James Governor on Adobe Engage, held yesterday and today in San Francisco:
I liked the short introduction from David Mendels, senior VP enterprise and developer solutions, when he talked about how the layout of the room is a little formal, based on a presenter and an audience, rather than being a roundtable of more participatory environment. He asked for participation, saying:
”We need to fight against the architecture of the space”.
What a sweet metaphor for creating more “engaging” or participatory approaches- the old 2.0* theme in one elegant phrase. We’re now fighting against architectures of non-participation, spaces that don’t encourage engagement.
As the only non-Adobe woman in attendance, I felt like I was fighting against two architectures: the physical space, arranged auditorium style, and the social space, a monoculture of mainly white and Asian men.
There were slights throughout the day: a mention of “granny mode” for a beginner’s big fonts mode of some Adobe software, a comment from some developer along the lines of “our users aren’t technically astute, they’re mature mothers,” and an example of a cell phone graphic for girls that was pink with cutesy animals. Stereotypes of females attended in greater numbers than actual females, if you don’t include the Adobe women who were there. No wonder these stereotypes prevail. If you work in an environment with actual women you might learn that some are technically oriented and some less so, some like pink and some do not, some are airbrushed and perfect like a Victoria’s Secret model… but most are not. I am not airbrushed and perfect, as anyone who has met me online or in person knows. But I am real in a way that those Victoria’s Secret models and clueless LASIK-free grannies and imagined versions of mature mothers are not.
The world of technology blogging is an architecture of non-participation for women–and it’s partly because we may, in general, blog differently than men. I was really impressed with Ryan Stewart’s blogging output at the event. I sat next to him and watched him pump out post after post. Many of the other bloggers–men, natch–did likewise. Then it all appeared on techmeme. I didn’t post at all yesterday. I didn’t feel inspired, didn’t have much to add to the conversation, don’t much care about what traffic I get to either Anne 2.0 or tech decentral. In this way I seem quite different from the other bloggers at the event.
Is it a gender thing? Who knows. There are plenty of women blogging frequently with attention to popularity (I do so–on Web Worker Daily, but I don’t do it out of a personal urge). But it does seem to me that women publish less frequently than men and may be less likely to post on something just because it’s news and might get them noticed. This behavior means they’re less likely to get linked to, less likely to become more visible, and consequently less likely to be invited to events targeted at influencers like this one.
Why does it even matter? When James asked one of the presenters why only one woman invitee was in attendance, another audience member asked, “why didn’t you invite more Australians?” That invokes the argument made recently about women conference speakers that if you pay attention to including both genders you must start paying attention to all sorts of arbitrary differences.
Gender is an important category of diversity because women experience radically different life patterns and external expectations than men and so by including a critical mass of women you are more likely to get some orthogonal perspectives than if you include more men. Now of course you can go after diverse men too–and you should if you are concerned about overcoming groupthink and echo chamber effects. But if you leave out women almost entirely, you are leaving out representatives of half your potential audience. Even given similar intelligence profiles, career paths, and temperaments, a woman and a man are likely to have very different views on technology… because they come at it from vastly different experiences of the world. We experience more conflicting messages and more ambivalence around working in technology and working with technology than men do. Society expects different things from us, so we in turn may focus on what seems unimportant or uninteresting to men.
A second reason it’s important to include more women is to break the vicious cycle of women not being invited because they’re not visible and then not being visible because they’re not in attendance. James figured out how the A list works: you go to events like Adobe’s yesterday, you post or otherwise get noticed for your attendance, and you become more well known. Then more people seek you out. That’s a virtuous cycle. I consider that working with the architecture of the social space–not fighting against it.
I didn’t speak up yesterday with my complaints except on the ad hoc Twitter back channel because I do want to work within this space of blogging and technology and influence. I don’t want to fight against it and be labeled shrill or out of touch or difficult. That’s why I so appreciate James’ speaking out. James is not going to get labeled shrill–only women are called shrill. And it’s fine within tech blogging for men to speak for or against diversity.
