Adding more women to this scene doesn't give them more power.
Katrin Verclas has picked up that eternal whining lament, occasionally found on TechCrunch and other tech publications, of why women in tech are not recognized, put on top 10 lists, honoured, feted, and appreciated. Why can't all those nerds in the usual sausage fests open up some space for the opposite sex?
And somebody like Mike Arrington or Robert Scoble always end up gently telling them that it's because, well, there aren't many women in tech. When there are more of them, they will get on lists. Some of them already are. Like Marissa Meyer, former Google VP and now CEO of Yahoo, who is mainly famous now for going on maternity leave not long after accepting the job, and now being widely rumoured to be able to "have it all". Let's hope she has a "good baby". (Everything depends on whether you have a "good baby," i.e. without colic who sleeps through the night.)
My answer below. Basically, using tokenism doesn't work to bring about the desired goals, and if anything, retards progress because it simulates outcomes that didn't arrive naturally and perpetuates the illusion.
But here's an interesting thing about Katrin herself -- she left her own start-up after 7 years and moved to a political organization, the National Democratic Institute. Naturally, she thinks to patronize a leader of her own workplace (ND) in her list -- which is of course, how Silicon Valley works.
And why there aren't more women on lists -- they don't get into the schmoozing with the men at all the barcamps or after-parties of TechCrunch Disrupt or whatever it is... There were so many men at the after-parties of TechCrunch Disrupt -- I was one of the very few women several years running -- that I wondered if they shouldn't deliberately import more women from computer classes at Columbia and NYU with free passes. But then...that would be tacky, wouldn't it?
One of the ways that women get into tech is, well, just getting into tech. I know a number of women coders in Second Life and related virtual worlds and online games who studied hard, worked hard, worked there way up. How else can it be done, really? Sleeping your way to the top can't work when it comes to knowing technology, you have to know and do the technology.
And then, take Sarah Lacy, once at Business Week and then at TechCrunch, who despite being dissed severely by Mark Zuckerberg at SWSX held on to her guns. And then left TechCrunch herself, to start her own publication, pandodaily.com. She just does it. It's hard. But by staying the course and writing and doing what you like you can make your world. She's not a technologist. But writing *about* technology does take a lot of technical language and there are also very few women in tech journalism! (Well, there is the Arianna-in-training, Alexia Tsotsis...)
So...Katrin (@katrinskaya) is now at National Democratic Institute, the Democratic Party's institute for supporting democracy abroad, as "senior manager for innovation" -- a contrived new job of the sort you find at many NGOs today, where those older, greyer male officials are scared that they aren't keeping up with the new phenomena, and invent jobs like this -- that foundations are happy to support because they're all worried about being relevant, too.
The people in these nouveau media and "strategic communications" jobs increasingly hold the power in organizations as social media *is* the power -- and the jobs pay more than the old PR jobs they've replaced. They often have fancier titles, like "CCO" for "chief communications officer" on par with CEO, CFO, CTO.
Katrin founded the wildly-feted Mobile Active and basically went around telling everybody that they could have revolutions using mobile phones and also that they'd make it safe enough for everybody to do so with various "aps". And they probably do in some places (except, oh, Belarus.) Mobile Active is part of, or a platform for, the "participatory budget cult" -- which in New York City takes the form of a Working Families cult extension. You go invade city councils and sit alongside elected officials and badger them for your special interests -- like $100,000 for app developers lol -- and then you bypass the voters and make the officials redundant, too. Someday, somebody will notice the awfulness of "participatory budgeting," a Marxian mash, and trash it properly -- I don't have time now.
I recall clashing with Verclas a number of times on Twitter in the earlier days (I've been on Twitter about one week longer than she on my Prokofy account) -- or at Tech@State because she is a radical supporter of the whole open source software tech cult, Twitter revolutions, etc. and I'm quite skeptical of all this. She's a vehement fighter and she then ends up telling someone who fights back that they are a "troll" blah blah. (As she did in this very discussion). I don't care. But...It's troubling when people with radical tech utopian ideologies invade the world of more mainstream NGOs. This is like Rebecca MacKinnon (@rmack) on the board of Committee to Protect Journalists. Katinskaya is especially voluble on LiberationTech.
The question is whether these more mainstream organizations with solid understanding of human rights and international law will moderate the radicalizing tendencies of these gals, or whether they will radicalize the organizations they get into. I fear the latter, as they are pushed towards taking positions against SOPA/PIPA/CISPA (so far CPJ has resisted, but just barely, and the thread could break at any minute). Now that we're in for Obama II, these types are unstoppable. I expect a certain amoung of shake-up in Gov 2.0 circles and the White House Office of Science and Technology and Hillicon and these other centres of power -- but then we'll see even more funding and more power for them.
