I’m taking my own advice, and stepping up to the mic for a presentation at the Vancouver League of Drupallers’ monthly meetup. I’ll be speaking about gender and technology, and more specifically about how web designers and developers can work at being more inclusive in their work. The talk starts at 6:30 pm on Thursday, November 29th. More details here.
I’m excited to be able to bring several facets of my work and life to this presentation — my business expertise, my academic background (I dropped out of grad school halfway through a Master’s in Gender Studies & English Lit), and my passion for making websites more useful. If I do my job well, it should encourage lively and stimulating discussion.
I realize this is a geekier topic than we usually blog about, but if anyone who reads this decides to show up, please introduce yourselves afterward. I’d love to meet some of you!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jens F. Andersen // Nov 30, 2007 at 7:46 am
Some feedback to your presentation as seen here (http://www.raincitystudios.com/thestandard/vancouver-league-of-drupalers-november-2007):
* Women’s incomes are lower
Not when corrected for work hours and education. In fact NYT recently published an article showing that women in some sectors earn more than men because they are better educated. Thus, this is not a discrimination issue. Pay reflects merit — NOT gender.
* Domestic responsibilities are higher e.g. children, Mom and Dad
Perhaps this is true, but what is your point. You want State intervention as they have in Spain?
Men and women are adults and free to negotiate their own division of work inside and outside the house.
* popular perception in Western countries is that sexes are equal but tech sector has a long way to go in numbers
Perhaps because you are conflating two issues. Equality before the law and equal distribution. The first we have, but the second we do not. Because men and women have different inclinations, interests and so ono — ergo if you let them decide for themselves what sectors to work with they will not distribute themselves symmetrically. You state yourself in a later issue that women are more social than men — so they will more likely want to worm in more social sectors.
In the West women and men are equal in their rights, but different.
* Q: 2/3 of all facebook users are women. What did Facebook do right? A: women are even more social then men, being able to keep up with people since women are the connectors and social hubs in the family
Exactly! See above
Apart from this I agree with the rest of the presentation.
Kind Regards
JFA
2 Lauren Bacon // Dec 11, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Hi, Jens.
First off, I apologize for the delay in responding; your comment was lost in the deluge of spam comments we get on this site and I didn’t see it until a full week after you’d posted it.
I’m unclear on whether you attended my talk, or if you simply read Roland’s point-form notes. If it was the latter, obviously a great deal of context gets lost in translation, so perhaps that’s causing some confusion.
Either way, it sounds to me like you agree with my assertions, but that you are under the impression I was attributing these various facts (about income levels, domestic responsibilities, etc.) to explicit, sex-based discrimination. This is not the case; in fact, I was careful not to enter into a discussion of cause, as I believe that’s a separate (and very complex) conversation. Rather, I encouraged those present to simply think about women’s realities as they differ from men’s, and take those realities into account when designing for a gender-diverse audience.
You make several comments I’d like to debate specifically…
1) “Not when corrected for work hours and education. In fact NYT recently published an article showing that women in some sectors earn more than men because they are better educated. Thus, this is not a discrimination issue. Pay reflects merit — NOT gender.”
I’d say it’s a logical fallacy to suggest that because some sectors show no evidence of gender discrimination (at least as reflected in pay scales), that this holds true for every sector.
In any case, my point at the talk was not to debate the whys of women’s lower incomes, but rather to state the bare facts and reflect on the various implications that lower incomes have on women’s lives. More women than men live below the poverty line; what effects might that have on their access to technology, for example?
2) “Perhaps this is true, but what is your point. You want State intervention as they have in Spain?”
Certainly not. I never suggested anything of the sort.
“Men and women are adults and free to negotiate their own division of work inside and outside the house.”
That is definitely true, but are you willing to concede that our choices (and methods of negotiation) are influenced by cultural norms? There are still a lot of straight couples in the world who divide the domestic labour along old-fashioned lines: the woman does the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, and the man mows the lawn and does the home repairs. Do you believe this is entirely due to personal preference?
3) “Perhaps because you are conflating two issues. Equality before the law and equal distribution.”
I beg to differ. I never asserted that 50/50 gender parity is the only measure of equality. That being said, the proportion of women in the IT sector is truly out of whack — only 26% of the IT workforce is female — and I am curious as to why that is. I don’t think it’s enough to simply assume it’s a matter of personal preference. Do you have any data to support your belief that women “want to work in more social sectors”?
I’d love to see more research done in this area. In my reading, I found the most useful statistics at The National Institute for Women & Information Technology, though there a few other organizations doing research in this area (e.g. The Anita Borg Institute).
And regardless of your views on *why* women comprise such a minority of workers in IT, my point here was that in any sector where there is a significant gender imbalance, it is not only worthwhile to question why we’re seeing such a gender skew in terms of employment, but moreover, that we must be diligent in examining our own blind spots with regard to our audience. When we are designing for an audience whose demographics differ from our own, how do we ensure that we are not carrying forward our own biases in terms of the websites we create? This is not only a gender issue, but is relevant to discussions of race, class, age, ability, sexual preference — all sorts of cultural and other divisions that play out in terms of the user experience. I think it’s a crucial issue for designers and developers to examine as we attempt to build websites that are truly accessible — and meaningful — to all.
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