the underlying problem with Women’s rights and equality
So I got asked this morning how I feel about BlogHerCon. I’ve spent the better part of the day thinking about this, as I dislike being termed a traitor to my gender because I feel like an equal in almost every crowd I’ve ever been in, assuming it was my crowd.
That sentence requires an explanation, I’m sure. If its my crowd, of course I feel like an equal. It’s all about how my crowd is defined. I’ve been an irc geek, I’ve been a sorority chick, I’ve been a sysadmin, I gave up being a web designer when java came out, because the one thing I know for a fact I can’t handle is anything resembling coding or scripting. For those questioning that statement, I was doing web design at UIUC for the Calculus & Mathematic program back before Yahoo existed as a company and Google was a drop in someone’s beer. After a year and a half as an internal sysadmin at Sun, I went on to help build, run, grow, shrink, budget and rearchitect Exodus’ global network for just short of 6 years, through far too many mergers. So what’s my crowd? Ten years ago, it was web design, system administration, NeXTs, students and ACM. Today, I keep my hand in at Unix, mostly because no former sysadmin trusts anyone else to run their stuff, and just to keep my hand in, and I’m still a senior network engineer on a global network, although the Exodus backbone is long gone.
So what’s my crowd? I would say anything technical, except programming. Even if I don’t know what’s going on, I’ve never learned more in my life than sitting over dinner with folks discussing what’s going on in life. Everything I learned about blogging in the first six months, I certainly learned from someone close to me. There’s far too much technical info out there to read everything that’s interesting. I don’t claim to be an expert in most things. I know what I know, and I hold my own, and I’ve never been afraid to admit what I don’t know.
Now, I’ll point out the little statement mentioned only once in what I am before proceeding, mostly in self defense. I’ve been a sorority girl. When I first joined ACM at UIUC, all of the guys said “oh, this is going to be fun.” There were 4 other women in ACM at the time, and they never got along. They’d spend time around each other on the basis women’s solidarity, but at least according to the guys, any second you could wait for cat fight extrordinaire.
That never happened with me. I was a far cry from being best buddies with all of them, but then again, I was a far cry from being best buddies with 90% of ACM. There are too many people in the world to get along with everyone. At least one of them I did become good friends with, and that was the one closest in age to myself. This is somehwat off the point, but its still near the mark. It’s relevant because when it boils down to it, I’m not a traitor to my gender. I know first hand and better than most what it is to have a group of women closer to you than any family could ever be. Ten years later, although one would never see it looking at me most days, I am still a sorority girl. I understand sisterhood.
That’s something different. That was a group formed solely around being female. That was the point, end of story.
This shouldn’t be. First and foremost, what all of these women’s groups are demanding is one thing: equality. At least, the ones that would ever have any hope of suceeding. Too often, and not something I want to go into are the groups based on gender, race, religion, whatever demanding special treatment for past injustice. That’s yet another separate issue, and I’m not bringing it up again in this post.
There are a couple of lessons that I learned a while ago about equality. Most simply, no one ever gives you equality. Equality is something you have to take, and you have to earn. A blog that consists of nothing other than what your children did today, and what color nailpolish goes best with 12012s is of interest to a very small set of people. On a quirky day, I might go look up what kind of nailpolish goes best with my routers, but that’s not what I’m interested in when I’m thinking about discussing networking(the physical kind, not social) with others. If your blog has two posts about cisco, and 300 about your nail polish, what your boyfriend did yesterday, and what you had for dinner, it’s only going to be read by people that care about those things.
The next lesson after that, is that there are no equals. Male, female, green, blue, red, purple, there is no other person out there just like me. There are similar people. There are people I’m equivalent to in terms of skills. There is no single person out there that I am exactly equal to. What most people say when they ask for equality, is that they want to be treated equivalently, at least if they have thought about the issue. The want the same chances, the same mistakes, the same hopes, the same dreams. I’m lucky, apparently, in that I’ve had that. The main reason I’ve had that for most of my life, if you believe some of those around me, is that I’ve never let it be any other way. When I was consulting, if I met a client who underestimated me because they had a little blonde in a miniskirt across the table, it worked out in my favor. In a way, that’s reverse discrimination, but most people were smart enough to learn after one encounter that that behaviour gets exactly no where with me, other than egg on the person in question’s face.
What this all boils down to is the same as the reason why the fact that I’ve felt compelled to speak out on this topic lately leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For one of the first times in my life, I’ve forced to daily have my gender rubbed in my face. Rather than sitting down at the computer and thinking about the things that I do, and how I compare, I have to stare around me at people trying to form divisive groups. As with affirmative action, what this whole Women’s Conference idea boils down to is one thing. I should be there because I’m a female. As I’ve said previously in a comment on another blog, I’d rather be down the street playing with the big boys.