There’s much more to say on this topic and it hooks into a bunch of conversations that have been happening on mailing lists and in blogs. For my own part, I want to work with the social architecture that exists in technology blogging because I don’t see much chance of changing anything if I fight it. Plus, the idea of fighting it makes it seem like an us versus them situation–and that’s definitely not what it is, because everyone benefits if more talented, smart people are able to voice their opinions on technology. I’m also going to take Leisa’s advice and think local.
Despite this, I did have a terrific time at the event. I’ll be blogging some technology perspectives on my RedMonk blog today or tomorrow.
30 Comments
hey i can be shrill… great post. one point on granny mode was specifically it was about HUGE FONTS, as if someone were wearing thick glasses, or reading cote’s blog. PoP is in “grandpa mode”. so its a take on poor vision rather than poor technical skills. but if its aimed at the partially sited it might be nice to just call it accessibility mode or something.
I’m genuinely sorry that there was anything offensive to you in the way things were presented yesterday, and I appreciate the honest feedback. I’m curious, though, why the female Adobe employees don’t count from your point of view. Was that purely to make a rhetorical point, or do you think that female Adobe employees are less likely to take offense, or that they are too disempowered or meek to speak out when they are offended? I know and work with a number of those employees, so I have a hard time believing it was the latter…
Andrew: of course the Adobe women count in the broadest sense and I was thrilled to both hear and meet Lydia–but the issue is that Adobe wanted to identify influencers on the web and came up with almost all men. I’m pointing to a problem in the tech blogosphere, not within big tech cos. Also, at least two of the other women (I think there were three more and can’t remember what the third did) were in PR, which is an honorable and important field but not technology blogging/web development/web design.
One more thing… not speaking up is not always evidence of meekness or disempowerment… it can be the result of a pragmatic calculation.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter much to me whether the Adobe people were offended or not or spoke up or not, I’ve been quite impressed with everyone there, and this doesn’t change it a bit. I see this as a thoroughgoing systemic problem not one limited to Adobe by any means. I hope you can see that my purpose here is to identify ways forward not just identify what’s wrong. However, we’ve got to start with what’s wrong.
Anne, my one regret was not getting to talk more tech with you. I know everyone I talk to holds you in high regard and they all kept telling me I needed to meet you. I think you’re right to highlight the lack of female influencers at events like this. I hope you continue to lead by example as one of the more thought provoking influencers regardless of gender.
Ryan, I regret that too, especially because we have pretty different views so it makes conversation extra interesting. Was great to be on the Twitter back channel though. I bet we’ll be in the same place again soon. I’ll be in Seattle in April 9th-11th on business and I’m considering going to MIX–are you going?
I’m not sure how blogging etc. can be called “social networking” or “social software” if its proponents habitually ignore half the potential constituency. While (understandably) I might be interested in why more Australians weren’t invited, I suspect that Australian and American males would have more in common in their approaches to technology than American men and women do, so I’m not sure that the parallels drawn by that comment from the audience are as valid as your point.
Anne, I’ve been thinking about this issue since my college days as a History and Philosophy major. My history adviser was a female, the only one on staff, who went on to become the dean of the department.
I remember a conversation with her on this subject. This was about 10 years ago but what I remember was she said that when she was a history student she had a female mentor who took every opportunity to encourage more women to become history professors. She in turn had done the same thing early in her career but had met with little success.
Her theory was that it wasn’t the lack of role models that discouraged women from the field of history. It was a basic lack of interest and wasn’t likely to change.
So I wonder: was she right? Are there certain fields that are just generally unappealing to women because of the subject - which applies to males as well? Is it likely that in 50 years there won’t be a significant change in female participation in the engineering fields?
For my part I plan on teaching my 15 year old niece Actionscript over the next few years in combination with tutoring her in math. We’ll see where it leads.
As an aside: if anyone wanted to do a study on this they should give young girls Legos - every engineer I know played with Legos when they were young. If that group goes on to have proportionally more technically oriented careers then we would have evidence that this is all cultural.
Ric - that’s exactly what I was thinking re: including more Australians vs. more women.
Oz - Thanks for commenting and that’s great you’re teaching your 15 year old niece ActionScript and helping her with math.
