Posts Tagged women
Women and the backchannel responses
I wouldn’t normally write a blog post in response to my own post, however I’ve had such a lot of comments that I really wanted to properly respond.
Firstly, I did not expect this to touch the nerve it so obviously has with so many people. I wanted to offer my support to the women who had been treated like this, ensure this behaviour does not go uncommented on and also start the discussion in terms of how we can stop this kind of thing happening. I didn’t want it to take the shine off what was an excellent day and achievement for Boagworld, and I apologise if that has happened.
I’m going to pick up on a number of the themes that came through in the comments yesterday. I’ve linked directly to some comments just to save people new to the discussion reading through all of them but generally the same points were made by a number of people, either here, on other blogs or on Twitter.
“We should just ignore this behaviour”
Several commenters suggested that we should just ignore these people and they would go away. I would agree that in many cases ignoring trolls and nasty comments is the way to go. During the show in fact the comments were ignored for the most part, we certainly were not giving air time to these people by detracting from the conversations to respond to it. A backchannel for a conference or chat on a live stream however is different to a normal message board setting. These comments were very visible to people participating and watching, not bringing this subject up in some way would really have meant accepting that this behaviour was ok and that boys being boys is perfectly appropriate in a professional setting.
I do not need to be told to “avoid schoolboy chatrooms“. I was dealing with trolls on usenet when many of the people commenting on Friday were still in primary school, so I have a thick enough skin to not be personally hurt by this stuff. What I am concerned about is the message it gives to other women, particularly young women, who want to work in the industry.
“These aren’t people from our community”
The Boagworld community is a really friendly place. I’m not a participant but have read many threads there and the attitude there always seems incredibly friendly, supportive and helpful towards newcomers – even if they are asking the same questions everyone else has asked a million times before. However the 200th podcast attracted an audience from the wider web community. Some of the nasty comments may well have been from kids who had just discovered a lively stream on Ustream, however some of those commenters quite obviously knew of the people they were making comments about, outside of the podcast, which makes me believe that at least some of those posting are people who work in some way in this industry. In addition, the Boagworld chat was not a unique event. The same attitude has been taken towards women on conference backchannels, by people attending a conference, presumably not 15 year old boys.
“Preventing anonymity is not the answer”
Some commenters were concerned that preventing people from being anonymous just creates another problem. In this setting I disagree. Being able to be anonymous is one of the web’s strengths. There are many reasons and places where hiding behind a nickname is appropriate and allows people to ask questions and get support on sensitive subjects, or speak up when they would be in danger if their identity was known. However, if you are contributing in a professional setting at a web design conference or in a chat, then you should be very happy to be identified and stand behind your words. My suggestion of Facebook Connect was really just a throwaway suggestion – I’m sure we can create better solutions – or offer a range of ways to confirm someone’s identity. I’d love to see more discussion on this.
“Women need to take responsibility as well and not act flirty or suggestively”
I have some difficulties with this point of view, and I don’t think that Jen in her comment meant any of the women on the show. If a woman is overtly flirting and then complaining about attention, well then she probably needs to stop doing the former before she can complain about the latter. However that was not the situation on Friday. The fact that some women, and men, behave in a provocative way does not give anyone a free pass to treat all women like that. If we start down this line then, once again, we are telling people they have to conform to be accepted, that as long as they look dowdy and unattractive we will believe they have a brain. Well, hooray for computer engineer Barbie, is all I can say to that!
“This should have been addressed during the show”
Kimberly makes a very valid point that perhaps it would have been better for this to have been addressed during the show. It’s difficult, obviously the show had a schedule to get all of the participants in and able to do their segment. There were people coming on via Skype from different timezones who had set apart part of their day to come on the show. A discussion about these issues could well have totally derailed the schedule and also taken the whole show to somewhere far less fun and positive.
That said, I think that anyone planning on having any kind of backchannel does need to consider, in the light of this and other situations, how they will deal with issues like this if they arise. Both from a technical point of view – being able to identify people, ban effectively and so on, and from the point of view of how it is dealt with by presenters and those running the channel in terms of what they say in reaction.
“This is just jealousy”
I have seen suggestions that the comments – particularly those expressing the opinion that someone is only involved because they are attractive – come from jealousy; from the attitude of, “why is SHE there and not me? It must be because she is pretty.”
Sarah has addressed this issue head on in her own post, which is worth a read. The issue of jealousy and bitterness directed towards people who are well known in this industry is a whole other subject, and one I might address here another time. What I would say though, is that in general, the “names” in web design and development are some of the nicest and most open people you could ever hope to meet. Most people you hear of regularly, you hear of because of the huge amount of time and energy they put into their work and in giving away freely their talents and knowledge. Most of us only get to write books and speak at conferences because we spent years giving stuff away for free on our blogs, and it got us noticed.
If you are doing cool stuff tell people about it, write about it, find small events that ask for speakers and talk about it. Find high profile people who are involved in that area on Twitter and drop them an @reply. If what you are doing is good, you’ll be amazed how quickly word spreads. Get yourself involved in discussion forums, help people out, show them you are an expert, and you can get the sort of attention you want. That is the beauty of this community, give something and you will get stuff back. Sit in a corner and whine and you’ll be ignored.
