To be clear I harbor no illusion of gender parity having been reached in business, let alone technology, but I have to say that if my recent trip to SXSW is any indication, we may well be at least moving in the right direction. I don’t know the official stats, but from where I sat the female power at this year’s Austin fest seemed more solid than ever. Granted this may be due to my paying more attention this year than at other times, but be that as it may I found myself proudly perusing the preponderance of powerful females populating panels and permeating parties (sorry, alliterative itch had to be scratched).

Quite a few months ago, when panels were submitted for SXSW, the gals of Technically Women swapped myriad emails proposing sessions, helping each other promote panels and ultimately Jennifer Leggio proffered this great post about the way women were going to be taking over SXSW. Fast forward several months to the final stretch of weeks before SXSW and I got a call inviting me to be among a small group of women honored at “Digitini” a luncheon held at the Frost Building in Austin.  Orchestrated by Sloane Berrent and Sarah Evans – two women whose work I hold in high regard – the idea was simple: honor 7 women from various sectors of business and tech at a women’s luncheon. While I admittedly had a bit of an issue with the girly girly name and the fact that the invite leaned a bit too much towards the pink and frilly, in practice this gathering was all bid-ness.

From the moment I walked through the door for that luncheon, which took place on the first official full day of SXSW Interactive, it was clear the honorees were just part of the story. As I looked around the room noting the women who were in attendance, I felt more and more humbled at being among this remarkable crowd. Every person there was worthy of recognition. It also merits noting that after this luncheon I seemed to keep running into great women – it’s as though the event opened my eyes to just how many of us there *are* … kind of like meeting someone at a party, finding out they live in your neighborhood then suddenly you start running into them everywhere

Everywhere I turned during my week in Austin there were more powerful women.

From the opening keynote delivered by the always-insightful danah boyd to a panel on “open science” populated by not one, not two, not three but four female speakers (who, for the record, were: Ariel Waldman of Spacehack.org; Dr. Kiki Sanford of This Week in Science; Natalie Villalobos from Institute for the Future; and Jessy Cowan-Sharp from NASA), to Women Techies United, a fabulous booth and related events set up by a collection of the top women-focused groups in tech there seemed to be no shortage of places catering to the women of SXSW.

Have we shattered the glass ceiling? Have we won the battle? Hell no. In fact, if anything the next phase of really hard work starts now. There must be no resting on laurels. There must be no complacency. We must continue to support each other, revel in our female ferocity and push the limits for where we go next.

I was a stay-at-home Mom for five years after the dotcom crash. I would have never returned to work had I not gotten divorced. I had retired from professional life. So, imagine my surprise when I was forced back into the workforce clueless and disconnected. No exaggeration: I did not know what a BlackBerry was or that the Wall Street Journal had color on the front page. I spent all of my waking hours tending to my children and family, far removed from the rigors of the professional world.

I started blogging in January 2006, four months before my divorce was final. I floundered around a bit looking for a logical place to settle in the market. I ultimately was drawn to the Enterprise 2.0 sector and began a deliberate focus to track the sector and make new connections.

Because I was paying attention, I saw buzz brewing over a new conference in the works called, “Office 2.0.” When I looked at the scheduled speaker list, one interesting factoid jumped off the page: there were over 50 men and 0 women on the agenda. So, without hesitation, I asked a connection to put me in touch with the conference organizer and I pitched getting me into a speaker slot. Two emails later, voila, there I was, the only woman on a high-profile Silicon Valley conference event with 53 men. You can see this called out on Techmeme when a bristling blogstorm blew up surrounding the fact that this conference was so shamelessly unbalanced, and perhaps, misogynistic.

In truth, I didn’t assert myself because I felt slighted as a woman. Honestly? I saw the imbalance as opportunity, leverage. I jumped at the chance to get visibility at such a prestigious event. In hindsight, I realize that single event turned the tables for me. Soon after, I was inducted (as the first female) to the Enterprise Irregulars‘ blogging troupe, and I continued to scrape and claw my way to the little top I now occupy, secure in my own business at SoCo Partners focused on Enterprise 2.0.

