Let’s Really Talk About Gender Diversity
Rethinking the female conference speaker dimension
The other day, while chatting in passing with a high-level executive at my huge enterprise software company about the conference speaker gender (non-)diversity issue, I suggested he could instantly transform speaker diversity by changing his gender.
The man, by the way, did an admirable job fielding my rather tasteless request (I think he said he’d need to run it by his wife first), but part of me, though realizing how flippant I sounded, really was that serious about seeking new ways to grapple with this apparently age-old issue.
Famous Kansas cultural (and digital) anthropologist Mike Wesch, when talking about his seminal video The Machine is Us/ing Us, includes identity, ethics, family, love — even ourselves in the list of things that “we’re going to need to rethink” as ramification of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. (You can listen to him explain it here.) Says Wesch:
When you unpack the impacts of digital text, it leads to a necessity to think what the Web’s all about — that it’s not just about information. It’s actually about linking people, and linking people in ways in ways that we’ve never been linked before and in ways we can’t even predict.
Allow me, Professor Wesch, to add gender to your list of rethinkables. The Web as a platform, I passionately believe, while itself is what offers to us this whole mess of lack of female conference speakers, is what’s also going to get us out of this mess. This is a platform that discriminates neither by gender nor gender identity, nor race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, age or other diversity vectors. It may prefer those with socioeconomic means for fast connections and machines, but even that divider is starting to fail as we evolve new and more and different kinds of devices available to different people the world over.
This results both in the need for and the inevitability of a much broader view of things (the “rethinking”). Yet looked at this way, we’re only just beginning to really hear about the world, as Sir Berners-Lee himself noted at a recent Web 2.0 Summit: “Only 20-25 percent of humanity actually uses the Web at all.”
Here’s the key: There’s more to it than meets our given eyes at any one given moment. There’s more to individuals; there’s more to gender; there’s more to rethink, period. Even if you believe in immutability of biology, while you in so doing eschew all our transgendered friends, you also ignore the huge variations there actually are within that biology and along with it. Anne Fausto-Sterling suggests that we may even need five genders to explain the breadth of naturally existing gender diversity. (And here I’ll resist, at least in this post, going off on the tangent of naturally occurring same-sex pairings).
Its easy, perhaps convenient, and in some cases a matter of life and death to obscure such real breadths of gender diversity, but I’m confident that as we’re only now just scratching the surface of the great big world of possibility, technology will indeed continue to promote the voices of all sorts of folks rather than reinforce its own self-limiting stereotypes. Twitter alone has put me in touch with more gender (and other) diversity than I ever had counted among personal contacts before. The wonderful wild voices of the world will continue to be heard — all we need to do is listen.
So I invite you to try that train of thought next time you’re at a tech conference confronting the gender diversity issue. You might find it a liberating departure from existing limitations.
With that out of the way maybe we can then get around to those other pesky matters like equal pay, childcare, access to good education for all, funding for public schools and actually nutritious school lunches, and yes in fact healthcare and federal benefits without gender or sexual orientation as a pre-existing condition. And beyond that, even talk about speaking at tech conferences.
But I digress.
Well, I do quite like the idea of pansexuality, but that said, sexuality is an incentive like many others, a reason to act, a point of attraction. as such, it may take many forms, and as long as it’s between consenting adults, I really see no reason for anyone to care — unless of course those consenting adults are in a relationship with other consenting adults and are not part of a hippie commune…an aspect I find most interesting however, and I know I’m going to risk a sweeping generalization, but the world is being forced to start reading between the lines, to start focusing on the relationships between objects, not the objects themselves, is starting to look at collections and aggregates and entire systems at work, finding new nodes through a study of their arcs, read micro-gestures and complex behavioral patterns at a glance…we are becoming systems thinkers and systems engineers…we are shifting from deductive reasoning to inductive understanding…we are at home in a digital womb that is fundamentally changing the way we work, live and imagine…science is traditionally a break-it-apart-to-find-out-how-it-works kind of entity…this shift is game-changing…it says “watch its interactions to understand it”. Big brother is not watching over us…Big Sister is…
by Sean MacNiven
on 07. Apr, 2010
Hi Moya..
I’d suggest that one of the causes of this lack of diversity, or lack of diverse thinking, is simple naiveity. I’ve spent well over 30 years in the general IT industry and have worked with and for some great people, male and female, LGB (and possibly T, but I don’t know) but it probably took me 10 years or so to accept that women are discriminated against….
My simple logical (but very naive) thinking was that it was irresponsible, not mention stupid / silly, to hire anyone except the person for the job, especially in an industry where skills were rare and expensive.
I THINK (but aren’t sure…) that this had a lot to do with my natural inclination towards the more technical side of the industry. Certainly, I had (still have ?) the typical social awareness of mid range Aspergers, which means I have to work to pick out the subtext of someone’s actions i.e. When someone said he didn’t hire her because the male candidate was better, I would accept it at face value (or more topically, Do women fail to put themselves forward for speaking engagements because they’re actively discouraged or because they don’t feel as confident as men in promoting themselves or because they really aren’t qualified enough or ….)
