trendpreneur

By all accounts, I’m one of the lucky ones.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never missed out on a career opportunity because of my gender. On the contrary, opportunities have been open to me that I would not have qualified for if I wasn’t female.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never lost out on something to an equally qualified male candidate.

To the best of my knowledge, my gender has never inhibited my ability to learn, to understand technology, to communicate or to get stuff done. Personality traits and work ethics don’t count.

Ever since leaving secondary education I’ve been extremely outnumbered by guys but that’s just how it is. The games industry is no better than the tech industry. Perhaps if I were to work in a large corporation I would notice how all the leads, managers, and higher up are male, save for a few women who learnt to play in a man’s world? I can’t comment on that; it’s well outside my own sphere of experience. Most of the companies I’ve worked for, or the parts of them that I’ve known, have been young and very merit-focused.

A comment at the gender panel on how the A-list bloggers were male, and women were maybe afraid to put themselves forward for fear of Internet defamation? My take on this is slightly different. What do the A-list bloggers blog about? Mostly, male subjects. Mostly for a male audience. There are plenty of women using the Internet today, of course, but when blogs were taking off and blogging celebrities first rose to fame, weren’t most of those people actually reading them guys? I remember several women, years ago, who were fairly prominent on the tech scene simply because they were female and had a blog.

Just look at Weblogs, Inc for some examples of this. There aren’t many (any? Don’t have a good enough connection to check now) female writers on pure testosterone sites like Joystiq and Engadget. I was certainly the only female gaming writer when I joined, but now look at it — there are tons of us! Mostly on sites that cover platforms or games we play, but that’s the way it falls out. Why would we write about stuff we don’t love? Many of the leads and the people who made Weblogs, Inc run, when I was a site lead, were female. No barrier to a meritocracy there, definitely. Perhaps the working style of remote problogging meant more women could apply in the first place, but that’s another conversation.

So I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve certainly been patronised often enough to understand there can be even fairly subtle, low-level barriers that discourage women in technology, but I’m not entirely sure what sitting around repeating the same discussions about it really achieves. Things will change, things are changing; many women working in tech startups simply don’t experience the macho corporate culture we hear complaints about. I don’t think all the dooming and glooming over the glass ceiling helps encourage people to get into technology, so in a way the meta-discussions around women in tech even work against their own goals!

Just treat people as they are, chromosomes notwithstanding, and maybe we can stop segregating off our community and simply get on with being just that — a community.