The Nexus of 2024

Links from the Arrington/TechCrunch women in tech kerfuffle (UPDATED)

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by

jon
in

WWII image of a woman: Yes we can!Even over the three-day weekend here in the US we continue to see some excellent discussions, for example Qworky advisor Gayle Laakmann’s Blame Men — And Women and Audrey Watters’ “Ambient Un-belonging” Arrington’s got another post up too.

Looking ahead, the Women In Tech teleconference on September 15 includes TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde is on the “Female Ferocity” panel.  There’s the sold-out Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Atlanta at the end of the month.  And late last week, Arrington tweeted that they were going to add an all-women panel to TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss “women’ issues”.*   So I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about this …

Hopefully as we move forward, as well a continued focus on the underlying issues and realities of structural biases against women and minorities, we’ll also see a lot more discussion about what people can do. Mary’s Where to after the required reading? on Geek Feminism asks for suggestions.  I’ve got a draft response in What each of us can do; feedback welcome.

In any case I thought it would be useful to collect the links to what’s been written so far.  It’s really striking how much good stuff there’s been on blogs and Twitter (I collected some of the tweets that caught my eye in various comments in another thread**) so hopefully the list it’ll be valuable to anybody else writing about it.

First though, in a comment that the Arrington’s of the world will no doubt dismiss as pandering, I’d like to take a moment and express my admiration for the women in technology who have been doing such great work to change the ratio.  The women I know who speak out on gender equity aren’t “whiners”, as they’re so often dismissed by people who don’t want to hear what they’re saying.   They’re remarkably successful despite the huge biases against them, and somehow manage to find time for diversity work in addition to having careers, friendships, and often families.

Of course they’re frustrated when privileged guys who clearly haven’t looked at the problem in any detail deny there’s a problem, attack women and allies, and disclaim responsibility — and who can blame them?  Despite that, though, they’re a remarkably positive group … and with good reason: they’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort here over the years and it’s really starting to pay off.

So kudos and respect to you all.  I’m impressed by what you’ve accomplished and proud to know you  And thanks, too: the technology world is a much more pleasant for your efforts!

And you know, stuff like this makes a big difference. There was a very encouraging episode late last week in response to Chiara Atik’s Guest of a Guest article on TechStars New York’s ratio of 46 male mentors and only two women. When Cindy Gallop brought it up on Twitter, David Tisch of TechStars quickly reached out.  Props  all around. More of this please!

Here now the links, in rough chronological order.  There’s also excellent discussion in the comments of many of these; I’ve also included “HN” links for the meta-discussions on Hacker News on some.  I’m sure I missed some — please tweet them to me at @jdp23 or leave ’em in the comments.  Thanks as always!

jon

* see @navarrowwright, @nakisnakis, and @randomdeanna for some points on the TC Disrupt panel

** including Arrington snarking at me if you read far enough down 🙂

Comments

16 responses to “Links from the Arrington/TechCrunch women in tech kerfuffle (UPDATED)”

  1. jon Avatar
    jon

    The coverage of the Arrington kerfuffle provides some great examples of a form of structural bias against women that most people overlook. At this point about 65% of the posts I’ve linked to above are by women (31/47, I think). Here’s TechMeme’s summary of the debate:

    five guys and Shira

    16.6% women.

    In a comment on Gender, race, age and power in online discussions, chapter n back in 2008, I talked about representation issues on Techmeme:

    the majority of these blogs are generally what Susan C. Herring et. al. refer to in Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs as “filter blogs”, commenting on external events, as opposed to “personal journals” or “knowledge blogs”; TechMeme’s technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it’s unsurprising that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth.

    It’s nice to have such a clear example!

    At the risk of being pedantic,there are a couple of important lessons here:

    – The “neutral” algorithms of sites like Techmeme, memeorandum, and mediagazer are in practice heavily biased against women, and so present yet another challenge for women in general — and women in technology, politics, and media in particular

    – If you’re getting a large chunk of your news via Techmeme, you’re getting a very male view of reality

    Reply
  2. jon Avatar
    jon

    A timely article in Atlantic today: what Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera reads. Looks like I’m not the one noticing a pattern. Here’s Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch:

    alexia: So basically @gaberivera reads no women

    In the article, Gabe talks about how he uses different approaches to get caught up with the news and then stay on top of what’s happening:

    I get caught up primarily through (yes, sorry) Techmeme, which provides on a single page all the day’s essential stories across the broader tech industry…. I could write at length here about the kind of sources that appear most on Techmeme, but they’re tallied up rather neatly on Techmeme’s source leaderboard…. Aside from Techmeme, probably the most useful one for me is Hacker News, which is basically a Reddit for young people interested in building tech startups.