The argument “girls aren’t interested in tech” comes up fairly frequently. I think what might be an accurate way to say that is that “girls aren’t always interested in tech in the same ways that boys are, though sometimes they are.” Using legos to see if a girl might eventually be interested in something technically oriented implies that there’s one path into it.
The point that Andrew Shebanow made that the Adobe women do matter brings up a disconnect between technology work at big companies, where women find more visibility at least within the company, and technology blogging. When I worked at Oracle in apps development, there were probably as many women as men, at least at the lower levels. But the women were more likely to be in QA or product management. Whether that’s out of interest or other reasons, I don’t know. I do know that many of those women had equally valuable perspectives on what needs to happen in the future with technology as the men.
These days software and web technology is so ubiquitous that you almost can’t help but come into contact with it. Many people commenting on technology don’t have heavy tech backgrounds, but that doesn’t mean that their opinions aren’t useful, especially if you are interested in getting a wide variety of reactions to what you’re doing.
Incidentally, I didn’t play with legos growing up, I played with Barbies.
When my daughter was in elementary school, I helped her to put together electronics kits. Together we framed a wall to close in an area of the basement and make a worksop for her. For Christmas I gave her hand tools. Over the years I have taught her about planting, cultivating, and harvesting corn. And at the moment I am helping her to appreciate the importance of brushing up on her Math skills and retaking the SAT. On Sunday I drove 45 minutes to and from a bookstore just to get some SAT prep workbooks for her.
Over the years, it has been the women in her life who have given her Barbie dolls, makeup kits, jewelry, etc.
Today my daughter is pretty sure that she wants to become a dental hygienist. I always told her that I pictured her in a white lab coat someday. I guess I wasn’t too far off.
In my life I have personally met very few women who have a genuine interest in engineering. And I have met very few men who have ever said anything negative (to me, at least) about women in technical fields.
Two years ago I started an engineering club at my local high school. This years we have 12 students, one of whom is female. This girls has been the most active participant all year. She was the first student to complete her electronic stethoscope circuit. She is very bright and very confident, and has been accepted into the Chemical Engineering program at a large university. meanwhile, most of the boys in teh club failed to attend regularly, failed to complete their projects, and seem more interested in sports than technical subjects.
I don’t have a great summary for all of this. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions. I just don’t think there are any easy answers here.
Regarding “girls aren’t interested in tech”, there’s a new book from the APA that summarizes the scientific evidence pro and con: see http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/847.html for a review. It was put together in the wake of Larry Summers’ remarks at Harvard, but is very even-handed.
Thanks for the link, Greg, looks quite interesting.
But the “girls are not interested in tech” argument is somewhat tangential, because Adobe was not just showing purely techie stuff at Engage. It was also about user interaction, about web design, and about what software and technology is going to look like in the future. It was about creating color themes (Adobe Kuler) and reading books online (digital editions) and how doctors and patients interact with online medical information (Acesis). Whether women are interested in the bits and bytes underneath it–some are for sure, but relatively not very many–is less important than that women have an important perspective to offer to these discussions.
The statements about “girls not being interested in tech” are disingenuous, primarily because we’ve never seen how girls will react to an environment that has not been engineered by men for men.
Giving of Legos to all kids helps with their visualization, as well as problem solving skills, but there is no correlation between the early use of legos and being interested in computers.
We continue to look at the actors as the agents, and the environment as the innocent bystander, when what we need to do is examine the environment to see how it impacts on the people within it…and those who are not within it.
We have to make an assumption that any field that has such a disparity of sex (and race for that matter) is a field that has problems. Encouraging young women to join the field, giving or withholding of Barbie, are incidental to the issue.
As for Adobe, I would imagine that they expect to have a significant number of women using their products. If they don’t want to get women involved, other more forward thinking companies will, and eventually the market place will determine who is the ‘winner’.
” we’ve never seen how girls will react to an environment that has not been engineered by men for men.”
