The New State of Gender in Technology
I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the so called feminist movement in the web community. There have been a lot of these “hey, why isn’t a woman listed on this,” complaints over the last couple of months, more than I’ve seen in a long time. I really don’t like it, and think it hurts, rather than helps, our cause.
Earlier today, a question was thrown out on twitter about whether or not a woman should have been included in this article about A-Listers who have stopped blogging, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, and the latest to join the list…Dan Lyons.’
My answer was no, I couldn’t think of an A-lister who belonged on the list. In fact, the only female blogger I could of who would even remotely fit the concept of the article was Kathy Sierra, but that was almost a year ago now, and the article was listing recent blogging drop outs.
Fact is, there isn’t a woman to put on the list. Period. It is one thing to not include a woman on a keynote of a conference about women (as happened a couple of weeks ago). It’s a whole other thing to ask why women aren’t included in everything.
10 years ago, I did lots and lots of interviews and panels about women and technology. The internet was male dominated, it still is, but it was certainly worse back then. There was blatant hostility towards women, we were genuinely afraid (at times) to openly be a woman online and it was important that we talked about it to change things. I took the same view then I did now. Don’t treat us any differently, don’t make concessions or lower standards because we’re women. We can totally rise to the challenge and beat you at your own game.
I thought things were getting better, and have said as much over the last few years. Sure, the industry is still male dominated – hell, my own company is comprised of 11 men and me, but so what. This generation of teenagers are growing up with computers, and I fully believe they will be heading into technology in mass numbers. Things are, without a doubt, going to change.
I never, ever expected to hear “women must be included everywhere just because they’re women.” That’s just not true, and it really upsets me to hear that. I think it’s destructive to our fight for equality, and only perpetuates the belief that men need to pander to women.
I don’t know where this came from. I’m a little concerned that it’s related in some part to the mommy blogger movement, which, for better or worse, is convincing some (with emphasis on SOME, I’m not trashing the entire movement) women that they should be rich and famous just because they blog about pampers. Male or female, you’re not going to get rich off of a blog. Period.
Do I sound bitter? Good, because I am. We’re taking steps backwards, not forwards.
Women are looking at gender first, then content. Please stop it. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the problem now really is with the women, not the men. And that’s pathetic.
Equality needs to start with us. If women can’t even act like they’re equal to men, then we can’t expect men to treat us that way. Stop using gender as a sword, and acting like you’re entitled to something special because you’re female. Act like you’re equal, and you’ll be treated equally.
To get back to the original point here, stop pointing out every single thing that doesn’t include a woman! It doesn’t matter, and it sure as hell doesn’t help.
5 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Lindsay, February 11, 2009 @ 8:18 am
Really interesting perspective, and I totally agree that we should not be treated differently just because we are women; treat us the same and we are sure to rise to the occasion.
My fear is twofold: One, yes, the popularity of women on the web may only be coming from the pampers bloggers, and that doesn’t really help *our* cause, being the women actually designing, developing and deploying technology. Two, and I talked about this with some others at ShesGeeky, is that young girls are going into scienes, just the soft sciences and medicine. We need to change the message that’s being sent to young girls to increase our turnover rate: the rate at which girls who are not interested in tech and engineering who become interested.
Nice work!
By Shelley, February 11, 2009 @ 7:35 pm
I can understand not having heard of me, but “megnut” is Meg Hourihan, the co-creator of Blogger, and former partner to Twitter creator,
Statistically, there are fewer tech women, then ten years ago. Things are getting worse, not better.
And yet over 50% of webloggers are women, so it’s surprising to see lists of webloggers with no women.
Perhaps if women were more supportive of women…
By Shelley, February 11, 2009 @ 7:36 pm
Sorry, Twitter creator Evan Williams
By Jen Z, February 26, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
i agree – women need to be more supportive of women and pamper bloggers frighten me most of all