    Quick interjection: Hacker News is run by Y Combinator, which as Shira Ovide’s article pointed out has just 14 female founders among the 208 firms it has funded. It’s a great site, a next-generation Slashdot and Kuro5hin, but every time I’ve visited there it’s been mostly guys.

    Gabe continues:

    I rely heavily on Twitter’s excellent list feature to simultaneously follow smaller sets of users. At all times, I maintain at a glance multiple Twitter timelines corresponding to lists with names like “tech-breaking” (which includes tech news sources like @techcrunch, @alleyinsider, and @daringfireball) “tech-media-backchannel” (including writers like @joshuatopolsky, @arrington, @marshallk, @parislemon, @mathewi, and the infamous @scobleizer), moguls (@nicknotned, etc.) and “general” (including @wsj, @nytimes, @breakingnews, @pkedrosky, @felixsalmon, @mediagazer, @urlesque, @gawker, and more).

    Hmm, looks to me like Gabe might well be a member of a clique of male nodes with preferential attachment to other male nodes.

    gaberivera: techcrunch should get rid of some of its women

    PS: for analyses of the “what I read” posts by Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, please see this comment in “Guys talking to guys who talk about guys”

    Reply
  3. jon Avatar
    jon

    ad astra logo by Nathan VogelOther “neutral” algorithms also embed biases which almost always tend to favor white guys. Back in 2006 I was leading the Ad Astra project in Microsoft’s Online Services Group I this through the lens of competitive strategy, as a huge opportunity for the company. I remember one time explaining it to a senior executive who got a look of astonishment on his face and replied “Oh, so that’s why my wife has such a hard time finding things she wants with search.” Yeah really. If over half the world’s population is being underserved by current technology, why not invest more in some new approaches?

    So I decided to look at how Google and Bing do on a search for “Arrington women ( technology OR tech )”.

    When I checked yesterday Google had 44% women on the first page (4/9, plus an aggregator). Alyson Shontel’s Business Insider is #1, followed by Michael’s post, then responses by Helena on ChipChick, Laurie on Seldo, and a brief mention by Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit round out the top 5. The rest of the top 10 is me, Brad Feld, Kelsey Wallace in Bitch magazine, Techmeme, and Kay in Feministe.

    Bing has Arrington, Laurie, and me at the top the list. Go guys! Then it’s Helena, Eva Smith on Tech. Food. Life., Alyson, Laurie again, Evri, Audrey Watters, and Zimbio. 50% women.

    Google’s got Audrey on the second page, along with posts by Michelle Greer, Audrey Watters, Sasha Pulaska, and Gayle Laakmann. Bing’s second page has a lot of dupes but also has an article from Ann All I hadn’t included in the list.

    So a couple takeaways:

    – at least on this topic, Google and Bing embed noticeably less bias than Techmeme, and it’s fairly easy to get diverse views via search engines.

    – that said, search engines are skewed against women. The Herring et. al. paper I cited above has part of the explanation; Shelley Powers has more.

    Reply
  4. jon Avatar
    jon

    As the examples above show, this whole episode is great fodder for student projects and research papers in areas like media studies, journalism, communications, feminism, and science and technology studies. As well as doing more rigorous versions of the quick Techmeme, Google, and Bing analyses I’ve been making here, it’d also be fascinating to delve down to the next level of detail.

    A few questions that leap to mind for this data set:

    – Who’s linking and getting linked to and are there gender differences? Who’s getting tweeted and rewteeted?
    – Have TechCrunch’s competitors like Mashable and Read Write Web covered the story? Why or why not?
    – What percentage of the commenters and Tweeters are male, female, genderqueer, ambiguous, anonymous?
    – Where else was this discussed?

    You could imagine going a lot further, collecting the text for all the posts (and maybe even tweets and comments) and using sentiment analysis, word frequency diagrams, and link maps to look at patterns. There are all kinds of cool projects here.