What happened on Friday was not a one off, it was simply a very overt example of this kind of behaviour. Writing it off as a non-issue, and blaming a few bored kids makes light of the fact that this type of thing happens all the time. No-one is suggesting you cannot criticise a person’s work – far from it. However, you criticise their work, you present an argument against their viewpoint, you do not make personal remarks that have absolutely nothing to do with whether they do good work or have a valid point of view.
Women and the backchannel
Yesterday Drew and I were fortunate enough to be invited down to take part in the 12 hour marathon that was the live recording of the 200th Boagworld podcast. It was a brilliant day, great people, a lovely friendly atmosphere down at The Barn, and lots of interesting people coming on the show and talking about a wide range of subjects. Many people on Twitter and in the chatroom on Ustream commented on how the day was just like a free web conference, and it really was a good day. I believe that the full 12 hours was recorded and will be released by Boagworld in the half hour segments in the weeks to come.
For those who weren’t following along, at The Barn was an impressive set up of mics and webcams so the whole show could be streamed live as video, in addition to the audio recording. The show was going out live using Ustream, which also has a chatroom displayed under the video so that the room can join in with the show – something that seemed like a great idea as Boagworld is so much about the community around it. There were hundreds of people watching and a good number commenting given the speed the chat would scroll up off the screen.
Early in the day the chat was very positive. A few moans whenever any technical glitch happened, but generally people were enjoying being part of the show. It was quite difficult in the “studio” to really respond to the chat questions because there were so many people commenting and they would scroll off our screen very quickly. There was a really funny moment at the beginning of our section on eCommerce where somehow the camera that was pointing at me was playing a mooing jingle. We couldn’t hear this in the room at all, so people in the chatroom are complaining about this mooing, pointing out that it was in fact me that was mooing, and we were none the wiser as to what was going on.
Drew and I took a break for lunch as Jeremy Keith and Anna Debenham showed up to do a segment, and then came back to chat a bit about the Joel Test. That was our main segments done but as we weren’t on a deadline to get back we hung around to chip in on various things and generally just to enjoy the atmosphere at The Barn.
I’d noticed the odd stupid comment on the chat earlier in the day, I’m pretty thickskinned about personal comments, and so chose to ignore them. However from this point in things started to get really quite unpleasant. During the afternoon Relly Annett-Baker, Sarah Parmenter and Inayaili de León were all doing segments, on copywriting, iPhone design and CSS3 respectively. All three are established professionals in their different fields, with lots to offer, they did excellent segments on the show. Ah yes, and they happen to be women. As Relly later said on Twitter:
I’m not going to repeat any of the things that were said in the chatroom here, but there were a number of comments that basically suggested that the only reason certain women were invited to be on the show was because of the way they looked, there were comments more suited to an AOL chatroom with regard to what people may or may not be wearing. If the room didn’t like what a male contributor was talking about the comments would be that it was boring or arguing against their point of view, for the women there was this idea that they were only there due to their physical appearance.
We, as a community, need to stamp out this attitude whenever we see it.
I believe that women in any industry should be there due to their own merit, and the same for men who wish to follow a traditionally female career path. That is what feminism has given us, equality. We should stand or fall on the contributions that we bring to the industry and as web designers, developers, scientists, systems administrators etc. our physical appearance is not part of the package.
What frequently happens in traditionally male industries is that women who want to be part of that dress down, become like “one of the lads”. What message does that send out to young women who are interested in careers in IT? Are we telling young women who are interested in looking good, in clothes and shoes and taking care of their appearance, that if they want to succeed in web development they will need to make sure they don’t look too good, as otherwise they will not be taken seriously? This is potentially hugely damaging to the cause of getting young women to consider our industry as a career path, and once they are here to get them to consider speaking at conferences, something which we discuss again and again.
The chatroom on the Boagworld show was essentially a backchannel, and similar issues have happened in conference backchannels in recent months, I believe this is something that needs to be addressed in two ways. Firstly, the community need to be ready to stamp on this kind of behaviour as soon as it is seen. If you are in a channel that starts to go down this line make sure you are not contributing to it, and speak up against it. Can you help to turn the general mood to something more positive? Or offer constructive criticism? I’m certainly not suggesting we shouldn’t be able to disagree with a female speaker! Quite the opposite, we should be dealing with everyone in exactly the same way, I’m not a fan of positive discrimination either.
Secondly I think there are technical solutions to some of this. If you have a live chat or backchannel, people should not be able to post anonymously, or behind nicknames that do not link back to a real person. As a thought perhaps we could have a system where everyone has to sign in with Facebook Connect? Facebook is about real names, real people. Would yesterday’s commenters have been happy for their comments to go out next to their photo, real name and the company they work for? In a conference situation the organisers usually have all those details, so a system can be created that ensured that comments only go out on a live channel that are identified to individuals. There are some people who will quite happily stand behind unpleasant comments but I would suggest they are far fewer than those who switch personalities when they can hide behind an anonymous nickname.
If we are serious about encouraging young women into our industry then we need the women already in the industry to be visible, and for them to be seen as normal. If the female role models are only of a certain type (the stereotypically geeky type for example) then a young woman would be justified in thinking that you need to be like that to be accepted. This is then reinforced by the sort of comments we saw yesterday when young women who do not fit that stereotype were speaking. As a community we need to ensure this behaviour is called out as wrong, every time we see it.