Why am I telling this story? Because getting industry visibility matters for men and women. Had I not been afforded that opportunity, who knows when or if I would experience the same industry recognition I have today. (Not boasting here, the e20 crowd is fairly small and insular.) But also to shine a spotlight on this as an issue that has been around for a long while, and seemingly will continue to frustrate us until women are seamlessly woven into every speaker agenda, not deliberately, but as a matter of filling the agenda with competent professionals who just happen to represent both genders.

I don’t personally believe there is a conspiracy against women or a preference for men in technology conference planning. This brings me to the other side of this debate. I am a conference planner. I went on to plan the subsequent two Office 2.0 Conferences, as well as am now on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I am currently in discussions with Björn Negelmann to join the board of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT, held in Germany where there is not a single woman on the board.

I can assure you, when the planning boards convene to review speaker selections, we are gender blind. We are looking for the best content; the best individuals to fill the agenda. At various times (when it even occurs to me), I myself may bring up the gender issue as I’m sensitive to it. Immediately, my board colleagues respond, “Oh yes, of course, we need more women!” But this process always bothers me, as if women are a special needs category- the Section 8(a) of tech conference planning.

My advice to women who want to be heard: speak up. Let us know who you are. We recruited one woman, Sara Bocaneanu, all the way from Romania because she sent us a video of her speaking at a tech conference in eastern Europe. You’re not going to get preferential treatment if you’re a woman; you’ll get preferential treatment if you’re a better choice than the person we had in that seat last year.

Finally, on speaking in general. I abhor speaking. I simply avoid doing it at all costs. I even turned down an all expenses paid gig to speak outside of Milan, Italy last year at an Enterprise 2.0 conference. So, as a few of us technicallywomen were chatting behind the scenes, it’s not that we’re being discriminated against… some of us are choosing not to speak. Me? I like hangin’ around backstage with the band. It’s where I aspire to be, and I’ve earned the privilege to be there by speaking up and creating my own destiny.

Posting to Technically Women provides an opportunity to share distinctly personal experiences as a female engaged in technology while living and working in the first decade of the 21st century. Participation here also allows for the framing of those experiences in the broader historical context. As a child of the 50’s it has been my privilege to witness momentous shifts in the way we perceive age, race and gender over the course of the last half a century. These shifts represent milestones in the journey toward equality but not yet a final realized achievement of equal representation. Perceptional changes have indeed occurred in the last 50 years but after five decades of observation we might conclude we have progressed toward parity but not experienced an absolute demographic transformation and it is obvious our representation in this sector remains weak.

Robert Kennedy said “Like it or not, we live in interesting times” “everyone here will ultimately be judged – will ultimately judge himself – on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.”. (The gender emphasis is mine).

Kennedy spoke these words in South Africa in 1966, while delivering a Day of Affirmation Address. Kennedy’s words were meant to empower youth and people of color. This was the same year I entered high school in a suburb of New York filled with the knowledge and hope that a relatively young person could be president of the US, that people of color might and could enjoy equal opportunity for education and betterment. It seemed inconceivable then that actually reaching all of those goals simultaneously (being young and a person of color and achieving the presidency) would take decades more to realize in the United States.

I graduated high school in 1969 when the word ageism was first coined, when “discrimination against individuals or groups because of their age” was being examined and discussed for the first time in the US. That same year the gender barrier for women’s undergraduate entry into Princeton and other exclusionary US centers of higher learning was breached. Two of the very first women to gain admission to traditionally male institutions of higher learning were not only from my own high school class of graduates but also belonged to my immediate class of 30 gifted and talented young high school students. One of these women was Carol Kellerman who later served as executive director for Learning Leaders, the oldest school volunteer program in the US and Carol was also a lawyer and chief of staff for a NY senator.

I would summarize my formative high school years as a time of recognition of barriers, with steps (in retrospect often fledgling) taken to redress inequalities of race, gender, and age. These were times of high hopes that those barriers would be permanently and swiftly removed. Many of my generation were/are actually fairly dumbfounded that the progress we saw launched back then has taken so many decades to realize.

So although some have questioned why the need for a blog that highlights women in technology, to them I would say: “collaborating in a woman’s environment is an empowering experience rather than an isolating one”. And seriously, if we think women in technology have achieved full equality, we’d better think again.

