Not Exactly a Head Count

Chris,

For years, in our ezine, personal correspondence, and little “sphere of influence” Don and I have made it a point to encourage girls and women to discard any outdated notions of chauvinism and make their own way in the technical world.   In a way, this has made us a little ultra-sensitive to any gender-bias we may detect in our web surfing.

In Lockergnome we have never noticed any hint of discrimintion against women in tech.   In fact the opposite is true.   When other organisations and publications had no female contributors to their sites, you did.   As far as we are concerned you are interested in people and the contributions they have to make.   Insofar as we can see you have made a concerted effort to encourage women and to influence others to do the same.   Don says it would be too cool if you could get Cynthia Lanius to attend Gnomedex.

If you’re getting some flack about bias relative to Gnomedex, your “Women at Tech Conferences” piece should clear up any misconceptions.   After that, you’ll just have to let people believe what they wish, they will anyway.   If you’ll look at Kottke’s List, you’ll see that his expectations may be unreasonable.   Some of the conferences that he complains about had a higher percentage of women speakers than that of their audience or of women in tech in general.   Quotas are intrinsically unfair anyway, it’s just too easy to lose sight of the objective, which is that of merit.   Something about this site makes me nervous.   It’s as though the only people who count are female.   I can’t get over the mental image of this fellow counting boobs and dividing by two.

Lisa Miller