The topic in question at that time was NANOG and the Women in Networking group. I had a great deal of respect for the person who started it, even if I do feel that it was misguided. The main problem was, they wanted to go off and have dinner and talk about women’s issues, and I wanted to be there, at NANOG, at the event I was paying to be at, having the discussions I needed to be having about peering, or Cisco wierdness, or what GlobalCenter did to the routing tables this week. There are women who don’t have the confidence to go out and play with the grownups at these things, and I can understand them wanting some support. Guess what, ladies, there are at least as many men down the street wishing they could get in the door. Do you know why they’ll get there first? They stepped up and knocked, rather than running off to complain about how unfair it is.
That fact right there is why conferences by women, for women, whether or not they exclude men, will never solve the problem. Going someplace, and being recognized by a group of other women, and even some of the men who feel they need to speak out for us, as if we can’t stand up for ourselves, doesn’t actually address the problem. If you want to play with the big boys, go ACT like a big boy.
For me, its a very simple case. I don’t need to go to a Women in Networking event. Why not? Because I’m a network engineer. Whether I’m running fiber in a miniskirt on top of a six-foot ladder (it’s happened) or literally changing the face of the internet sitting in front of my computer in boxers and the dirtiest t-shirt you can find is irrelevant. I don’t need to say I’m a female network engineer, except in very specific cases, because that doesn’t matter. I’m a network engineer, and it stops right there. Adding another label just demeans the title, and adds something to it that should, and in my life does, have no bearing on what I do. My foot is in that door, because I knocked, and because I stepped up, and because I’m competent.
Tags: gendergeekiness, feminism, genderbias, perception, bloghercon
May 1st, 2005 at 8:30 am
I’ve done my best to stay out of the whole women thing. Like you, I don’t consider myself a female anything.
When I switched my major from engineering to film in the late seventies, I was confronted with a group of “feminist” filmmakers who believed that audiences should put up with their out of focus work because the patriarchy has taught us that we can’t do anything technical, so we can’t.
My response? “Shut up and learn how to focus the damned camera!” They were doing more to hurt their cause than help it.
I’m not saying that it’s the same thing, because many of the women who are voicing problems today do great work. It’s just that I’ve personally had better success being whatever I want to be as a goal in itself, without considering my gender.
May 1st, 2005 at 9:41 am
Definately agree, but I’m starting to wonder if we aren’t hurting ourselves and those around us. If more competent women stood up and said “I’m here, not because I’m a woman, not in spite of being a woman, but because I AM here”, those screaming for a positive role-model might realize its not as bad as it seems.
May 1st, 2005 at 10:44 am
I’ll say the same thing I always say when someone implies success in any field is merely a matter of talent or desire.
I’ve never observed any field where the cream rises to the top (male or female) simply by virtue of talent or even wanting it bad enough.
There is always luck, timing, networking, relationships etc. This was true in the creative fields I used to pursue, it’s true in high tech, and it’s true in blogging too. It’s true for men and women.
BlogHer really has two goals: to educate (both technical skills and best practices-no “let us be less” philosophy here, thank you) and to foster community that creates a network.
That latter part may bother some because, men included or no, it is *focused* on women connecting to and supporting other women as an overt, stated goal…but I see it as extremely pragmatic.
Every job, gig, or opportunity I ever had came through someone I knew (sometimes removed by a degree, but still.) I’m looking to expand that circle.
Maybe when we post the official agenda later tonight you’ll see there’s no victimhood or kumbayah there.
May 1st, 2005 at 11:00 am
Whether or not its a case of victimhood, kumbayah, women’s power, or feminazi’s it boils down to the same thing. Fostering technology and skills is a great thing in any field. Fostering divisiveness is not beneficial on any grounds, and when you draw a line in the sand, or in words borrowed from someone else, put people in a box, you foster divisiveness.
By focusing on one segment, it brings up two questions in everything I’ve ever seen: Why can’t these people play with everyone else? and Why do they think they’re different?
In some sense, I suppose that boils down to the same thing really.
Building networks is a great thing, and one that needs to be fostered and most definately shouldn’t be overlooked. Creating a silo’d network of women, men, gays, whatever breaks more bonds than it can ever build.
May 1st, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Rather than divisiveness I see solidarity…and great progress for many groups has started (and had to start) with such solidarity, accompanied by like-minded people from all groups, of course. There are so many examples for women, for people of color, for gays. The ideal may be a world where we can all be simply individuals, but I just don’t think that world is real yet.
This is not to say that women bloggers and their interests are comparable in gravity to bigger-picture civil rights endeavors, but simply to say that I disagree that promoting the interests of a group is a bad thing. You gotta start somewhere. It’s not knowing when to finish that usually leads to problems.
May 2nd, 2005 at 9:41 am
Something destined for a separate post, as its another issue in and of itself, but I’ll say this here.
This solidarity in and of itself creates a divisiness, because it builds boxes around people. Civil rights and equality for “people of color” and for women have been around for years. What they’ve lead to, conciously or not, is not equality, but reverse discrimination.
If what you’re working on is a way to promote women bloggers, that is a great way of doing it. If what you’re working on is to increase readership and respect for women bloggers, the first thing that needs to be realized is that you have to promote them as bloggers not as women.