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.

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.