hyperlinked society: a political note
Twenty-eight men.
Five women.
Of the latter, at least one is already not here. (Nancy Tellem of CBS was supposed to be on the first panel, and isn’t up there at the table. Maybe she came in late!)
I’m talking to you, people.
June 9th, 2006 at 11:49 am
do you know about bloghercon, vika?
June 9th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Yep!
June 9th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
What do you mean by “I’m talking to you, people”?
June 9th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
gfly – it’s a (perhaps overly glib) way of implicitly addressing the conference organizers. I’m unimpressed by the gender ratio, as regards both the panel participants and the audience members. (Although the audience has a slightly better ratio.)
June 9th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
There are all sorts of diversity that are important in these discussions. Just couting the women and men, mentioning how unimpressed you are, and calling out the conference organizers could suggest a touch of missing white woman syndrome that overlooks racial minorities, people of different nations of origin, or even things like academic / industry / government representation.
It also isn’t obvious that the conference organizers deserve blame. Is the gender ratio of experts in this field (CEOs, technologists, etc.) 50/50, or are they drawing representative panel members from a group in which men are favored? Did they invite many women who declined to attend? There’s little point in being accusatory without answering these questions.
There are plenty of ways to actively work toward equality, and plenty of groups working to provide more opportunities for women in computing. Pointing out the skewed gender ratio is a very reasonable thing to do, since it calls attention to a problem. But just dropping off the blame where you did, without any argument as to why the organizers are at fault or what should have been done instead, doesn’t seem so productive.
June 9th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Your point about diversity is taken, gfly. However, I don’t believe that talking about a group-discrimination problem that one is experiencing in the moment is only permissible if you nod to all of the other groups discriminated against.
Yeah, there’s definitely a preponderance of white people here. People of diff. nations of origin are fairly well represented. Academics and industry people are fairly well represented; I haven’t gotten a sense of government representation.
The organizers are the Annenberg School for Communication. They have the resources to figure out that the ratio of women whose work would be relevant to this conference is much higher than they’ve represented here.
That said, I have (here, now, and elsewhere) praised the organizers for doing this thing in the first place, and for providing so much support so that audience members (myself included) could attend. I appreciate that.
I should also mention that the last sentence of my post was intended to be slightly tongue-in-cheek, which has been a common usage of it (that I’ve seen, anyway).