I don’t think that’s accurate… my sister clawed her way up medicine in a field where the male/female boundaries have been far more established and sexist (Men are Doctors, Girls are Nurses or sexy pharma reps). The stories she tells about medicine (and medical conferences) are nightmares.
Then there’s law. Other sciences. Large animal vets. (Geez, even the as-macho-as-it-gets cowboy world is shifting — there are about 40% female farriers out where I live in Colorado). And even more openly sexist and hostile– law enforcement.
So, we DO know something about how “girls will react to an environment that has not been engineered by men for men.” There are a lot of data points, and in several different areas, and in domains far more established, where the old boys club is truly an old men’s club. One almost never, for example, hears the top engineers making golf plans, or going to the cigar club, or even plans to visit a strip club when entertaining clients–all things you STILL find in fields women have managed to push into, more than tech.
Girls and women have proven over the years that they ARE willing to fight obstacles–despite difficulties–to get into male-dominated fields. I would argue that the medical field is far more ‘broken’ than tech — especially because female roles are so clearly established (nursing).
The evidence just keeps mounting that girls are not interested in pursuing tech– no matter what we do–and we may be wasting our time going down this specific path. Trying to do more and more to make them feel “comfortable” in this field may not change a damn thing.
Perhaps we need a sideways look at this, and work on different means of solving the problems we believe are created by this imbalance/lack-of-diversity rather than fighting for something that might not be productive. Just because we can prove that girls CAN be just as good as men at writing code doesn’t make them any more likely to want to do it as a profession.
Other male-dominated professions where women have made more progress have been professions a lot of girls clearly WANTED to pursue–despite the odds and obvious obstacles– medicine, law, etc. Little girls play doctor or vet (medicine). Even young girls like talking and persuading and even doing research (law). But left to their own devices playing with their friends, even the girls who–like my daughter–could do amazing things in the second grade with turtle logo–just didn’t feel like taking apart radios, despite being given every electronics kit on the planet.
My daughter was about as shielded from cultural influences as one can get in the US (no television in the home, a gender-neutral name (Skyler), no public schools until high school (no labels, no unconscious gender-bias from the teacher, no classroom dynamics to contend with), parents who were an aerospace engineer and a software developer, and a mother whose tech job was painted as somewhat “glamorous” — game development and motion pictures. I could not possibly have given a more enthusiastic picture of the joy of working in tech (”Mom had another fun day at work, Skyler, we had a meeting with Steven Spielberg about the Casper game, oh, and Dreamworks wants your opinion on this new game they’re thinking about…”). In her mind, tech was associated with nothing but cool, fun, exciting things and jobs where you were practically worshipped. She could make turtle logo jump through hoops at the age of 7. Made… no… differrence.
She–and all her like-thinking, super-smart friends–all stunningly tech-savvy–just are not interested in this as a career! They cannot imagine sitting around writing code.
There has got to be another way to work on this problem. I am starting to think more and more that people like me, Anne, Shelley, Dori, etc. are just… odd. As odd as the guy who just loves scrapbooking as a hobby.
If you define “working in technology” as working on compilers… well maybe I’ll grant that women in general are less interested (though there are still plenty who are). But working in technology is hugely broad. There are tons of women interested in web and graphic design, desktop publishing, digital photography, building online communities, etc. etc. and many of these women find they’re interested in how their tools behave.
Just because today there is some expectation that you need to be able to write a Java or C or Ruby program to be considered a technologist doesn’t mean that’s the way that software has to be built.
Did I say this already? I think I did, but I’ll say it again… in Oracle Apps Dev there was a roughly 50/50 ratio of men to women (at the staff level, not management or executive)… but women were clustered in QA and product management. But most of those women were in it because they were deeply interested in and excited by software technology. They might have come to it later than the men, they might not know PL/SQL from Java, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in technology.
Adobe Engage was not primarily about writing code. It was about trying to peer into the future of the web, of interactive design tools, of medical care information systems, of community-based software, and so forth–and I think a lot of women ARE interested in that.
Let’s grant that we’re odd (or how about unique or individualistic or something, I had some stuff happen over the past two days that makes me feel all too awkward and odd) but a ratio of roughly 30 men to 1 woman is not representative even of tech blogging. So on top of the issue that there are way fewer women in technology and in tech blogging than men, there is a problem of visibility.