I would maintain that little has changed since Anita Borg (1949-2003) penned this article in 1993. She wrote:

“Increasing the number of women in computer science and making the environments in which women work more conducive to their continued participation in the field requires the active involvement of both women and men. In particular, there must be ongoing and productive communication throughout the field concerning the unique problems that women face when they enter the field and as they progress and advance. The fact that women are a small minority in the field results in two impediments to this communication. First, women work almost exclusively with men and so have few opportunities to create and then participate in a “community of women in computer science”. Second, men work almost exclusively with men and have limited opportunities to communicate with more than a few professional women. Open electronic forums can improve communication by introducing us to a larger community, but do nothing to reduce the disparity in numbers. On the other hand, exclusively female forums, such as Systers, are a particularly effective way to connect women in our field with each other. They also ultimately contribute to improved communication between women and men.”

So here’s to mentorship, improved communication and a speedier route to closing the gender gap in technology.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/smcgee/2245932396/

Let me state right from the start, I do not like playing the gender card. Sweeping generalizations about how men and women “are” make me bristle. I do not consciously frame myself in this world as a woman first. I am a person. I am unique. I happen to be female in gender. And in part, because of that, I often resist believing that there are any barriers to entry in positions or fields.

I am the youngest of 8 children – 6 girls and 2 boys. My mother was atypical for her generation. In 1962, when my father told her to get a hobby, she took flying lessons and became a pilot. Consequently, two of my sisters also went on to become pilots. One of them became the first female Airbus A330 captain in the world. Did she ever flaunt that fact? No. She’d be mortified to set herself apart by gender, that by being a woman she should somehow be singled out or assessed differently is the antithesis of how we were raised.

The mindset in my family has always been, “of course we are equal, of course we can do it, there is no reason why we can’t do what we want or be what we want.” And in that equality, we expect no special treatment – either for, nor against our gender.

And so, from time to time, when I’ve encountered overt statements of sexism in the workplace, I’m usually flummoxed. As recently as 5 years ago, while holding a management position at a tech company, I had a C-level executive make direct comments to me that sounded as if they were right out of the 1970’s. I left his office scratching my head and wondering how someone only a few years older than myself could be such a dinosaur.

Despite my own personal attitude of equality and a belief that any reasonable person would feel the same, I have encountered situations that have shown the world to be otherwise. I have been told by a superior that I would not get an increase in position because I was a woman. I have been passed over for promotion because I was on maternity leave. At conferences these days, I see a discrepancy in the number of women who keynote or lead panels vs. women participating in the industry. It’s out there. But I still don’t want to believe it.

In 1999, I was working in marketing for a large computer software and hardware distributor. I decided that, for personal growth, I wanted to learn how to build a web site and didn’t know anyone who could teach me. I started to investigate where to find resources and happened upon a group of women who were committed to helping others advance their technology knowledge and careers. Together, we founded DigitalEve International, a non-profit, volunteer run, grass roots organization. I founded the Vancouver chapter and grew the membership to 2,000 people within 18 months, way back in the days of listservs. Then I joined the International team to oversee marketing, specifically branding, for more than 50 chapters worldwide, each of whom wanted their own regional identities and flavour considered.

The DigitalEve experience taught me so much about building communities, working with volunteers and creating programs from zero. But, it was the camaraderie I felt, the friendships that took hold and ultimately, and the difference that we all made in helping women to advance themselves in technology careers that made the experience so rewarding.

While representing DigitalEve, I was often asked if we were “against” men or if by our mandate we were exclusionary. I responded that women can’t advance in traditional male careers without the help and acceptance of men, and that those men who want to help and share what they know were always welcome to join us.

It’s been 7 years snce I left DigitalEve and here I am collaborating on a blog focused on women in technology and business. If my experiences in those years are any indication, I still think the culture of business – especially tech focused businesses – needs a little help in opening up and accepting women as equals in all ranks and pay scales. Mostly, I think it’s a question of habit. Both men and women need to look at their norms and assumptions about who does which job and why, then ask themselves if all is right in that world. If you see room for improvement, then it’s time for you to take action. Collaborating on the Technically Women blog is just one of my contributions to changing habits and taking action. What are you doing?

Post Script: I did learn how to build a web site back in 2000. I took HTML and CSS in some of the first classes delivered online at British Columbia Institute of Technology and learned how to hand code a site without the aid of today’s visual editors. As a marketer, this has been an invaluable skill to have.