A lot of pixels have been spilled on the topic of gender in blogging. Lot's of people have weighed in. Here is a very small sampling.
- Rebecca Blood weighs in
- Shelley Powers, You are Hurting Us
- Jeff Jarvis, Blogging white male
- Stephen Levy, Blogging Beyond the Men's Club
- Dave P., "The problem with Blogrolls"
"The truth is we are all outsiders. Our secret fears are real and revealed. We are each random points, outliers, misfits, rejects and strangers. We are alone. We are all different. Yet we are all the same."
Julie Leung,The Outsider: why high school never ends
This speaks to the heart of the matter. We are all outsiders, stuck in our own local minima, unwilling or unable to see past our part of the curve and discover how much we resemble the rest of the sample.
While sympathetic to any person or group who is or has been historically downtrodden, I hate to listen to whining about how one group is more downtrodden than another. This is especially true when the discussion is dominated by digerati who are better off than 98% of the world's population. Please folks, it's not a contest. (Of course, I've read enough about gender politics to know that my attitude is easily written off as "that's what the powerful always say." That is an argument that is as useful as proclaiming that history is always written by the winners, so all history is basically wrong.)
I would like to mention that I would love to see tech conferences where gender is more equally represented. I don't know how to fix that as I don't send people to conferences, nor do I arrange for the speakers. Everyone should have an equal length line when they are waiting for the bathroom.
My blogroll is staying, mainly because it's a convenient way for me to be able to find out what my online friends are saying. I'll also continue my practice of linking to any authentic voice that speak to me irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, political persuasion or any other self-imposed or other-imposed group identification.
