5 posts tagged “gender”
I'm reading this article by Nell Scovell.
One frequent excuse you hear from late-night-TV executives is that “women just don’t apply for these jobs.” And they certainly don’t in the same numbers as men. But that’s partly because the shows often rely on current (white male) writers to recommend their funny (white male) friends to be future (white male) writers. Targeted outreach to talented bloggers, improv performers, and stand-ups would help widen the field of applicants.
I've never worked in TV writing nor comedy. So why am I nodding in cynical agreement?
Ah! It needs some mild rewriting:
One frequent excuse you hear from technology company executives is that “women just don’t apply for these jobs.” And they certainly don’t in the same numbers as men. But that’s partly because the projects often rely on current (white male) programmers to recommend their funny (white male) friends to be future (white male) programmers. Targeted outreach to talented bloggers, tech conference attendees, and niche discussion groups would help widen the field of applicants.
Glanced at my credit report recently. Unlike many, it didn't include noticeable errors, except an irritating little statement: "ALSO KNOWN AS: MELANIE KNOWLES."
No, I'm not. When I married, I did not change my name. I saw no reason to-- my husband's family is prolific; it's not like the name "Knowles" will die out-- and I was established in my life as Melanie Archer. I never, ever referred to myself as Melanie Knowles, legally or not, and, aside from the credit bureaux, nobody else has, either.
Meanwhile, my husband's credit report does not give him an automatic alias. No, his marriage didn't trigger any gratuitous renaming. He's unchanged, as far as they're concerned.
And so I'm made to look like one of those Most Wanted desperadoes in the post office, with an alternate identity, an alias, something I assume to work a con or scam, just because of an outdated assumption that the female spouse assumes the male one's family name.
It was pretty hard to pass up Ajaxian's latest conference, being both in my region and interesting to me. I didn't investigate the gender ratio at this one, because I was cynically confident there were no female speakers. But I was really intrigued by the conference's emphasis on user interface design, the front end of things, and so off I went, double-X chromosomes and all.
Some observations, in no particular order:
- Why are Java developers so heavily represented in the Ajax realm? Aside from the lamentable renaming of LiveScript, I see very little connection.
- Why was Mark Meeker's presentation about building accessible Ajax so sparsely attended? For that matter, why wasn't attendance mandatory?
- Where has YSlow been all my life?
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- Which bright spark thought up the Devo hat logo for jQuery?
Aside from the gender imbalance, I was bothered by the frequent misuse of "it's" on many of the presentation slides. If I were the conference czarina, I would sentence all aspiring presenters to confinement with the AP or Chicago style manuals, or, hell, even just Strunk and White, until they can cite the rule for the appropriate use of "it's" from memory.
Personal heroes Eric and Tantek and Chris are congratulating themselves for being so open-minded that the lack of gender diversity in Web conference speakers doesn't bother them (because, you know, if we ignore the gender, race, or physical abilities of conference speakers, the discrimination associated with those characteristics will just go away). I didn't see their opinions about a similar lack of gender diversity in Web conference attendance, but I expect those are just as sanguine.
Plenty of people have disputed their points eloquently, in some cases pointing out that these guys benefit from a false meritocracy, in which the same few people get hired, get published, get speaking engagements, make hiring choices, make publishing choices, and make conference speaker choices. Is it any surprise that those of us with an atypical profile are looking for affirmative action from conference vendors? The feedback cycle's got to be interrupted somewhere.
I'm not an aspiring Web conference speaker, but rather an aspiring Web conference attendee. As a freelancer I have to pay the full cost of attending a conference, and that makes me very particular about which ones to go to. Yes, the subject matter of the conference is my chief concern. And if I look at the speaker list, and see the same guys who've been writing the blogs and books about the subject all this time, I'm not going to spend money on that conference. Hell, I could stay home and read the blogs and books.
But the female-consumer-me turn-off doesn't stop at the conference speaker list. Sometimes the event is so obviously geared to the 20-something white guy crowd that I don't regret a moment of not going to it. For instance, how come so many conferences have mixers or gatherings in noisy bars? Did the organizers really think all attendees would feel comfortable shouting over big-screen TVs and hooting, drunk sports fans?
You might think this is an insignificant point, but the conference organizers set these things up as "networking" events. Well, by holding them in venues where women's voices can literally not be heard, the conference organizers have pretty well kept the status quo-- for this conference, and the next.
I think people do what they are rewarded for doing, and I think women realize, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, they are not going to get the rewards. So they put the hours into their families or whatever.
-neurobiologist Dr. Ben Barres in the New York Times, about women as scientists
So far I've read only the newspaper interviews with Dr. Barres, which publicize his commentary in this month's Nature. Infotrac or Academic ASAP will fetch me the full article in a couple of weeks or so.
Barres challenges the noticeably widespread view that the low number of women in the sciences is due to innate differences in female brain functioning. Barres has the uncommon experience of having worked as both a male and a female scientist: after transitioning from female to male mid-career, he noticed remarkable improvement in how his work was perceived and rewarded.
As far as I can tell, he discusses only the treatment of women in the higher levels of science. Perhaps he, or another scientist, will examine in a similarly well-publicized article the treatment of girls in the very lowest levels of science.
I went to a public high school in Arizona where many of the graduates were expected to go directly to college. So it wasn't unusual that half of the twenty or twenty-five students in my physics class were girls; we were all trying to look good on our high school transcripts, and some of us were anticipating science majors as undergraduates.
The course was year-long. By the end of the first semester we knew our teacher was a likeable, dedicated crank: he clearly enjoyed teaching, but was touchy about a couple of things. One was the state's requirement that he teach the Big Bang Theory, which he considered propaganda for "secular humanism."
At the end of the first semester our teacher wrote five names on the blackboard. These, he said, are the top five students in this class, based on homework, exam grades, and class participation. All five of the top students were girls. Our teacher seemed to think this was unappealing: he set to teasing the boys about "catching up."
Among the topics in the second semester were electronics and magnetism. Our teacher decided to use "real life" examples in his lectures to help us learn these topics.
He used examples from model railroading, ham radio operation, and household electrical wiring to illustrate principles of electronics.
At the end of the second semester our teacher wrote again five names on the blackboard. These were, again, the top five students in the class. However, none of the names were the same as those in the first semester. They were, however, all boys' names. Some kind of order must have been restored: our teacher did not tease the girls to "catch up."
What happened? Why had the girls not sustained their high grades? From my own experience, I think it was the introduction of "real life" examples that had no resemblance to my real life. Like many girls I didn't have a childhood of helping Dad install dimmer switches, or of shopping for soldering irons at Radio Shack.
I don't think our teacher really acted from malice, but just ignorance, and then of unconcern. Which is what angers me still: it's not the "C" grade I received, it's that my teacher was unbothered that it had started out an "A."
