Giving Tech a Bad Name
It's been a turbulent couple of weeks for women in tech, filled with pornographic images of women during Matt Aimonetti's idiotic presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference and the heated panel debate on "Balancing the Tech Culture" at the Geek' n Rolla conference in the UK; where women were ridiculed with stupid and inaccurate comments like "We shouldn't be apologizing for having fewer women in a sector in which men naturally perform better," said the Daily Telegraph blogger Milo Yiannopoulos.
On one hand it's men like Milo and Matt and conferences like the Golden Gate Ruby Conference that give men in tech a bad rap. On the other hand, these men had the audacity to bash women publicly and tell the world how they really perceive women, thus proving that women in tech still face an uphill battle in fighting sexism. Flagrant, public sexism is a sign that we have a long way to go, and it just gives the tech sector a bad name. Just because sex sells doesn't mean you can sell sexism to us.
It's already disheartening that women still make up only 28% of those graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science. And the average age of owning their first computer is 19 for females, as opposed to 15 for males. This needs to change ASAP!
What can we do to break through the digital ceiling once and for all? A lot, as I discussed in depth in another article on Fast Company. Women make up approximately 20% of panelists (and sometimes less) at major tech conferences, and are rarely quoted or sought out as opinion leaders as much as their male colleagues. There are, however, plenty of highly qualified women in the industry who would make fantastic panelists and can provide expert commentary to the media. We women in tech should be promoting ourselves as experts by blogging and posting articles in our areas of expertise, showcasing our successes, submitting panel ideas to conferences, and ramping up our networking with "influentials".
While we women in tech can do our part to promote ourselves, the tech industry needs to transform or, do I dare say, revolutionize its old school way of thinking.
1. Conference organizers need to do a much better job programming informative and thought-provoking panels that include women. There are several networks that conference organizers can utilize such as Women Who Tech, Women of Color Technology Conference, She's Geeky, The Speakers Wiki, Social Media Women of Color, The Anita Borg Institute, etc.
2. Reporters and bloggers that cover technology and social media need to seek out women experts and look beyond their personal networks, often comprised of men in tech and social media.
3. Include more women in those top 10 lists. By not recognizing women in top 10 lists, you send the wrong message that women are not valued as leaders in tech, when in reality there are several women innovators in tech and social media.
Here are just a few women who are helping to transform technology and social media, many of which will be talking about these issues at the Women Who Tech TeleSummit next week.
Jill Foster: Cofounder of DC Media Makers and Women Grow Business. Jill is considered one of the top 100 tech titans by Washingtonian Magazine.
Heather Holdridge: Former Partner of CTSG, one of the first constituent relationship management systems created for the nonprofit sector, Heather moved on to Care2 to reorganize their ten million member social networking platform to a series of integrated progressive advocacy channels.
Beth Kanter: The social media expert and analyst who really knows just about everything there is to know about social media and how to truly engage online communities.
Ellen Miller: Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation. Her never-ending commitment to government transparency and use of open-source-technology has earned her the "go to" expert on government transparency.
Amy Muller: Cofounder of the innovative consumer site Get Satisfaction.
Shireen Mitchell: Founder of Digital Sisters/Sistas, Chair of the media and technology task force of the National Council of Women's Organizations and Founder of Social Media Women of Color (Geekette '84). Shireen was also named one of the top 100 tech titans by Washingtonian Magazine.
Michelle Murrain: Partner at OpenIssue and one of the most established technology strategists in the nonprofit sector.
Corvida Raven: Founder and Editor of SheGeeks.net. At only 21-years-old, Corvida has captured the tech worlds attention with her spot on reviews of tech, gadgets, and social media. She is a former writer for The Industry Standard and ReadWriteWeb.
Holly Ross: Executive Director of NTEN. As one of the biggest champions of technology, Holly helps nonprofit organizations skillfully and confidently use technology to fulfill their missions. She is also one of the leading researchers on nonprofit technology and benchmarks. Her book (which also contains chapters written by other members of the nonprofit community) "Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders" will be published in the fall of 2009.
Amanda Steinberg: Founder of Soapbxx, an open source firm that builds great Joomla websites.
Deanna Zandt: As a programmer and media technologist, Deanna combines her background in programming, advertising and linguistics to help media organizations like Alternet. She is also in the process of writing a book on social media for social justice.
While women are coming together to overcome barriers, we also need the support of those already in tech professions, including men. We need to crack the digital ceiling and we definitely need men to immediately stop using juvenile antics in their presentations. Ending sexism takes all of us.
Follow Allyson Kapin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/womenwhotech
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At the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, our programs include top technology leaders such as Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, who keynoted our recent Women of Vision Awards, and Sophie Vanderbroek, CTO of Xerox, who spoke at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC). We also featured 1000’s of technology professionals, undergraduate and graduate students.
Each year, as we put together GHC, we find ourselves with the opposite problem than other technical conferences. We receive so many panel and workshop submissions from highly qualified technical women that we have to turn away over 60% of the submissions. For examples of highly qualified presenters you need only look at our 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration Program. It included:
• Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo discussion Conversational Code and the Changing World of the Internet
• Alina Bejan, University of Chicago, discussing Introduction to Grid Computing using OSG
• Manuela M. Veloso, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science Speaking on Multi-Robot Intelligence.
And those are a tiny fraction of the over 300 technical women who spoke last year. We are getting ready to announce the program for the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration. Again we have received far more excellent proposals than we are able to use. If conferences are looking for technical women to speak, they simply have to look at our programs.
Telle Whitney
President & CEO
Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
www.anitaborg.org
tellew@anitaborg.org
The truth is that my company does not have a single female engineer and to the best of my knowledge had no more than two or three in total in the past. So there is a real disparity between sexes in certain sectors.
The other truth is that the only female engineer I ever worked with was absolutely equal to her male counterparts on the project. And I do not remember ever having a problem with that.
And the final truth is that a guy who puts pornographic images into a public presentation has so little credibility that he is not even worth being written about.
Our company has a lot of female employees, bosses. They just dont have that many female programmers. We have female project managers, female editors, technical writers, financial analyts.
and women still cry foul..wtf
I have several female friends who are executive managers. I know a female CEO or two. Plenty of women work in life sciences and banking on all levels of their organizations.
Where women are still virtually absent is hardware design, although one can find more of them in design departments of large corporations than in small companies like mine. I have seen beautiful schematics by a female design engineer working for HP that were some twenty plus years old. Great design with tons of insight, real fun to look at.
See Allyson Kapin's Profile
What is even worse then Matt putting in pornographic images of women in his presentation is that conference attendees voted for his presentation to be a part of the conference. When conference organizers saw his presentation, they should have had the brains to tell him that his presentation was unprofessional and not acceptable. Instead they chose to look the other way and offend so many women and men. The problem goes way beyond Matt.
Great article, thanks!
Nice to see the illustrious Deanna Zandt mentioned as well, I've seen her work around NYC.
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