Walking around town yesterday, talking with a friend and fellow girl-geek, the subject of armpit hair came up. “It’s like abortion,” my friend says, “people are either violently for or against.” We are both decidedly “for” it.
I was a late bloomer, which is just a friendly way of saying ’socially inept,’ all through school. My peers seemed to “understand” boys before me. They flirted voraciously on our long bus trips with the chorus or band to Florida or Virginia. Endless games of Suck and Blow went down in the back of the bus. Nobody ever went out of their way to drop the credit card to kiss me. So, I kept my head in the books. And it may have all turned out for the best.
The Bling
Women in the tech sector are gaining in number. But they are still woefully behind their male peers. A recent survey found that, “56% of women think there is a career glass ceiling for women in the IT industry, with the most senior jobs off limits.” I think this is only one tiny piece of the puzzle where women are concerned. I’m not as interested in moving up a corporate ladder (and making the big bucks), personally, as I am in cultivating meaningful relationships and developing my skill sets and the skill sets of those around me. And when it comes to money, women are often willing to take less, as this review of Why Men Earn More by Warren Farrell shows. The premise is that, “Men make decisions that result in their making more money. On the other hand, women make decisions that earn them better lives (e.g., more family and friend time).”
The Numbers
NCWIT reports that women held 26 per cent of the positions in IT-related occupations in 2006 in the US. 74 per cent were held by men, then, if my math is correct. Yet, mysteriously, when I’m at tech events, I usually see fewer than one woman in four people. At Startup Weekend in Boulder, Colorado, I remember five women participants out of the seventy or so folks represented. One woman at each of the following tables: PR/Marketing, Sys Admin, Design and CSS/HTML. One woman may have been involved in some light programming, but for the most part, in any event in which I’ve participated, women tend to stick to the design end of things (the arty/nurturing, softer side of tech?). Why might this be? Theories abound, but I think it’s healthy to continue to ask the question and probe for more satisfying answers.
Entre-Manureship
I became an entrepreneur the day I started my first “real” job. I was twenty-one, had just arrived in Japan and was teaching English in central Tokyo. The lack of organization, leadership and passion in the teachers and students made me realize I had to have all of those elements to thrive in a work environment. Rather than try to change that system, I decided to step out of it altogether. Before my twenty-third birthday I had launched my first business and started accepting payment on the terms set out by my business. I have not looked back once since becoming an entrepreneur. It is a way of being, a mind-set, as much as it is a lifestyle. I have made mistakes, but no mistake would have been greater than continuing to make a man richer by doing work for him. That first company I worked for is now bankrupt, its 450,000 students are searching for new teachers.
But making a living as an entrepreneur really is about turning shit into food. You have to take what you’ve got, understanding that from week to week the tide could turn, and you have to practice acceptance on every level. I have been flush with cash at times over the past three years, but only on rare occasion. Nearly every dollar my businesses (a yoga studio, a design firm, a podcast venture and four startups spawned from Startup Weekend) earn is recycled back into the business. Or spent on groceries. I don’t have car payments, house payments or debt. But that also means that I live my life in a state of groundlessness that I realize a lot of my peers (and especially those that are women) are unwilling to live with or cultivate.
This is about taking healthy risks. Farrell would say that women would take a job that pays less but that has less risk (childcare worker vs. police officer), in order to cultivate a family and have stability. Perhaps the same applies to women in entrepreneurship and tech. I speak broadly when I use the word “entrepreneurship” as I see each person as a Sole Proprietor, able to break out and do their own thing at any moment if they so choose.
XXXSEXXXYTECHWOMENXXX
We’ve got another tiny little thing to contend with, those of us that are doing the tech and/or entrepreneurship thing. A guy friend of mine showed me Dig a Tech Girl (which I read, accidentally as Diga-Tech Girl and was like, “ah! cool!” Little did I know…). It’s this little ranking site for “hot women” in the tech sector. The top 5 tags are “cute, cutie, hot, presenter and smart.”
Why perpetuate the imbalance? Why rank women in tech based on their looks rather than on what they do?
What Do We Want?
Well, ok, if I figure out the answer to that question, I’ll shoot you an email. David Cohen in his post “How to Get the Girl” says, ‘It hadn’t occurred to me that perhaps women simply have differing intentions from men, perhaps in many cases being more likely to bootstrap, grow slowly, and not seek total world domination in quite the same fashion as men seem to do.” He’s right on and I wonder why we don’t realize this about each other.
Some of my motivations, beyond the ones I mentioned above are becoming self-sufficient, having enough to create a scholarship for Motherless Daughters like myself (and perhaps this will be specific to the tech industry), financial independence and self-knowledge. I don’t want to change the world, I want to know it better. I don’t want to dominate the world, I want to be a good person. In all honesty, I already feel I’m doing enough. I just want to keep doing it. And do it better everyday.
Back to the armpit hair. Why is it ok for men to have armpit hair and women not? Why don’t men have to shave their leg hair, too, while we’re at it? It’s a tiny rebellion on my part that may bore me eventually. As one of my guy friends said, “The days of 70’s hirsuteness was you know, 30 years ago, Gwen.” But, honestly, I am enjoying the conversation around this. It’s like I’m back in school again, being socially awkward and scaring off the boys.
“I grow it like a terrarium, keeping it fresh and well-cultivated,” I explained to my friend as we crossed the street together. She began to laugh. We talked about how we want gender neutrality in tech as much as we want net neutrality, hugged, and went home to prepare food for the potlucks we’re attending this week.
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I’ll be exploring each of these topics (err, minus the armpit hair) in more depth over the coming months, once I’m back in Boulder from January 2. If you have thoughts, links, or book recommendations, please send them on. If you’re a woman in the tech industry that would like to engage in a dialog about any of this, please email me.