    So any teachers or students looking for class projects or simple exercises — or tech wizards with visualization and analysis tools looking for good demos — please take notice!

    Reply
  5. Hiking Avatar
    Hiking

    This debate/linkbait is getting to be tiresome……

    Reply
  6. Restructure! Avatar
    Restructure!

    – Who’s linking and getting linked to and are there gender differences? Who’s getting tweeted and rewteeted?

    In 2009, there were more women than men on twitter, but men had 15% more followers than women, men were almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman, and women were 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.

    As for the “women in tech” issue in general, my general opinion is that Discussing sexism in geek communities is more important than discussing gender imbalance.

    Reply
  7. jon Avatar
    jon

    Thanks for the comment, Restructure! The HBR study looked at follower differences (here was my reaction when it came out), but I’m not aware of any work that’s looked at RTing and gender yet. Also there might be some intereting dynamics particular to this situation: my impression is that Arrington’s post was RT’ed waaaaay more than any othere post, but that there may well have been more women than men weighing in with additional tweets. Anyhow my point was just that it could be interesting.

    I remember reading your post at the time … I can see both sides here. I totally agree that it’s critical to discuss sexism. [Props to Ivan Boothe for doing so in Blame Sexism.] And I agree that abstract numerical discussions of representation risks becoming a proxy for dealing with deeper issues. On the other hand I also think it’s valuable to look at representation for several reasons … I’ll reply at greater length on your thread …

    update, September 12: here’s my (long) response

    Reply
  8. jon Avatar
    jon

    arrington on tweetmemeWhile it’s just one data point from summer 2009, Meeyoung Cha et. al.’s paper The Million Follower Fallacy has this tidbit:

    The most retweeted users were content aggregation services (Mashable, TwitterTips, TweetMeme), businessmen (Guy Kawasaki), and news sites (The New York Times, The Onion).

    Since TechCrunch is a content aggreator a lot like Mashable, it’s not surprising that Michael got so many RTs: 1824, according to Tweetmeme. Allyson Kapin’s response on Fast Company, by contrast, got 186. Which would be consistent with my impression that “Arrington’s post was RT’ed waaaaay more than any other post …”

    Reply
  9. Andy Cohen Avatar
    Andy Cohen

    C’mon Jon, Arington should get some kudos for being blunt.

    Brad Feld wrote a blog post over summer. Not his first though; I’ve seen him talk fairly often about this. http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/07/the-discussion-about-the-lack-of-women-in-tech.html (Feld is a huge VC out in Boulder, CO. He is also big with Women in Tech)

    Jezebel – Irin Carmon: She’s popular here. You might know her from the kerfuffle (thanks for the word Jon!) about the Daily Show boys’ club. Here’s her take on the debate. http://jezebel.com/5625287/what-do-where-are-the-women-shitstorms-achieve
    and http://jezebel.com/5585862/sexual-rejection-toughens-up-men-for-entrepreneurship

    MIT Review – Chizoba Nnaemeka: This one’s worth the read just for the theory. Out there but definintely clever. http://miter.mit.edu/node/188.
    It’s about men, start-ups, and getting rejected. Long, but funny/wild in some parts.

    Reply
  10. Andy Cohen Avatar
    Andy Cohen

    Forgot this one!
    Eric Ries (Lean start-up guy):
    http://bit.ly/c4xI0n

    My bad, Brad’s org is called National Center for Women & Information Technology. I called it something else. He’s Chairman.

    Reply
  11. jon Avatar
    jon

    Thanks for the links, Andy! Brad and Iris were on the list already; Eric’s post from February is excellent; I’ll add it to the references once I get around to doing them.

    I hadn’t seen Chizoba’s post before … different risk tolerances certainly are a factor, although hard to know how much they contribute. Strangely she doesn’t cite Melissa Funicane et. al.’s Gender, race, and perceived risk: The ‘white male’ effect, or other research looking at gender differences in perceived risk. And the title’s unfortunate: socialization and cultural constraints are likely to be far more important than genetics. A good read nonetheless. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
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  14. Kristendom Avatar
    Kristendom

    Here’s the post I just finished on why I think Arrington – and other TechCrunch bloggers – are way off the mark when it comes to women and technology: http://kristendomtalkstech.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-techcrunch-missed-boatand-dock.html
    Thanks for inviting me to post on here, Jon!

    Reply
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