Hi Anne,
Apologies for your discomfort. I am glad you still had a terrific time. If/when we do a similar event, I’d love to brainstorm with you about other female attendees.
One quick note. While it doesn’t address you core issue about the attendees/blogosphere, you might be interested to know that a lot of Adobe women in the room (and some not in the room) are technical leaders in addition to the PR folks who attended and you mention. Emmy Huang was there, and she is Product Manager for Flash Player; Michele Turner was there and she is VP of Product Management for all our clients. Susan and Heidi were not there, but were nearby (upstairs) and respectively run engineering and QA for the Flex SDK and Flex Builder. Of course, like most software companies our engineering organization is clear majority male, but I am pleased that we do have extremely talented women as well in key leadership positions.
-David
Ahhh… yes, Anne, I was primarily addressing the writing code side. So if the question is, “Why… even in the areas of tech where women ARE interested–and participating in much heavier numbers–are they still not visible?” then I totally agree. My apologies if I was answering a slightly different question… so many comments about “girls are/are-not interested in tech” have been flying these days…
You said:
“Just because today there is some expectation that you need to be able to write a Java or C or Ruby program to be considered a technologist doesn’t mean that’s the way that software has to be built.”
Exactly. That’s what I think of when I think of coming at this sideways as opposed to “let’s work harder to get girls to want to write code” kind of thing.
OK, I’ll settle for “unique” instead of “odd.” ; )
Visibility IS a separate-but-related issue, and needs a completely different discussion. If that’s the discussion your post wanted comments on, then again — I’m sorry I veered off track. However, we might be looking at a similar problem: what if a lot of women don’t want–or care–about visibility? What if they’re just not interested or motivated enough to do these things? I ask my female cohorts constantly why they aren’t going to some of these conferences… especially when money is not the issue. Most of them just don’t really care. Not uncomfortable, not disheartened or cynical, not oppressed-for-so-long-they-no-longer-know-what-they-want. They’d just rather do something else.
And for those who are uncomfortable–as I was/am in public speaking, for example–how much do we really want to push women into doing it? What if the benefits just aren’t worth it? How can we MAKE the benefits worth it?
Anne, yup, I’ll be at MIX - you should come, it should be a great event. But if not, I’ll make sure to ping you closer to your Seattle trip.
I disagree that women somehow have a gender bias against writing code. That’s no more realistic than saying women have a gender bias against being surgeons, just because most of the surgeons are still male. Or that women don’t want to be judges because most of the judges are still men.
We’re making assumptions that the responsibility lies completely with women, and ignoring environmental issues, not to mention how the predominant gateholders act within the environment.
Kathy, you’re using anecdotal information and making a broad generalization that can harm this industry more than help. You’re basically saying: well women don’t want to be in tech, so we don’t have to examine this issue any further. It’s women’s choice (ie fault), so case closed. I’m sorry your daughter doesn’t want to go into tech. I imagine there are any number of children of techs who don’t want to go into tech of both sexes. And I imagine there are children who don’t want to play with radio kits of either sex.
Engineering and computer science are the two fields where no progress is being made, and in fact, progress is being lost. Now either the early were freaks of nature, or we have to look at other factors.
I don’t believe there is a field that is ‘gender locked’. Even being a parent doesn’t require that you actually birth a baby. To make a claim otherwise is to forever limit either sex.
I agree that telling girls, here’s the field, take it or leave it, and you need to take it is foolish. That’s what we’re doing nowadays. But that doesn’t we should walk away and let the field stay the way it is. Not only does it limit the participation, it limits what the field can accomplish. No field that is not diverse will _ever_ live up to its full potential? How can it? By its very nature, it might be ‘filtering’ out those who could contribute much.
As for visibility, the last round of “Where are the women” related to women in conferences demonstrates the problems associated with this. Except for a few, men linked to men; men argued with men; men made decisions, and women seldom called them on it!.
Why? Because to rock the boat means losing opportunities. I’m a poster child for this.
