Listening to Shelley Powers about women in tech

Jeffrey, I didn’t know that Arrington was a coder, and with an Office 2.0 application to boot. Well, color me surprised.

Yes it would be a shame if conference organizers were forced to consider issues of diversity. I live in the south, a lot of towns here abouts thought the same of the blacks.

David, thank you for the note on the baby elephant. A smaller aperture leads to a greater depth of field. I believed I used f/10, but I’d have to check the photo’s metadata to know for sure. And yes my site has no about page. They’re new sites and I’m re-organizing.

However, just to clarify: I didn’t bring up this issue because I wanted to be speaker. I don’t bring these up because I want more visibility for myself. Having this turn into a discussion of my visibility is nothing more than sidetracking from the more serious issues.

So yes, Robert, I forgot about Search champs. However, I don’t really consider that a conference. But yes, I was invited to four things in six years, two of which would have paid my way. I think, though, this really isn’t germaine to either this particular discussion or the issue generally. Is it?

Jeffrey, I just went through several speakers: you sure you want to stick with your criteria?

And when did diversity become a burden?

You know what’s funny is the organizers naive pleasure in how the conference was set and speakers found even before a press release was published. See that actually works against diversity, because it reflects only that group of people initially involved in the earlier discussion of the conference. Now, should more women have been reading the Office 2.0 weblog? Perhaps. Perhaps the Office 2.0 weblogger should have been reading more women.

Even with all of this, the most important point lost in the discussion is that whatever comes out of the conference is hopelessly flawed. Why? Half the target audience was not represented. Unless someone wants to convince me Office 2.0 is meant to be used my men only, nothing that comes out of this can be accepted with any credibility.

Diversity isn’t a burden; diversity is an opportunity.

Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of “Digital Divas” makes me a little uncomfortable. Rather than integrating interesting techie women into the show alongside the men, it marginalizes them into their own segment: it suggests that they’re interesting not for what they *do* but for what they *are*.

FWIW, I seem to remember reading Shelley saying she declined the BlogHer invite because she wanted to speak as Shelley Powers, technologist, rather than Burningbird, activist — that is to say, as a professional who happens to be a woman rather than a woman who happens to be a professional.

Can’t find it now, though, so I may be remembering wrong.

I’m glad you made this post and are hanging on for the rough ride it creates. Your post, and the comments to it, brought up a lot of good points I have no answers for, but think about quite a bit.

Maybe one of your video shows can be you in drag at a tech interview or gathering as Roberta.

Shelley conveniently forgets the fact that speakers were mostly not invited, they could openly apply here.  I’ll take the liberty of finishing Tara’s title: Okay…rather than just complain... apply!

I know for a fact Ismael would like to have more female speakers… 

But … gee .. .how do I invite you now, Robert?  Will you dress up as woman for us? 

Joke apart, sending email in a minute… and hope to see you there.

Zoli, how many of the speakers applied, and how many were specifically invited? How many of those 52 men went through the application process, and how many were recommended by other people, or approached directly?

How publicized was this conference out to a more general populace?

But no worries, few women at this conference. Should be just about right for you. Then you can have your manly echo chamber, and when you come out of the conference with all your bright ideas, we can all smile and nod knowingly when they all fail because you all didn’t bother to even try to attract participation from a significant segment of your target audience.

James, I actually wanted to speak as Shelley the activist at the BlogHer. The conference organizers asked me to teach a tech tutorial.

As for the Geek Divas thing: I don’t really care for segregation. Separate but equal has never worked in the past. I believe that Robert Scoble will find women that will meet his ‘geek’ criteria.

geek geek geek, Robert.

That’s it for me on this thread. I’m afraid we’ve moved away from the original topic. Anyone have anything to say to me directly, you know where to find me. Anyone wants to email me, it’s shelleyp@burningbird.net.

Shelley, Ismael’s comment here answers most of your questions.

hey Scoble, why should we care if HP,Dell,Apple,etc aren’t runned by woman? I don’t see any real difference if its runned by a man or woman. this post makes me think. who mostly use msft products? A woman did run a major corporation once. It was called the HP and Compaq merger and look what that did. that was a waste of money and thats why she was fired. unless your argument is woman are more business savvy than man. no one is trying to stop woman from creating her own company and running it.?? thats how Dell,Gateway,HP,Google started.

so to make it clear, what is the real reason that woman should run companies?. plz don’t use the “equal ” arguement.

Yea, what Orbit said. In this day in age why does it matter what the race or gender of a person is that runs a company? Do people really believe that women are DELIBERATELY being kept out of the tech industry? I hardly believe that. That would be like saying heterosexuals are deliberately being kept out of the clothing business. Or that heterosexual women are deliberately being kept out of the WNBA. Or that men are deliberately being made a minority in the elementary education field. Or that whites are being prevented from driving cabs in New York City. Or that non-Koreans are being kept from owning convenience stores in urban areas. Have I generalized enough for you? Certain careers and industries simply attract more of one gender or race or lifestyle than another. It is what it is. Ask women why more of them don’t go into the field or don’t aspire to be CEO’s. I think you will find the answers eye-opening.

Robert asks: “…can you name a CEO of a recognizeable tech company that’s not male? It’s hard to do.”

Dude, no it’s not, unless you just aren’t paying attention. Meg Whitman/eBay, Anne Mulcahy/Xerox, Carol Bartz/Autodesk, Pat Russo/Lucent, Kim Polese/SpikeSource. It’s true, there aren’t very many, but I know you’ve heard of these.

How about company (co-)founders: Ann Winblad/HummerWinblad, Heidi Roizen/TMaker, Mary Hodder/Dabble, Caterina Fake/flickr, Jessica Hardwick/SwapThing…

If you really want to talk with women who are world-class tech leaders, you can (and should) find them.

