apathy stew

Monday, June 15, 2009

Franklin's new best friend, a quarter

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

An otherwise amazing two-day conference of technological innovation was soured by an ill-timed remark.

During last weekend’s Barcamp NYC4, I attended an interesting session on how to bypass the cable networks and use your computer as both a digital TV tuner and a DVR. There was a poetic irony in the session presented by an employee of Microsoft—how to avoid corporate by using corporate—and it was, in many ways, a 30 minute plug for Windows Media Center. It was useful and should have been a completely innocuous product-driven presentation. When he was all finished, the presenter passed the floor to one of the participants to discuss his startup—an open-source cross-platform media center software application. I’ve been a long time supporter of his company and have recommended it to many of my non-tech friends who are looking for a sleek alternative to cable. I was looking forward to what he had to say.

He introduced himself by smiling and remarking,

“Well, that was a little more technical than any of us were expecting. I know you lost the girls at hello.”

There was a moment of stunned silence as his meaning registered across the room. “Heyyyy---” I cried out in offense. Yet he offered no apology and continued with his product demo as if nothing unusual had happened. The room, filled with men and women all wearing identical red Barcamp NYC t-shirts, said nothing. At the end of the session, the women in the room gathered to share our collective outrage over the unsavory remark.

A man in the room overhears and tries to commiserate.

Can you believe that guy, he asks.

No! What a ridiculous statement to make. We’re here because we work in tech, I reply.

It was kind of funny, he comments.

How was that funny, another girl asks.

Oh, you know, the man tries to explain. That guys like that exist.

Nope, really nothing funny about it, a third girl adds, as she turns to us and explains, that’s why we’re trying to get a girls’ tech empowerment group together. Just a little something through which we can connect so that we’re not all alone at these industry events.

The man asks how we would feel if he started a tech group and only let men join.

That was all of history, I retort.

The man rolls his eyes.

I get his argument. We say we want to be treated as equals but then we identify ourselves through self-selected exclusion. You can’t have both, he is thinking.

And to those men—and women—who make that argument that you can’t single yourself out and expect to be treated equally, I will agree… when and only when we are paid equally, we are promoted equally and we are represented equally. When we can go to a tech conference and not have our intelligence reduced to a frailty with a single statement, as if—unlike every man in the room—we were unable to comprehend the concept of a DVI cable and a couple of codecs.

On a thematically-related note, @breakingnews had a Twitter update last night about a girl whose rape was streamed live over the internet. And that’s when my percolating fury started to steam. Yes, we’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet.

Not even close.