Comment boxes and lack of editing is an example of male dominated technology:
“I agree that telling girls, here’s the field, take it or leave it, and you need to take it is foolish. That’s what we’re doing nowadays. But that doesn’t we should walk away and let the field stay the way it is. Not only does it limit the participation, it limits what the field can accomplish. No field that is not diverse will _ever_ live up to its full potential? How can it? By its very nature, it might be ‘filtering’ out those who could contribute much.”
Should be:
“I agree that telling girls, “Here’s the field, take it or leave it, and you need to take it”, is foolish. That’s what we’re doing nowadays. But that doesn’t mean we should walk away and let the field stay the way it is. Not only does doing so limit the participation, it limits what the field can accomplish. No field that is not diverse will _ever_ live up to its full potential? How can it? By its very nature, it might be ‘filtering’ out those who could contribute much.”
I think your article is bang-on, the two problems with conferences that you highlight are right on the money the social and physical space.
After some 25-years attending computer conferences, it is a very male environment, the rooms and sessions are organised in a particular way for both logistical and psychological reasons, there is a lot of control freakery involved with conferences. Increasingly the cost aspects of large conferences has meant that logistics often seem to override everything else, and this is a real mistake. Think about the choice of venues, even that is often control freakery…
Conferences need to be more social, they need to be more interactive and less force-fit structure and logistics and output only sessions - they are so 1980’s.
You say in your last paragraph “I want to work with the social architecture that exists in technology blogging because I don’t see much chance of changing anything if I fight it. Plus, the idea of fighting it makes it seem like an us versus them situation”
Fighting it is also a very “guy” thing. Whats needed is the sort of rational engagement and discussion about how to make things better. Which is exactly what is needed at conferences and what makes blogging so attractive, rational engagement and discussion. No output only diatribes.
Thanks for bringin up this subject.
I’m still trying to put together what I want to say about visibility. I think maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Kathy said, “I ask my female cohorts constantly why they aren’t going to some of these conferences… especially when money is not the issue. Most of them just don’t really care. Not uncomfortable, not disheartened or cynical, not oppressed-for-so-long-they-no-longer-know-what-they-want. They’d just rather do something else.” Assuming that women, being people, want to participate in their field of employment not just as consumers of information, but producers of content and new methods of doing things and all the other stuff that conferences reflect, at about the same rate as men… Maybe we’re focusing on the tool, the event, the thing people are using to get things done, and not examining what it’s supposed to accomplish. Does that make any sense?
This also reminds me: Is the Tech Tea Party podcast still in the works? I think it’s a cool idea.
Great discussion. I’m an electrical engineer, now an engineering manager, and I’m presently frustrated at the fact that it’s very difficult to find women to hire, especially since the women engineers I’ve worked with have been mostly great. We may never get to 50/50 men/women in Engineering and Computer Science like law and medicine have, but I can’t believe the interest among women is as low as the resulting numbers (5-9%?) have been, especially since the numbers were somewhat better about 10 years ago. In fact, when I went to engineering school about 20 years ago, 25% of my freshman class was women. (Brown University). We seem to have lost a lot of those women over the years to fields other than engineering. I meet women from my class who are now in management, medicine, finance, entrepreneurs, patent law etc… I don’t have any statistics, but there’s a lot of social and cultural factors involved in this trend. As a young engineer, I have to say constantly having to prove myself and not having my initial competence assumed was tiresome. I don’t seem to face that same attitude now that I’m in management.
Lisa
Fields that are currently dominated by women:
marketing
teaching
nursing
Funny how nobody ever asks “How can we encourage more men to go into teaching?”. Perhaps it has something to do with the architecture of the space. Maybe it’s not a male-friendly environment.
We often hear about racial disparities in the prison population. But the gender disparity is far greater. White men are incarcerated at a higher rate than black women. Does anybody think that is because black women are getting special treatment, or because white men are being discriminated against?
