He’s been calling out the tech industry for their gender bias for quite some time over on the Mule blog. Today’s post hits ‘em where it counts.
The Web STILL hates women
Last year we spoke about the ridiculous disparity between the amount of women and men speaking at industry events. After writing that post I had the pleasure of speaking to some of the people men who organized a few of those events.
Their defense was that basically, gee, they just don’t know any girls. That’s fair. Girls are intimidating and they smell pretty. So, I pointed them to a list that Jen Bekmen put together for just this kind of thing, hoping that the next year’s set of events would be a little more gender diverse.
They’re not.
Jason Kottke has a great run-down of this year’s events. He did math and everything.
Since I’m much more childish than Jason, and he’s already done the smart work, I’ll merely point out, in my charming Eddie Haskel-like manner that this year the ‘Future of Web Apps’ Conference (26 men, 1 woman) went as far as incorporating a penis into its logo.
At least there’s truth in advertising.
The comments of the post are pretty revealing as well and I definitely recommend you click through to Jason’s post. And digg it.
You can make all the “there are more men programmers and designers” arguments you want and to be fair, that may account for some of the disparity at these events. That said, the industry still perpetuates an unmistakable cultural bias as evidenced by Violet Blue’s recent article in SF Gate. It’s not uncommon for the heroes of tech to be dismissive and disrespectful toward women in the field. And for that, there is no excuse.
Now if we could just get Mike to stop screen-shotting all our IM conversations… I just might buy him a drink at SXSW (31% women).
UPDATE:
I just stumbled across a post on this very issue from earlier this month on Veronica Belmont’s blog. She points out that John Dvorak apologized for his comments about Violet Blue (I heard that) and so did Leo Laporte (that I didn’t know). Apparently, it was a case of mistaken identity. They confused Violet Blue the writer/podcaster/blogger with Violet Blue the porn star. They probably should have done their research (the links were available in the Forbes article) and if they had taken her at all seriously, they would have but still, Veronica’s post does provide some food for thought on the larger issue of gender bias in technology.
It takes a big person to admit a mistake, so good for Leo. While this was a unfortunate misunderstanding, I’m glad that it gave people the chance to open a dialog on the subject. The comments on my blog post were very interesting to read, and I think it gave people something to think about.
Check out the discussion on her blog. Looks the conversation Lane is after (see comments on this post) has already started. If only we could keep it civil. Unlike the comments on Dvorak’s apology. Wow.
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speaking from personal experience with hugh, the sxswi organizer, i can tell you that the way he does it is, if you’re a panel organizer you’re required to have at least one person on your panel who’s female. it’s really that simple. @ sxsw this year i’ve got gina bianchini on my panel and i’m crazy excited about this because every time i’ve ever been in the room with gina she a) makes more sense than anybody else speaking b) knows exactly what she wants and knows how to explain it to you and c) swears like a sailor. fantastic.
so, yes, absolutely, conference organizers should be doing their damnedest to get women speakers on their panels and taking advantage of the resources available to help them do that. that point has been well made, and while we need to keep up the pressure, it’s not enough. so here’s what i’d like to see this conversation evolve towards: ways to address the gender disparity in the technology realm over the long term. i want to talk about what i personally can do and what we collectively can do. how we can fix this. shaming conference promoters is effective in the short-term and undoubtedly cathartic, but there must be more we can do to promote systemic change.
sxsw does the best job and it’s still only 31% of their participants. most of the rest fall well short of that. so how do we deal with the larger issues that you bring up, micki? how do we correct for people who are “dismissive and disrespectful toward women in the field?” how do we find ways to involve women into the industry? i don’t want this all to fall down on the shoulders of the conference promoters. we all have something we can be doing here besides just calling them out, and risk failing to deal with the real problem if we just sit back and pat ourselves on the back for having done so.
so let’s have that discussion: what can we do? let’s assume the 30% ratio @ SXSW represents a truly accurate picture of the male to female ratio in the industry (i have no hard data on this but if anyone does i’d love to see it.) if that’s the case, the how do we move the industry towards having more women, so that an accurate representation of the male to female ratio at any given conference is actually 50/50? how do we turn this into a non-issue over the long term? what needs to change, and where can we start?
And that, Lane, is why I love you. Having been at SXSW, I can say it definitely feels like less of a boy’s club than most tech conferences. Hugh does a great job in general and I’m glad to know that he thinks about this.
You’re right that we need to take the conversation one (if not many) steps further. But now we’re talking about real culturally entrenched problems. And those conversations are super valuable. But I wonder how many men will even participate?
I like Mike and Jason’s approach as a beginning step. We all know that snark gets attention in this space so the more we can raise the flag in the beginning, the better.
And I’m just thinking out loud (or on my keyboard) here but I really do think we need more female role models in technology. And a big step toward getting there is having them speak at events! Catch 22?
Women (and men who care) need to be less intimidated to talk about the gender bias.
And VCs need to give more money to women. And we need more women VCs! Man, this issue runs deep. These are big conversations indeed.
And dammit, I have to get back to work. But yes, let’s have them.
This is where I imagine a panel discussion at sxsw about the gender bias in tech. And the audience – 100% women….
Ugh.
leave it to brian oberkirch to parse out the issue much better than i.