies: that they were fat or their breasts too big–humiliating the girls. There hair was kept short and they were dressed in coarse shapeless dresses, their breasts bound tightly so that they seem flat chested. Some were sexually abused, both by Sisters and by the Priests. Many were beaten or otherwise tortured, and in Ireland, not allowed to leave on their own, even when they reached adult age.

It wasn’t until one of the Laundries was sold in the 1990’s and 133 bodies of women were found in unmarked graves that the story of the horror of these Convents started to be told.

A few years back I read about one woman put into the Convent for wayward behavior in the late 1960’s, and was stunned to realize that was only a few years earlier than my own ‘wayward’ behavior here in the States. I would say, “Thank God, I wasn’t born in Ireland”, except as one of the former inmates said, what kind of God exists that would allow such cruelty to innocent young girls?

The history of the Magdalenes started getting international attention when a reporter with the RTE (Irish Television), Mary Raftery, did a story on the institutions. In this country, we learned about it when 60 Minutes ran a story on it the same year. Yeah, the same ‘bad boy’ 60 Minutes of the infamous CBS documents. I guess it takes one set of ‘bad’ people to expose the truth about another set of ‘bad’ people.

The Catholic Church, of course, denounced the work as lies and fabrications, a stance it would hold through subsequent documentaries and movie release.