I have been asking for weeks, for a list of women who are developing Social Media, (Web 2.0) or Web 3.0, (The Semantic Web), applications. After hitting nothing but dead ends, I was starting to lose faith. Today, I had commented to Robert Scoble on FriendFeed after seeing his great interview on Sliderocket:
Me:
BTW Scoble, when I first read your posts it seemed too much like highschool: who is cool. Also seemed to define geek as male. Which felt strange to me. But this interview is great. Much success with your new endeavor.
And he replied:
terra210: yeah, sorry, sometimes I get pulled into the World Wide Highschool. :-) I do track who is cool, based on their products and services. Male vs. Female geeks are tough. I try to fight that, but truth is most people I come in contact with are guys, so sometimes I fall into that trap. Thanks for the kind wishes! - Robert Scoble
But then...
Later on FriendFeed, Robert Seidman posted an insightful and informed article on women technologists or Geeks; FINALLY...
I loved this portion of the subhead:
"As geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar."
"Unlikely subset", is a brilliant but somewhat disturbing description.
The article includes teams of women researchers or Nerdettes, such as Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google, and Leah Culver, the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform.
The article also had an interesting paragraph on statistics, regarding women technologists:
Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to "act like a man" in order to succeed. In the past, women dealt with that reality in two ways: some buried their femininity, while others simply gave up their techie interests to appear more feminine. For most of my life I hid my passion for all things scientific and tried to focus on pursuits that were 'allowable'," says Cathy Malmrose, a Berkeley, Calif., mom who, at 38, is now the CEO of a computer manufacturer. "Instead of getting to play on my brother's TRS80 [computer] and study the sciences, I went into elementary education."
To many of you, finding this article this may seem like a minor event. But to me, a lifelong member of the unlikely subset, it was a huge coup. As someone who encounters obstacles on a daily basis for my "active" interest in technology, and who paid, (am still paying), a huge price for taking a faculty position at one of the leading technical universities in the US, it feels like the winds of change are gaining force. You have no idea how good that feels.
Comments