BarCampDC: We Are Unintentionally Divided
BarCampDC2 was held on Oct. 18, I realize that is was also the day LifeTime aired their movie Living Proof. (I went to the screening but I will post that later). On a day that LifeTime airs a movie about a scientist testing for a breast cancer gene to attack a disease that was unnecessarily killing women, I was at BarCampDC representing women in tech.
Similar to the scientist, I was fighting an unnecessary disease in the tech and social media culture. Women are not seen as leaders in these fields although everyone will tell you the opporunity is there for the taking. At BarCampDC the behavior was interesting, most of it was classic text book geek behavior and others were outside of the “tech culture” box.
Below is a picture of the room in the morning. Most women arrived noticing more men than women and wondered what was going on. Several of us noticed that the women were on one side and the men on the other. Jessica Avison says it best.
Women and Men at BarCampDC
Most of the guys will insist that women are invited and included but they spent most of the morning with their backs towards the women. Jill Foster and I talked to the women but decided that we were going to present a session and infultrate the crowds. One man walked straight to the women, Nick Whitmoyer, but he was a teacher to two of the girls and his stuff was sitting in the middle of the circle of women.
Our session, which was highly attended, Social Media, Community Building, DC Politics & Beyond. Jill was the Utterli ambassador covering the DNC. I covered the Democratic and Republican Conventions for women and politics. We talked about how social media was used to cover the conventions including C-Span coverage, a session held at BarCampDC by Leslieann, Sleevis and Bill later that day. Most importantly we talked about media coverage on the protest that was a result from twitterers on the ground. A third session covered the work of the Sunlight Foundation projects which I and other bloggers have used during the bailout = corpwelfare debates.
We talked about Social Media being an extension of your existing social networks. If you don’t generally pal around with women or women of color would they be a significant portion of your social networks if you are a geek? [Think hard about that question]
In the session, Making the Web Better and Easier presented by Voodotikigod Chris, women were included throughout the discussion. He allowed the programmer to be called “Geekette” and repeated it during the whole session. The designer at the bottom of the graphic was a man. He continued to confirm the title with me and I could see heads turn to look at me with a little bit of disgust and annoyance, as if to say a programmer “a woman”, what planet are you on?
A snippet of history for those that don’t know, the first “computers” were mostly women. We now call them “programmers”. The theory at the time was that women were the only ones with the patience necessary to do the job. Although that theory has changed in today’s tech industry I would say that it is the lack of patience and over excitement of “the shiny new toy” ideas that keep us in this new tech development cycle we are experiencing. (more on that in another post)
Chris was great! He took the humor that the women brought to the session and had real tech discussion with all of us (men and women). There were some great ideas about pulling various data sets and codes into websites without having to continuously change the graphic front end design. Some did not agree because they wanted to get rid of having to pull html and java codes into content management systems.
I don’t agree, you don’t have to scrap everything that came before the current data modules and codes (ie. drupal, java applets, ruby, etc.) in order to have something completely new. Sometimes the “old” way of doing things can prove to be insightful to new ideas.
Overall we had a great time. You can see some of it here.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:57 pm
This is no different than in other IT linked areas. We are in minority in IT and guys are not used to female presence as equals.
And in some ways it is perpetrated by other women. If we want men to change towards us, we need to change our own stance. Among other things that means being authoritative, positive and standing our ground without blame.
However, this is not the only or the first place where such separation and inequality happens. We just have to get back with arguments that are now in the public domain and show why in certain circumstances women are not only equal to the task but also better at it. Scial networking happens to be one of those!
Thank you for sharing this and good luck with your work.
First, no need t be
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Hopefully I’m not putting too big a target on my back by commenting here
I see large gaps between men and women in terms of social expectations and communication styles, typically wider in geek circles. Unfortunately these gaps create perceptions that fester into bigger issues.
I was at this event and saw a couple of the situations you reported here. I saw women clustered together and thought that was odd. Wasn’t like that at other events (e.g. Refresh DC).
I remember my impressions of you during the “Geekette” discussion. “Who is she? Twitterer with a sense of humor.” I got uncomfortable when the speaker kept going over the word “geekette” with you - did he not hear you the first time? I was slightly annoyed with him about that and who knows, maybe I had an expression on my face that I wasn’t aware of and didn’t erase when I looked over at you. If so, communication gap. Or it could have been someone else. I get that you perceived an unfriendly message regardless.
I didn’t get to meet you, but I did meet a few other women for the first time. All of them were in mixed groups with guys I knew. I never tried to break into groups I didn’t know, including women-only groups. I never saw women try to break into groups of all men where the guys were all strangers.
For whatever reason, I simply don’t see many tech women hanging out socially. Or women in general hanging out in the hard core tech circles. I suspect that some kind of self-perpetuating dynamic is involved. I get the impression from women I’ve invited to tech events (such as my wife) that it’s just not a priority to geek it out socially. Should I be working harder at inviting women? I don’t know.
Well enough of my rambling … thanks for posting! Hopefully our paths will cross again.