Love your Naked book…

Am not a geek, but do have a blog for 13 million+ people in the business of network marketing – 80% of whom are women – to show them that they CAN use the Internet to do neat stuff.

I get a kick out of helping them feel like they know almost as much as their children, especially their boys, about enjoying their life and business more because of what they can learn from folks like you on the Internet.

The stories you wrote about your Mom were big hits and made many women feel like maybe, they could, too.

And now they do. They’re online, reading good stuff to make their day and get their businesses off the ground.

Kim Klaver

I wondered, if I applied to a Victoria Secret store would they hire me? I doubt it. They would think I’m just a pervert.

thing is, why do woman buy this type of underwear?…. (I’ll wait for the brain to catch up)

Zoli after reading that post, I was less surprised there was one woman presenting and more suprised that 52 men actually agreed. No accounting for standards.

Maybe promote some European and Asian voices too.

Well, if you need someone interesting who can talk about large scale Mac OS X deployments or Directory Services issues, I know someone who’d be outstanding.

Yo, talk to Vanessa Fox of Google’s Sitemaps team. She’s done great stuff, like a radio show episode with Danny Sullivan called “Everything I needed to learn about SEO, I learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Rooting around.. um.. link here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/listen-in-matt-cutts-and-vanessa-fox.html

Shelley: regarding “speaker standards,” maybe you haven’t heard. Out of about 40 speakers who spoke at Google’s first Zeitgeist conference (including CEOs from Yahoo, AOL, Google, and other places and some women) I was the second highest ranked speaker (according to the audience) second only to Malcolm Gladwell.

At LIFT in Europe, I was the second highest ranked speaker (if I remember right) second only to Cory Doctorow. Out of dozens of speakers, including a famous author and a famous model.

And, there aren’t many people alive who’ve interviewed the Office Live team as well as the Google Calendar team as well as the guy who runs the company that makes Open Office.

I also have a pretty deep resume of speaking engagements, including to executives from Boeing, Microsoft, Target, Nestle, Amazon, and other places. 

Just to stick up for Zolli’s standards. If you have someone who is a better speaker, please feel free to recommend him or her. I’m sure Zolli would appreciate that.

Also, I don’t need to be a speaker there. I could run a panel discussion or do something else like interview someone like Meg Whitman or Mena Trott.

As to my Office 2.0 bonafides? I was one of the first people to email Bill Gates and Steven Sinofsky (execs in charge of Office at Microsoft) telling them that they should make a suite of apps, including a wiki, a blog tool, and a few other things. That was back before Flickr was purchased by Yahoo.

Do you know of someone else who saw this industry back then and has an email to prove it?

Robert,

Where I don’t qualify as a hard-core geek, I do as a female CEO of a company using tech in interesting ways. After all, you were one of the first to try us out, and to be a featured guest! [thanks again for that - we really had fun with you and Shel]

Attending a plethora of geek-centric events in San Francisco and Silicon Valley over the past months, I can attest that on a list of 400++ people I am often the only, if not one of very few, female CEOs.

However, I concur with Gene. We are out there. It’s just a matter of digging a little deeper. I think even more interesting than “Digital Divas” would be to mix it up a little…a panel (or series of interviews) of smart, innovative and driven men and women brain jamming. Kind of like we do in the ‘hallway discussions’ at un/conferences and at tech/networking parties.

Belated congrats on your successes, and the move. Hope you’re enjoying California.

Tracy: we’ll have a segment where we can mix diverse geeks together in an interesting way: a dinner party.

Thanks for your comments and appreciate what you do!

Sadly to say Robert, when you engage the castration crowd, you ain’t never gonna win an argument. Not even come close.

Robert, yeah, and I used to be one of the highest ranked speakers at Ken North’s old XML series — should we pull out our reviews and toss scores at each other at 20 paces.

To clarify: I was responding to Zoli’s link to Ismael’s post. I thought Ismael’s post was clueless. I still do.

I will say in his favor: between yesterday and today Ismael added three new women speakers. Three extremely impressive women speakers, in fact. A thumbs up for that action. Now, 10 or so more like the four ladies already speaking, and this conference might even be worth the bucks.

“Sadly to say Robert, when you engage the castration crowd, you ain’t never gonna win an argument. Not even come close.”

What an abysmally stupid thing to say.

I came looking for adults, and I find boys in the later stages of arrested development.

Shelley, considering the general tenor of your posts and comments, I’m almost surprised at comment 47.

You like stirring shit up. You’re good at it. But please, don’t even start to act surprised when it spatters wrong. It’s silly. You get precisely the results you knew you’d both find and create, stop pretending to be surprised.

Whether male or female, I’ve always found that geeks (which to me means computer science nerds) will be geeks and shy away from roles that will focus a spotlight on them; they’d rather sit in their cubicle and write code, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

What no one’s yet pointed out is that Robert’s looking at who’s running tech companies and leading their projects. In all of my experiences, I’ve always found these folks to be primarily business people — not hard-core computer scientists. So is that the main issue, that there aren’t enough women making it up the rungs of the technology corporate ladder?

My take on that question would be yes. Being a geek that made the transition to management, I know that there aren’t enough women there, and it’s a damn difficult leap to make.

So my suggestion, Robert, is to dig a little deeper. You’re not going to always find women running the show or leading the project — sometimes they’re behind the scenes actually making shit happen!

Kinda off topic, but my sister-in-law just started blogging. More of a personal blog right now, but it gives her a place to write.

http://rows-reality.redleif.com/

I am sure some of the “mommy bloggers” can related to some of what she writes about.