Update, April 20: Rrevised version has been posted on Qworky’s blog, Better Software/Better World

We’re now only a week out—next Tuesday, April 20th will mark Equal Pay Day—the point in 2010 when the average woman’s wages finally catch up to her male counterpart’s salary from the prior year. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the movement for pay equity and the impact of unfair pay.

– Andrea Maruniak, National Women’s Law Center, on womanstake.org

Yeah really.  Women working full-time, year-round are paid only about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men; in 2008, this meant the average “wage gap” was $10,622.  For women of color, the numbers are even worse — African-American women earn 62 cents and Latinas earn 53 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.

What would it mean if this wage gap didn’t exist — if, on the average, women were paid as much as men?

How real is the wage gap?

Conversations about this topic like the one Mikal kicked off on LinkedIn often fall into a familiar pattern.  Sometimes guys who aren’t familiar with the data mistakenly attribute the wage gap to “obvious” but incorrect reasons.   Yes, it’s a complex situation with multiple causes.  That said, Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva’s recent Women in Management: Delusions of Progress from Harvard Business Review describes a reality that matches the experience of most women I know:

Even after adjusting for years of work experience, industry, and region, Catalyst found that men started their careers at higher levels than women. And that isn’t because women don’t aspire to the top—the finding holds when you include only women and men who say they’re aiming for senior executive positions. It’s not a matter of parenthood slowing women’s careers, either. Among women and men without children living at home, men still started at higher levels…. After starting out behind, women don’t catch up. Men move further up the career ladder—and they move faster.

What would it mean if the wage gap didn’t exist?

One way I think of it in terms of my female friends and colleagues.  How different would they and their families’ lives be if they were fairly compensated?  actionforeequity describes it far better than I can, discussing how the gap can mean the difference between a living wage and living in poverty, fewer obstacles to face between being trapped in an abusive relationship and getting out, being able to afford a college education, a reliable car to get her to and from work, a home of her own, medical insurance …

One of the things that’s changed since my #fairpay and Women Don’t Ask post from last year’s is that I now also look at this issue from the perspective of a software startup.  Jennifer Hunt’s research, summarized in Why do Women Leave?, suggests that the single biggest contributor to the exodus of women from technology fields is that they’re dissatisfied with pay and promotion opportunities — and with numbers like these, who can blame them? And while it’s  hard to know how much it contributes to the overall number, the investment patterns described in Restructure!’s White, male startup companies get money for being white and male further entrench these inequities. Without the wage gap, we’d have a much more diverse workforce, corporate cultures that were far more supportive to women — and a lot more women-led startups.

As xxxx said on the LinkedIn discussion,

“….”

Well said.

What do others think?

jon

I’ll be splitting this into two posts, which will appear on the Qworky blog

Thanks also to those who expressed interest … if you’d like to get involved, stay tuned — or get in touch via the contact information at the bottom of the post.

As a company we view diversity as a vital ingredient to sustained business success.  We value unique perspectives and traditionally under-represented viewpoints in the software design process. We welcome collaborators from every walk of life. We welcome people of any gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, experience level, discipline, educational background, culture, and political opinion.

– Qworky’s draft diversity statement

In early January, we’re going to be kicking off an open-source project to build a key component of the Qworky Meetings V1.0 product.  How to attract a diverse team?  Kirrily Robert’s outstanding Standing out in a crowd OSCON keynote and earlier Dispatches from the Revolution look at two highly-diverse open-source projects, and provide some excellent suggestions for this situation.  For example, Dreamwidth started out by posting a clear diversity statement.  Hey, we should do that!

And when Organization for Transformative Works’ Archive Of Our Own started up they resisted the trap of focusing primarily on experienced programmers.  Instead they invited everybody who was interested and had a passion for getting involved, chose a language that was accessible to non-programmers, and put the effort into organizing and documenting the project well enough that newcomers could easily see what was going on and where they could help.  Hey, we should do that too!   So we spent some time at this Saturday’s engineering meeting discussing what else we could do to make things easily accessible, and how we’ll reach out.

