Sour Duck: Where Are The Women Redux: Supreme Court, Office 2.0 Lacking Women

Technology conferences, newspaper articles, and the Supreme Court workforce are the latest three areas where women are notably absent, prompting bloggers to once again ask, "Where are the women?"

Anne Zelenka, a former BlogHer Contributing Editor for Technology & Web, ties together technology conferences' all-male speaker rosters and a New York Times article on lack of women Supreme Court clerks.

Writing at her personal blog, Anne 2.0, Zelenka points out that women "face a radically different opportunity landscape" than men. Responding to a call for women speakers made by Debbie Landa of Under the Radar, Zelenka writes:

Safra Catz

"How about Safra Catz, Co-President and CFO of Oracle? Can't get any higher at Oracle, unless you're the man himself. I don't know anything about Catz' interest in or availability for speaking engagements, and I've heard she doesn't do a whole lot of those. However, last year she spoke at a gathering of the Women's High-Tech Coalition in Silicon Valley and said this on how women can succeed in the male-dominated technology field:
'You have to be better. You have got to work harder, work longer, be louder.'"

Read Anne Zelenka's "Where are the Women Redux" at Anne 2.0.

Science + Professor + Woman = Me also comments on the Supreme Court "where are the women?" story:

"In just the past week or so, there have been front page articles in the New York Times about the general lack of women ministers of large churches and the decrease this year in the number of women Supreme Court clerks. In the first article, the scariest part was when parishioners were quoted as saying they just didn't like to see a woman up there preaching. In the second article, the scariest part was when one Supreme Court Justice (Souter) said that, alas, none of the top applicants for his clerk positions were women this year. I believe (though of course disagree with) the first sexist statement—it's the same with other professions, including academia, that many people prefer to get information from deep-voiced, authoritative-sounding men—but I don't believe the second statement. How lame. I've heard the same excuse for why 0.014% of the math faculty at my university are women. The 'top' candidates are always men. Amazing! If a Supreme Court Justice hired only women clerks, would people assume that the 'top' candidates just happened to be all women? Unfortunately, I cannot set aside my deep cynicism for even a second to believe that would be the case."

Read "So Many Ceilings" at Science + Professor + Woman = Me.

On another print media front: The Wall Street Journal ran an article by Elizabeth Holmes that examined how bloggers handle vacations. While the piece positions itself as covering bloggers in general, by having a skewed sex ratio it implies that part of the definition of "blogger" is male.

One of the Contributing Editors at BlogHer, Elise Bauer, tallied up Holmes' oversight:

"Let me see, out of the eight bloggers mentioned—Andrew Sullivan, John Amato, Jim Romenesko, Mark Lisanti, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Drum, David Weigel, and Michelle Malkin, only one of them is a woman. What's up with that? Here we have a medium where it has been documented that there are at least as many women blogging as men, the writer, Elizabeth Holmes, doesn't bother to scratch beneath the surface of the Technorati top 100 to bring her article into some semblance of balance."

(Hat-tip: the author, Elise Bauer.)

Shelley Powers advocates a direct approach: ask men how to get included as speakers at technology conferences. She lays down the gauntlet by listing (and linking) men involved in the Office 2.0 conference:

"This is a conference related to the whole concept of Web 2.0 and moving into the future; held in the year 2006; in an environment where women make up 50% of webloggers and at least 20% of technologists and closer to 50% of marketing, as well as almost half of business professional and lawyers and doctors and I could list you a whole bunch of other statistics—what didn't work? Why would a conference so related to something of interest equally to women as well as men have such little representation among women?

Ask them directly, these men who go to this conference: what should we do?

Ross Mayfield (speaker profile), you're hosting the list of potential women speakers from the last set of discussions on this…what should we do?

Stowe Boyd (speaker profile), you've been vocal in your condemnation of other conferences that have so few women…what should we do?

Michael Arrington (speaker profile), you profess to want to bring back 'core values' into weblogging. Aren't fairness and equality and diversity core values? Aren't they, perhaps, the most important core values? If so, what should we women do?

Marc Orchant (speaker profile), you wrote about this for ZD Net, and mentioned about C/Net being a sponsor. I have to wonder how C/Net feels about being associated with a conference that has such an obvious bias against women. Do you know the answer? Can you tell us what women need to do differently?

David Young, your conference photo shows you with your daughter, and your profile says you have two daughters. Do you want them to have an equal opportunity to participate in the web of the future? Rather than increasing in numbers and visibility, we're actually losing ground in this brave new world. By the time your daughters are in college, at the rate we're going now, women will make up less than 10% in the fields related to the web and the internet. As a father of daughters, how do you feel about this? What do you think we need to do differently?"