Re:Women in Tech: The Silicon Ceiling
by ahoyhere on Monday September 21, 2009 @08:50PM
(#835966)
How boring.
All of these deplorable "women in tech" articles fall into the following camps:
1. I'm more feminist than you! (written by men)
2. We need a different perspective -- which of course means perspective provided by genitals, not, say, people from different cultures (e.g. tech Africans), or different original interests like design, music, or architecture
3. I want more people to date.
4. I want more people other than socially handicapped, unwashed men to speak to/befriend, who understand what I'm talking about.
5. I failed and the first potential explanation I came across was sexism, and I'm stickin' to it. [1]
6. It seems I'm different, and so if I don't theorize about why I'm different, and explain it away by sexism (e.g. lots of women would do what I do, if the world weren't so damned sexist!), I might have to admit I'm just weird and not like other girls.
7. Look at me, I'm a girl coder, that's like a unicorn but with boobs!
This article is a mixture of #2, #6 and #7. ("Yes, we do exist!" -- listing a healthy number of famous tech women, and acknowledging that it "barely scrapes the surface" -- hmm, wasn't the article about there not being enough? Oh wait, I get it, to be good enough for the author, the women can't just hold respectable titles in big companies, or write about startups, or head up super-lucrative tech blogs, they have to found startups. And yet, somehow, the evil "anti-founder" sexism that stops women from founding companies, doesn't extend to "anti-founder-news-coverage"?)
And they often fail to take into account things like: A) women who aren't attention-seekers go totally unnoticed by lists like these; B) computer science enrollment is not equal to people who work as programmers; C) many programmers, especially women ones, work in nontraditional jobs like nonprofits and education, with job titles that are not "programmer". Also, they often seem to set up an artificially narrow distinction to keep out many women who would otherwise ruin their hypothesis.
For example, this article in particular mentions Leah Culver, cofounder of Pownce, which was acquired by SixApart, but not Mena Trott, who co-founded Six Apart and obviously made a shitload more money than Leah -- as well as now being, in effect, her bosses' boss.
There are tons of other sucessful, low-profile women doing things that aren't traditionally called startups. Nobody talks about SixApart any more because they weren't bought, and the Trotts don't court attention. Those seem to be the main differences.
And beyond that...
None of these articles EVER consider that tech is a weird industry to go into, if you're not obsessed with it. In the tech industry, the majority of jobs are like Office Space.
It's hard and not very fun to to achieve a moderate level of success in our industry if you're a normal, well-adjusted person with friends and outside interests/responsibilities.
It's much easier to achieve a moderate level of success in other industries -- which pay more, and offer more perks that women are interested in.
That is, in other industries, you can work regular(ish) hours, and not be fanatically devoted to the latest practices, and not worry about being upstaged by the 16-year-old prodigy who's willing to work 18 hours a day and sleep under his desk.
Compare to biotech, which while being way more technical than all of the TC50 startups I've heard of, has many more successful women:
"While the industry is dominated by men in many aspects... by some objective measures — such as patenting, or likelihood to lead projects — women are actually doing better in biotech than at universities. One reason, scholars suggest, is the more fluid approach to science favored in the business world."
Biotech is more respectable. Biotech has more concrete rewards. Biotech probably has more people who are interesting to talk to outside of work. Biotech obviously has fewer annoyingly prodigious 16-year-olds, because the university book-learnin' is much more critical.
This was even true back in the days of Microserfs. Anyone read that? There was a joke in there about how the parking lots at biotech companies are always empty on weekends. And that the smartest woman in the valley worked in biotech.
No wonder biotech has more women.
But hey, let's light up the pitchforks and try to convince more women to do programming instead.
[1] (I've seen this one over and over. I was especially amused to hear a woman at OSCON claim that OSCON in general, Tim O'Reilly was specific, because her talk was rejected. I was on the committee and I had rejected it. It was a terrible proposal and she was a bad speaker. Men do this exact same thing as well, naturally, but they use other flimsy excuses than gender.)