And, what is it that makes someone like Verclas leave a start-up like MobileActive built around her own persona that will only languish after she leaves? In fact, collapse after she leaves, as she explains, as it has "worked itself out of a job" in a world where there are a zillion mobile tech things now. (It's like Alec Ross' organization to empower local economies whose website hasn't been updated since he took office).
Well, I think the answer is simple: power. Fooling around in a little NGO that constantly needs fund-raising and has to compete with now 100s of other such groups with more tech expertise as she herself admits is just not going to cut it for someone who is ambitious. And something like NDI lets you become a Washington insider close to those in power while going around doing good developing democracies -- in that method that the US loves so well (especially under the Clintons) -- via elections (which in many places, is not how you get real democracy anyway...)
I'm skeptical of the things she has worked on like SMS data collection for election monitoring. Why? Because I think this job has to be done not by nearly-created tekkie NGOs (like Golos), but by building up local independent media, often suffering in oppressive countries, and making it safe and easy for them to do exit polls as part of their overall role of investigative reporting and keeping officials' feet to the fire. And I think those most motivated in exit polling, like party-affiliated institutes in countries abroad, also need empowerment. What the SMS/tech/mobile phone approach does is create a meta-layer of sophisticates who are outside the process and even whine that they are "beyond" politics (in Russia they are particularly good at this fiction). So they don't serve people. They serve themselves. Mitt Romney, one of the richest people in the country with a whole political machine of top-paid people behind him, had trouble with his grand ORCA scheme for collecting mobile exit poll data. How much more the case for somebody in Azerbaijan.
My reply to her piece:
Katrin, you've cited these 10 women as "innovators in democracy," but you don't say anything actually innovative that they've done. They may all be great people, and they have important titles and credentials, but most of them just look like the sort of female caretakers of NGOs that bigger, more egotistical, more famous men put at the helm of their organizations to do the donkey work -- like Jimmy Wales re: the Wikimedia Foundation, or for that matter, or Tim Armstrong of CEO re: even the headstrong Arianna Huffington. Ginny Hunt may be an inside-the-Valley celeb, but the public never heard of her. "Spearheading" democracy initiatives at Google (like the campaign against SOPA) are managed by, not conceived by, someone like Ginny Hunt -- Larry and Sergei decide all the big things there, you know?
Again, if the list is about *innovation* you have to put people who aren't just social media managers, because social media itself by itself isn't innovative anymore. You have to be doing something *with it*. Now, you didn't mention Marissa Meyer, formerly of Google, who went to Yahoo. And I wouldn't put her on the democracy list, as just going to Yahoo isn't about democracy, but about....well, some other industry or personal goal. But she belongs on *some* list for her abilities.
Susan Crawford is on everybody's committee and has written an important paper but again, you're not spelling out the case for *democracy innovation*.
The Sunlight Foundation is a lobbying organization for Silicon Valley in Washington. It is a part of the democratic process, yes. But it just lobbies for Silicon Valley interests, it isn't empowering people.
I have a lot of respect for Madeleine Albright and she is definitely an innovator in history, but it really isn't the case that you could say she is "at the forefront of changing the landscape of governance, media, and technology". Does she even tweet?
I care for Hillary Clinton much more than Alec Ross, but he more properly belongs on the list of this nature as she Clinton has not headed any program specifically herself; "21st Century Diplomacy" is a bureaucratic branding exercise involving a lot of people, not just Ross. And in general, it's time for Ross to come off these lists as he has not done anything *lately*.
Re: Catherine Bracy: Running Obama's political campaign isn't about democracy for us all now, is it? It's partisan. And in general, the left (you) haven't told us anything about what sooper kool stuff Obama did in his social media campaigns to win -- you (the left media) have only trashed ORCA and Romney's failures. So spell out what you think she brought to the table other than just being your cool friend.
The Prime Minister of Iceland sounds like she's just engaged in a branding exercise, too -- constitutional reform isn't achieved on Twitter and Facebook, it's achieved by elected officials, and that's how it should be. Social media is a means to engage and call to account elected representatives; it is not a brave new shiny replacement for them, although TechPresident often sounds like it would like them to be.
So that leaves Reshma Saujani -- and if she empwered girls to code, that would indeed be helping democracy and technology.
The reply you got is legitimate. That's because you cannot bring about equality for women by using the Soviet-style identity politics so beloved of Marxists -- let's have 1 Estonian and 1 Udmurtian and 7 mothers of ten children who are milkmaids. They don't bring about actual democracy just by being from a Chinese menu. Just adding forcibly the female gender doesn't mean a damn thing: look at the UN Security Council now. For the first time in history, it has a whopping three women on it -- ambassadors of US, Brazil, and Ghana. This has made not *one whit of difference* in terms of the world's wars, its ability to bring peace or help the poor. And there you have it.
Instead of trying to get on the boys' list, you could start your own, but...is it really worth it? Who cares? Only Alec Ross. Just do good work.
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