Girl Tech
March 22, 2008 |
I generally don't consider myself a raging feminist, but I have had days, like today, where the gender divide seems so wide as to to be insurmountable.
Let's take the past month, for example. Within just the past few weeks, we've seen the launch of WoWoWoW, or however you want to attempt to type that, a “Huffington Post” just for women. Now, let's forget that The HuffPo is one of the biggest political (and just about anything else now) sites out there, passing up the Drudge Report in eyeballs no matter which metrics you are viewing. Why on earth, when we have such a widely read site that was created by a woman, do we need one geared specifically to women? Never mind that, as the Jossip link above so succinctly put it, that WoWoWoW is written by “famous white ladies, plus Whoopi Goldberg.” Why do we need these sites at all? Yahoo also thinks this is a trend worth following, readying their own site for women, tentatively called “Shine.”
Not long after reading about these two sites, I had the privilege of being informed by Forbes that, apparently, as a woman, I'm not a “real” gamer. After all, women aren't playing “real” games, but the casual games market is booming thanks to, you guessed it, women. Forbes does take the time to state about halfway through the article,
“To be sure, classifying casual games as “games for girls” would not be fair. But casual female-targeted gaming hits with female heroines, such as “Diner Dash” and “Wedding Dash,” make it clear that casual game developers are attacking far broader swaths of the population than the traditional 18-to-35-year-old male demographic coveted by makers of hardcore games.”
The problem is that the title of the article, which is about casual gaming, is “Games Girls Play.” Last time I checked, I was a girl, and I wouldn't touch Cooking Mama with a ten-foot pole.
I was nearly over this virtual segregation of women until today, when two articles came across feeds. The first was Guy Kawasaki's review of Sk*rt, which some are calling “Digg for Chicks.” It has topic areas that sound like something out of a 1950s home ec class, including “Arts & Entertainment, Design & Crafts, Family & Parenting, and Food & Home.” Wow, between that and the small blurb at the bottom of Mr. Kawaski's post about a FABULOUS shoe tree, I could almost die and go to Martha Stewart heaven.
Still, I might almost have stayed in a calm state of Zen were it not for the comparison in Mr. Kawasaki's tweets between his post and that of Duncan Riley over on TechCrunch. I realize that this being a holiday weekend for a good portion of the web, we are in for a few slow news days. However, posting several links to women doing tech podcasts and the associated commentary from the TechCrunch reader base were just enough to set me off.
When it comes to viewing women in tech, there seems to be an extension of the Madonna/whore conundrum. We have the Madonnas who love home and hearth and flock to anything under the Martha Stewart umbrella (I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Sk*rt's exit strategy). We have the whore example perpetuated by the TechCrunch commenters, where any relatively pretty girl talking about tech on video is enough to send most of them men back to the mentality of a 12-year-old where someone's looks are debated rather than their knowledge or content. And TechCrunch wouldn't be TechCrunch without commenters like JosefVirek demanding that “Techcrunch should hire an attractive lady blogger.”
I must have missed the day when all the TechCrunch male bloggers (and for the record, most of the male tech bloggers) turned into something I'd want to see shirtless. I haven't seen any women begging for an Arrington or Scoble calendar; have you?
Yes, tech is dominated by men, and the comments on articles, ridiculous 12-year-old boy comments about whether or not a tech podcast is worth watching based on whether or not the podcaster has gained weight, and the relegation of women to sites dominated with casual gaming, scrapbooking techniques, and parenting advice isn't going to change the status quo.
In the meantime, I'm going to start lobbying to get some beefcake hired around here. Enough with the pasty tech geeks I find in every single Qik stream. I want some podcasts of Brad Pitt talking about the latest social networking business model while he's working out. If he'd like to invite George Clooney and Taye Diggs along to discuss the future of semantic web applications, I'm all for that as well. After all, it's only fair.
@Trina, Nicole is right; it won't change a thing. Generally, the only thing that seems to work is women who have opportunities sharing those with other women. But the thing about leaving jobs when you get pregnant is on the money. The problem is that they don't look at the underlying cause for it.
I'm one of those women. I left development when I had my first and switched to writing. But the reason wasn't so much because I had a child but because I weighed my options. After a string of jobs that were much like you describe, Trina, where I had more knowledge and more experience, but was paid less and had less authority, was it really worth it to continue or did I want to shift gears, change what I was doing, and spend time with my child? In that case, family won, hands down. But my husband was the first to point out that if I hadn't felt boxed in I probably would have continued in the same minimum 60-hour weeks.
What does have to happen, however, is women need to quit undermining themselves. The two things I see most often that I think stand in our way pop up frequently. One is the adoption of the "whore" version; that by acting in such a way that draws the boorish behavior exhibited in the TC comments, you get attention. I won't mention any names, but you'll see a few examples frequently in the articles at Valleywag. I don't think that type of attention is something any woman should aspire to. The other, however, is the victim card. Oh, look, woe is me. I'm just a little woman here who needs help from a big, strong man.