All of these deplorable "women in tech" articles fall into the following camps:
1. I'm more feminist than you! (written by men)
2. We need a different perspective -- which of course means perspective provided by genitals, not, say, people from different cultures (e.g. tech Africans), or different original interests like design, music, or architecture
3. I want more people to date.
4. I want more people other than socially handicapped, unwashed men to speak to/befriend, who understand what I'm talking about.
5. I failed and the first potential explanation I came across was sexism, and I'm stickin' to it. [1]
6. It seems I'm different, and so if I don't theorize about why I'm different, and explain it away by sexism (e.g. lots of women would do what I do, if the world weren't so damned sexist!), I might have to admit I'm just weird and not like other girls.
7. Look at me, I'm a girl coder, that's like a unicorn but with boobs!
This article is a mixture of #2, #6 and #7. ("Yes, we do exist!" -- listing a healthy number of famous tech women, and acknowledging that it "barely scrapes the surface" -- hmm, wasn't the article about there not being enough? Oh wait, I get it, to be good enough for the author, the women can't just hold respectable titles in big companies, or write about startups, or head up super-lucrative tech blogs, they have to found startups. And yet, somehow, the evil "anti-founder" sexism that stops women from founding companies, doesn't extend to "anti-founder-news-coverage"?)
And they often fail to take into account things like: A) women who aren't attention-seekers go totally unnoticed by lists like these; B) computer science enrollment is not equal to people who work as programmers; C) many programmers, especially women ones, work in nontraditional jobs like nonprofits and education, with job titles that are not "programmer". Also, they often seem to set up an artificially narrow distinction to keep out many women who would otherwise ruin their hypothesis.
For example, this article in particular mentions Leah Culver, cofounder of Pownce, which was acquired by SixApart, but not Mena Trott, who co-founded Six Apart and obviously made a shitload more money than Leah -- as well as now being, in effect, her bosses' boss.
There are tons of other sucessful, low-profile women doing things that aren't traditionally called startups. Nobody talks about SixApart any more because they weren't bought, and the Trotts don't court attention. Those seem to be the main differences.
And beyond that...
None of these articles EVER consider that tech is a weird industry to go into, if you're not obsessed with it. In the tech industry, the majority of jobs are like Office Space.
It's hard and not very fun to to achieve a moderate level of success in our industry if you're a normal, well-adjusted person with friends and outside interests/responsibilities.
It's much easier to achieve a moderate level of success in other industries -- which pay more, and offer more perks that women are interested in.
That is, in other industries, you can work regular(ish) hours, and not be fanatically devoted to the latest practices, and not worry about being upstaged by the 16-year-old prodigy who's willing to work 18 hours a day and sleep under his desk.
Compare to biotech, which while being way more technical than all of the TC50 startups I've heard of, has many more successful women:
"While the industry is dominated by men in many aspects... by some objective measures — such as patenting, or likelihood to lead projects — women are actually doing better in biotech than at universities. One reason, scholars suggest, is the more fluid approach to science favored in the business world."
-- http://www.boston.com/business/specials/bio2007/articles/gen...
Biotech is more respectable. Biotech has more concrete rewards. Biotech probably has more people who are interesting to talk to outside of work. Biotech obviously has fewer annoyingly prodigious 16-year-olds, because the university book-learnin' is much more critical.
This was even true back in the days of Microserfs. Anyone read that? There was a joke in there about how the parking lots at biotech companies are always empty on weekends. And that the smartest woman in the valley worked in biotech.
No wonder biotech has more women.
But hey, let's light up the pitchforks and try to convince more women to do programming instead.
[1] (I've seen this one over and over. I was especially amused to hear a woman at OSCON claim that OSCON in general, Tim O'Reilly was specific, because her talk was rejected. I was on the committee and I had rejected it. It was a terrible proposal and she was a bad speaker. Men do this exact same thing as well, naturally, but they use other flimsy excuses than gender.)