The reason I mention Aspergers, though, is that it is over represented amongst the IT industry, and mainly affects males…. I don’t know if that is the why behind ‘discrimination’, and even if it is, it doesn’t excuse it. Rather, it should serve as a warning to check your assumptions; otherwise you will miss out on meeting interesting / intelligent people you can learn from (a good example is whether you want to spend time in the company of a wheel chair bound quadriplegic mute from regional England…. See http://goo.gl/HcKf )
by martin_english
on 08. Apr, 2010
This is a brilliant and original new take on the age-old “why can’t you be bothered to include a woman in your group” question/complaint. And I like being reminded that only 20-25% of the world’s population uses the web. We’re all a minority here though we often act like the power is all in the bits. At tech conferences there’s usually a high percentage of people with social anxiety and all sorts of dorks and geeks and dweebs, regardless of gender.
by Leanne
on 08. Apr, 2010
leanne thanks for that point that tech conferences are full of social anxiety and people with it: i often marvel at the web 2 conferences i attend about the craze of social networking — when being social can be downright hard. hence that’s where technology has enabled people for whom it might have otherwise been impossible to engage.
which leads us to sean. sean, you sound a bit like virginia woolf in your musings. note that in my post i’m talking about gender and specifically not sexuality – though sexuality is of course an interesting vector to explore perhaps in a later post. nevertheless, i love the direction you take this: “sexuality is an incentive” – and then the imagery of the digital womb.
i think there are so many shades of female/male-ness and things in-between, so i appreciate y’all taking the time to read and think about this and ‘read between the lines.’
i think both sean and leanne are already living between these lines — how about everyone else?
by moya watson
on 08. Apr, 2010
martin — many thanks for your thoughtful comment.
i *love* that you bring up Aspergers and i do believe it’s a prevalent challenge for many, and somehow especially men as you state. i also love how you remind us that many men (many women – many people) are simply not aware of the ’speaker issue.’
i accept that it’s perhaps a matter of being naive, as you note. however, i think we also have stereotypes and concepts of “social norms” to thank (and conquer) for this.
just try this thought experiment alone — anyone reading this — (and i love that you bring this up too, martin) consider this description:
“wheel chair bound quadriplegic mute from regional England”
now consider this:
Stephen Hawking
did you — do we — have the picture in our heads of a brilliant world-renowned scientist in our minds for both?
i’m all for anything that helps us challenge our assumptions and allow people — in all their diversity — to be all they truly are. and i believe it’s key to our survival.
thanks again,
-m
by moya watson
on 09. Apr, 2010
Great post, Moya! I’m really fascinated by your points.
I’m reading this a few days after being at a nonprofit tech conference where I spoke on a panel about tackling big social issues. Every presenter was male, interestingly. I’m a trans guy. Most of the sessions were fairly good on gender diversity, but I found it interesting that this session was notably not very diverse.
I live in SF, where it’s increasingly cool to be down with the trans folk. It’s rare that I meet someone who’s hostile. But I feel like a lot of people who are developing broader understanding of what gender is (through connecting with the trans mecca that is SF) don’t really personalize it. Being a pretty typical guy myself (though a bit of a nelly queen), helping people think about what gender means to them probably isn’t one of my greater gifts, but it’s an idea that comes up around me a lot as people wrestle with what “transgender” means. I’m intrigued by ways we might make gender nuance more concrete or more understandable for people on the learning curve. Can a panel full of dudes tackling the world’s big social issues through multimedia and online and mobile organizing really bring gender diversity into the session? If so, what does that look like? I feel like we were pretty mindful about sharing women’s stories from our work, ensuring that audience members who asked questions represented a good spectrum, etc., but these are all lessons we got from the previous generation of conversations about gender. Perhaps the next generation involves making it personal, and figuring out how to bring that personal angle into the performance involved with presenting and communicating. But I struggle a little to imagine what that involves to the point that I can articulate specific things I can do… Would love to hear others’ thoughts!
Web 2.0… I’m a little divided on whether social media really makes us more open and able to rethink ourselves, or if it just creates another place where subnetworks and subgroups develop and find each other. Perhaps what we can say is that web 2.0 creates the potential, but it’s up to us to decide what to do with the tools? I feel like we have a ways to go to really make the social web help us rethink gender. On the trans angle, I think it’s helped a lot to reach new people, share stories and influence their thinking – but this leads to people rethinking us (transgender people) but not necessarily themselves. Using the tools to help people rethink themselves involves a shift in our communication style that I’m not sure has happened yet.
Wish I’d seen this before the panel! It’s making me think lots of interesting thoughts.
by jay
on 14. Apr, 2010
hi jay!
i thank you very much for engaging and giving us the first-hand trans-perspective. interesting that you particpated on a panel with the same phenomenon — all-male-speakers. do you write somewhere? these are great impressions and i’d love to check out more online — and i wish i’d seen the panel, too!
i’m glad your experience is that it’s increasingly cool to be down with trans folk — and fascinating that your existence prompts so many to openly question themselves around you. it makes sense, though i can’t imagine how you feel being sort of a catalyst instead of just “yourself.” maybe we all take this responsibility just by being — which brings me to these words from you:
- “I’m a little divided on whether social media really makes us more open and able to rethink ourselves, or if it just creates another place where subnetworks and subgroups develop and find each other. Perhaps what we can say is that web 2.0 creates the potential, but it’s up to us to decide what to do with the tools?”
brilliantly put. ideally, as long as it all stays in our hands — more and more of the world in all its diversity will be able to share. but people don’t always use the tools for good, or for this generosity of sharing — all too true.
i also like this point especially:
- “Perhaps the next generation involves making it personal, and figuring out how to bring that personal angle into the performance involved with presenting and communicating. But I struggle a little to imagine what that involves to the point that I can articulate specific things I can do… Would love to hear others’ thoughts!”
i’d love to hear others’ thoughts too!
- “this leads to people rethinking us (transgender people) but not necessarily themselves. Using the tools to help people rethink themselves involves a shift in our communication style that I’m not sure has happened yet.”
exactly — but i see the potential. i think the tools will also evolve, but as long as they remain in our hands, and we each have access to telling our story, we can’t help but broaden the horizons. in the meantime, i truly think we need to get beyond the constraining aspects of gender in order to really celebrate it in all its diversity — and thank you for the generosity of your thoughts and for bringing more to the table.
by moya watson
on 15. Apr, 2010