It was a sleepy Sunday morning as I combed through tweets looking for juicy bits about what’s happening in the world of the web. A single click led me to this Fast Company article, Sexist, Sexist and More Sexist: Digg Responds to Fast Company’s Women in Web 2.0. After reading it, I clicked over to this Huffington Post article on the same subject. Two articles. One honoring women in tech, the other discussing the backlash that came with the honoring.
I asked Joel what he thought. I asked, “If you don’t commit code or know databases, does that mean you’re not really part of the tech scene?” We turned on the mic and started recording because the conversation was passionate and honest. These are the notes from the convo, but listening to it will help you understand what the notes mean. We both hope this opens up a dialog that will go much further than this blog post can or should. That by talking about it honestly and with gentleness, we can help to make positive change not just for women in tech, but for people in tech…and at the end of the day, it impacts all of us.
— Notes from the podcast. Click the link at the top of the post to listen. It’s about 25 minutes long. —
Evangelists versus Builders…Builders think Evangelists often take all the glory, saying, “I built this,” rather than crediting the team that has built the technology.
Maybe it’s just that we all want to be appreciated for our gifts.
Ways that Developers + Social Media “Experts” can coexist peacefully
Give specific credit to the developer. Name developers by names rather than taking credit for building it yourself. Know your Dev team intimately and put them first.
How would your hundreds of thousands of lines of beautiful code reach the light of day without an Evangelist to get out there and connect it with the people that matter.
It’s primarily women on the front end communicating about the product and it’s primarily men building it on the back-end.
Builders can build without Evangelists. It’s a symbiotic relationship - there’s nothing to evangelize without the builder. Ideas are cheap…building is hard.
Engineers and English Majors. The chasm widens. Cultural experiences allow you to speak to people on their terms. Talking with a Developer vs with a Humanities Expert.
How can we better appreciate each others’ gifts?
If women are primarily in front of the scenes…and men are primarily behind them…how can we view each other as equals? How can we work together on this?
Do Evangelists/Social Media types even realize there’s this tension?
Developers want to create. Do Evangelists not want to create?
Maybe Evanglists/Social Media types are not good at sharing the spotlight and the mic?
Sexism - is that the real problem here? Joel encourages us to reflect on anonymity - “the beauty and downfall of the internet.”
Does the answer come down to a comma?
—-
The articles we talk about in this podcast are not the only ones I’ve seen on this subject and our podcast on the topic is far from exhaustive, but a commenter on the Huffington Post by Allyson Kapin asks a question to which the response deserves mention.
User wagadog commented, saying, “None of these women are programmers by trade, by the way. They’re all evangelists and managers and “leaders”. When was the last time any of them checked in any code?”
One of the women recognized in the post, Rebecca Moore, responded to the comment. I think her response deserves a standing ovation. She says:
One should be careful about jumping to conclusions here. I’m one of those included by Allyson, and do happen to be a computer scientist and a “programmer by trade”. I’ve checked in hundreds of thousands of lines of code, I’ve written software for products that have made hundreds of millions of dollars, and currently have a patent pending. No big deal, lots of people have done this, including probably many of the women on this list. I’m more proud of having poked my head up out of code-cranking-mode one day and had some larger insights about digital mapping technology and how it could be applied and further developed for the significant benefit of society. I’m sure that there are many, many women more deserving than I of being on this list, but kudos to Allyson for recognizing that there is more than one way to be a technology pioneer. And I suspect that lots of the “boys” we’d laud for technology contributions today are similarly varied.
I applaud programmers for developing the technologies we evangelists and social media folks talk (and often, rave) about. I also applaud those working to bring these technologies into the light of day so that they may provide, “significant benefit” to society. We hope this conversation sparked something within you that can help illuminate your way.
–
Photo cred: Many, many thanks to Greeblemonkey for capturing and allowing me to use her image.