A while back I was sitting in a hospital waiting room reading a poster about breast cancer. The poster said that if I had breast cancer I could call and speak with a woman counselor. Hey, my uncle got breast cancer last year. Is it not possible for a man to counsel a woman about breast cancer? If not, then doesn’t that imply that women are unable to counsel men about prostate cancer?
I love little children. But as a middle-aged man, what are my chances of being hired as a caregiver at a daycare center? If you are a woman, ask yourself whether you would feel just a little uneasy about dropping off your toddler at a daycare run exclusively by men.
Walk into JC Penney and look at the clothing on display. A woman could purchase almost anything sold in any department and wear it on the street without anyone batting an eyelash. But 70% of the items in the store are “off-limits” to men. If I were to purchase those items, I would be called a “cross-dresser”. Why is that term never applied to women?
At social gatherings where the genders self-segregate, I frequently gravitate toward the females. I generally find their conversation more interesting. I played some sports in school, but have never enjoyed talking about sports. I’d much rather talk about children, which men almost never discuss in groups. So I am certainly not a jock.
But I can’t begin to count the number of times that I, simply because I am male, have been tarred with the “beer-drinking, Super-Bowl watcher” brush. I don’t like being lumped in with that crowd simply because I happen to be male.
At my previous place of employment, our female CEO once gave a magazine interview in which she stated that women were better managers than men. What did that imply about my chances for advancement at that company? Glass ceiling?
People discriminate all the time, often without realizing it. Short men and obese women have no legal status, but are frequent victims.
I think it is unfortunate that many people only pay attention to certain types of discrimination, as if no other types existed.
Remember Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary for a time under the Clinton Admin? Realistically, what would be his odds of getting elected president? More specifically, how many women would vote for a short man?
Why isn’t it “taboo” for a woman to say she’s looking for someone “tall, dark, and handsome”? If you’re a woman and you prefer tall men, then why would it be wrong for a man to prefer slender women?
Bob, I don’t think my post directly mentioned discrimination. Instead, I’m trying to get at how the overall architecture of a social space may privilege one gender over another. That doesn’t mean anyone’s actively engaging in discrimination. I certainly don’t mean to imply that Adobe was.
I am working this out as I go along and hear from people, but the issue I’m trying to get at is that there are more women working in technology than appeared as invitees at Adobe Engage. As David Mendels pointed out, though his engineering organization at Adobe is male-dominated, there are women working at high levels. I also know there are lots of women blogging about tech. So why was I the only woman invitee (assuming no one else was invited and wasn’t able to attend)?
I think Audrey, Shelley, and Kathy all make important points. (1) This isn’t really about individual choice, because everyone makes decisions subject to a complex set of influences. (2) Women do seem genuinely less interested in some modes of interaction than men: techmeme style heavy linking and posting just because there’s news, going to conference after conference and speaking at them to raise their profile, etc. and (3) probably women DO want to contribute to their profession but maybe in different ways. I know Audrey is working on a ‘zine and I had the idea for the Tech Tea Party–a podcast for women in technology–that has fallen by the wayside due to my overeager pursuit of new opportunities.
Lisa: I sympathize with you when you say you had to constantly prove yourself when you were a young engineer. I felt the same when I started in technology. One thing I really do appreciate about tech blogging is that most people judge me by my ideas, not by my gender. Though my modes of blogging do not lend themselves to climbing up the rankings, I have not found that people question my competence in this media.
Finally, I have to agree with Mark Cathcart: we need rational engagement on this topic. And that’s what I’ve seen here in the commenting on this post. Thank you everyone.
Thank you for this article. It really made me think about my blogging, or lack thereof because I too like to wait until there is something important to be said. I do believe that a lot of men blog about trifles, but yes they get noticed. Thank you to reminding me of the reality of the situation, and that BlogHer is really onto something.
Cheers, ~ang*e
Thought for the day: blogging is a racket.
This isn’t pushback on whether you’re right or wrong, except that I think you’re being vague.
Anne: “Adobe wanted to identify influencers on the web.”
Assume it’s true. Did they succeed?
Shelly: “Comment boxes and lack of editing is an example of male dominated technology:”
That’s a grand claim. This site runs on Wordpress. Wordpress committers are men, but I don’t see how Wordpress is “gated” against women. How does that conspire to work?
