One of the blog drafts I most regret not writing was one about women in technology and startups. With each article I found coming through Snackr or Twitter, I would save in the draft, hoping to come back and process it later. That never happened.
The issues of gender in this domain clearly haven’t been solved in the interim, so instead of synthesis and analysis, you get a list of topical links (a couple of which are more recent than 2008):
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Advice to men: “Learn to shut up and listen.”
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The most fascinating and perhaps most important of the links I had curated was reference to Corinna Bath’s warning that the semantic web may be gendered. Like the first phone books that listed the names of husbands in each households, the architects of such curations carry their biases into the rules the machines will use to create this knowledge. It also reflects cultural biases that have persisted over the life of digital artifacts, meaning the machines will reflect gender biases in the content they find, “learning” misinformation.
Coverage of reports like this one from 2005 and this one from 2007 in some key demographics are both reflective of imbalances of adoption and over-generalizing in documenting bias. This is what machines see, too.
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Dennis Howlett conducted a series of interviews with women in leadership, motivated by a McKinsey report on advancement of women. This was two years before Clay Shirky’s rant about women not self-promoting themselves enough.
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Among top tech blogs, few of the writers are women, but that doesn’t mean women don’t write and contribute heavily to the tech blogosphere. Orli Yakuel compiled a list of top technology blogs written by women.
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The apparent closing of the gender gap is based on changes in work force, not pay—More qualified women are in higher positions demanding higher pay, but that doesn’t reflect equity with their male peers. This is problematic because it helps propagate the myth that gender issues have been resolved.
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Most organizations have to battle the problem of siloing, where small groups within the larger organization become isolated. Women are most likely to participate in cross-group communication, which is just one of the reasons gender inclusion is vital to the long-term success.
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Across all genders, there is a tendency for people to counteract traditional gender stereotypes when trying to impress someone during a negotiation:
Men’s strategy of behaving in a more conciliatory fashion apparently succeeded in producing a positive impression in the counterpart’s eyes. However, the women’s strategy of behaving more assertively failed to create a more positive impression. Instead, women who behaved more assertively, were judged more negatively.
Is that one of the reasons there are still few women corporate leaders in Silicon Valley?
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Women are pretty good at science
Yet, academics are in bad shape, particularly in science, when it comes to creating female leaders. Too few women scientists achieve leadership positions, due largely to gender roles and chasing women away from science“>non-supportive culture. Just last fall, the Journal of Applied Psychology claimed to show a gender bias existed in letters of recommendation for faculty hires (in psychology).
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The establishment of a dominant demographic for brands and marketing may also lead to the elimination of gender as a marketing focus.
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A few organized efforts to support and promote women include: Girls In Tech, the BlogHer network, and WITI (Women in Technology International).
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This just in: Women aren’t men.