Upping the embarrassment
I’m conflicted about blogging about this because I don’t know how to do it without sounding self-righteous. But I also think we generally need to surface stuff like this. So here goes.
Last week I was invited to attend a day of discussions about a tech topic with cultural and economic consequences. But, because I hadn’t responded to the first invitation (the msg got lost in my spam stream, I think), the organizers sent me a followup that included the list of about 20 attendees. The list of attendees is amazing. A fantastic group. I’d love to spend time with them. But everyone on the last was a man. The list wasn’t mainly or predominately male. It was 100% male. (The other attendees had not seen the list, so they did not know of its homogeneity.)
I want to go primarily because I want to meet these folks. I want to know them. I want them to know and like me. It’s the networking that attracts me. In other words, this is exactly how the old boy network is built and maintained.
When I told the organizers why I wasn’t coming, they replied that they had invited three women who turned out to be unavailable. After our conversation they have invited some more women. But, only a few because, they told me, they’re trying to keep the total number of participants down so it will be more intimate – more better bonding! I told them they could use my spot to invite another woman. Have I mentioned that this is how the old boy network is formed?
I’m not naming names because that’s not the point. The organizers certainly weren’t trying to create an all-boy meeting. It was bad luck that the three women they invited were unavailable. But three isn’t enough, and the fact they ended up with none didn’t strike them as a problem. And that is the problem. This isn’t a matter of quotas. It’s not about math. It’s about power. It’s about men strengthening bonds that have real consequences. The perfect gender homogeneity of this meeting is inadvertent but it’s inexcusable. We have to get to the point where this is prima facie shameful and unacceptable. We have to get to the point where this is just plain embarrassing.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Hello David,
Came across this entry via Burningbird…
I was at the We Media conference in NYC yestserday (http://www.mediacenter.org/wemedia05/). This was an amazing conference with at least one woman on every panel and many women in the audience. Gloria Pan, the Communications Director, I’m sure had something to say about who was on the panels.
The fact of the matter is that many conferences are meant to be preaching to the converted. They are costly, for one thing. They are meant to reach a certain audience for another. Their planning committees know that and I’m sure are geared to picking those the attendees will identify with.
So, let’s face some facts here– many of these conferences are elitest little groups not really interested in communicating with others beyond their little ivory towers. They are not cost effective for bloggers who aren’t connected to them in some professional/academic way, and most average bloggers don’t even know about them (contrary to what so many think.) When the elitest groups are themselves amazingly narrow in their scope and appeal, and keep admission on the q.t., can one really expect, or even ask for, diversity?
As for how I got into We Media: luckily I have a boatload of chutzpah and find nice ways to get myself into these things when I can. I volunteered and they were receptive. That was truly the place to be yesterday–just ask Rebecca MacKinnon.
Tish G
http://spap-oop.blogspot.com
http://lovehopesexdreams.blogspot.com
Well, it turns out Mr Ten Percent is in London at a Geek Dinner next Thursday http://www.geekdinner.co.uk/2005/10/05/tim-oreilly-october-13th-2005/ – so I thought it would be rather appropriate to go to the dinner and call him on his misguided misogyny http://www.geekdinner.co.uk/2005/10/05/tim-oreilly-october-13th-2005/#comment-494
Not that it would do any good – but I’d do it anyway.