Shelly: “we’ve never seen how girls will react to an environment that has not been engineered by men for men.”
You have to ask at some, at point, why has no such environment been engineered. The answer for participation I see given for say, the IETF or an open source project, is turn up and contribute.
Also, when I see editable comments - I think “cool”. I think that not because it breaks away from male-dominated technology, but that editable comments are more work to implement - which is objectively true, but doesn’t fit the argument.
I will being facetious, Bill about the comments, but not about the environment.
Turn up into male-dominated environment, where chances are the woman is going to be ignored more often than the men, rewarded less, and paid less respect.
Oh, sure that’s all women really want to do with our spare time.
Yours is a simplistic answer, which in a way demonstrates some of the problems in the field: unwilling to listen, unwilling to consider that the problem does not exist with women and our ‘choices’.
While it is possible that girls and women aren’t as interested in technology as men, it’s also possible that they could be as interested if circumstances were different.
Mark Glickman wrote a
paper on why only 1% of chess grandmasters were women. In essence he found it’s not because women aren’t as good, or can’t be as good, but because not enough women start. Specifically he found that “(a) the ratings of men are higher on average than those of women, but no more variable; (b) matched boys and girls improve and drop out at equal rates, but boys begin
chess competition in greater numbers and at higher performance levels than girls; and (c) in locales where at least 50% of the new young players are girls, their
initial ratings are not lower than those of boys.”
Along the way he discounts the inherent differences, more male geniuses and other common arguments that we find in both fields. It makes for some interesting reading even if you know nothing about Chess.
Bloggers… I have seen those blogs you speak of, people just post crap - what they did, shallow thoughts on how they were offended that the proper form wasn’t followed, blah blah blah.
Take a great blog like Kathy’s - you really can’t crank out many of those posts a day. I’m amazed when she does 1 a day! 2 a day gives me a heart attack (in a good way of course).
There is value in taking time to think and say. I decided to start writing more in my notebook with my fountain pen (remember?). I have lots of thoughts, but I’m not really organizing them in the long term nor am I capturing some of these ideas - I’m sure some of them are new and insightful, but yet they are formless so far. Suggestions? Just sitting down a blogging doesn’t really do it for me.
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[…] So it was that I saw their (along with others) live Twittering of Adobe’s invite only meeting on Flex and Apollo. I’m going to save my commentary on the tech stuff for a separate post. But I was stunned to read Anne’s account of a long Victoria’s Secret demo and a few other maddening comments (which I can’t quote, because Twitter’s history is currently broken). I can relate to being stuck in an environment where people are being offensive and don’t even know it (I am sure that no one at Adobe intended to be offensive). My brother and I were the only 2 Chinese kids in our school for a number of years, so I have some idea of what it’s like to be in Anne’s situation. It’s as if you don’t exist, and people do things that offend and then genuinely have no idea why a particular action might have given offense. I’m fairly sure that’s what happened at the Adobe shindig. Still, not good. […]
[…] One other point that Anne Zelenka made while reflecting on the Adobe Engage event had to do with gender and blogging frequency: The world of technology blogging is an architecture of non-participation for women–and it’s partly because we may, in general, blog differently than men. I was really impressed with Ryan Stewart’s blogging output at the event. I sat next to him and watched him pump out post after post. Many of the other bloggers–men, natch–did likewise. Then it all appeared on techmeme. I didn’t post at all yesterday. I didn’t feel inspired, didn’t have much to add to the conversation, don’t much care about what traffic I get to either Anne 2.0 or tech decentral. In this way I seem quite different from the other bloggers at the event. […]
[…] Anne 2.0 » Blog Archive » Working with the Architecture of the Space There were slights throughout the day…Stereotypes of females attended in greater numbers than actual females.. (tags: gender computing) […]
[…] Every time the Tech Conference topic comes up, I read comments on the inappropriateness of terms such as “making it easy enough for my Mom to use” or “…my grandma…” or some other variation on age and possibly gender. (seen here and there, most recently at Anne 2.1) […]