A common theme in these examples, and one that Selena Marie Deckelmann also touches on in What works? Getting more women involved in open source, is to make sure that people who might be interested in the project know they’re invited.  One of the great things about working on software for meetings is that it’s a topic almost everybody relates to — these days, even high school and college students have to deal with action items.  So do small businesspeople, moms, teachers, activists, consultants, administrative assistants, system administrators, customer support experts, designers, programmers, testers, etc. etc. etc. … So please, consider yourselves invited!

It’s a great chance to get involved at the early stages of an open-source project with world-class software engineering that’s truly committed to diversity.*  And if we can make meetings better, we’ll make all of our lives easier and earn the world’s gratitude.  Talk about upside!

If you’d like to get involved, please join us at our first planning meeting early next year — check back here for details.  If you’re so eager (or so bored over the holidays) that you can’t wait until then, please get in touch with us.  We’re @qworky on Twitter and I’m jon@qworky.net — or just leave a note here in the comments.

If you know anybody else who might be interested, please pass the word.   And if you have any suggestions for how we should be reaching out, please let us know!

jon

* see my professional bio for details

We received 189 valid proposals for talks at Expo Showcase.  A few people, men and women, submitted two proposals, but the vast majority submitted just one.  Of these 189, only 41 (or 22% of the total) were from women, with 147 proposals submitted by men.  I have no reason in particular to offer for this. Perhaps women would like to comment on this blog about why a two month open call for proposals for anyone with a good idea for a five minute talk about Government 2.0 was dominated by 78% men.

– Mark Drapeau’s Government 2.0 Expo: Women by the Numbers

The women in technology community has been doing a great job of highlighting lack of diversity in conference speakers, using mechanisms like the #diversityfail Twitter hashtag and act.ly.   Mark’s post provides some interesting data on how an O’Reilly conference he’s co-chairing wound up with more than two-thirds of the presenters being male.  While I’m not actually a woman, I’d nonetheless like to take him up on his invitation for discussion about how the submission process became so male-dominated.

Some context here: I’m writing this from the perspective of somebody who’s been a program committee member of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference for the last couple years, and will be co-charing in 2010.  CFP’s gender ratios have similary hovered around 2-1, and other dimensions of diversity have been equally problematic.  There’s no denying that it’s a challenge to get diverse speakers for conferences in male-dominated fields, and it’s almost never a matter of bad intent.   As Ellen Spertus said almost 20 years ago, “women’s underrepresentation is not primarily due to direct discrimination but to subconscious behavior that tends to perpetuate the status quo.”

In the process of thinking through how to improve things for CFP 2010, I’ve talked a lot with gender equity and other diversity experts — and with other conference organizers as well.   Based on those discussions, and what I was able to discover about the Government 2.0 Expo with some quick web searching, here are some questions and observations that may help explain the gender skew that Mark has documented … and point to future opportunities for improvement.

• Did the conference establish and publicize explicit diversity goals?
• How many diversity experts (gender equity and other dimensions) did the conference recruit for the program committee, and how much power did they have?
• Did conference materials and communications channels feature women as much as or more then men in the videos, phtoso, and quotes on conference materials? [The overview page currently has two videos by guys, and links off to a page where five of the six videos are by guys; the names mentioned gov2events twitter profile are overwhelmingly male.]
• Were the male and female co-chairs perceived as equals, and did they have equally big roles in outreach and shaping the program?  [On the program committee page, there are two long paragraphs with many links describing Mark's credentials; co-chair Laurel Ruma is described in one short paragraph with no links.]
• Only 38% of the program committee are women.  Why wasn’t their gender equity here?  And given this bias, what did the connference organizers do in their outreach to counter the potential impression that this was a male-dominated event?
• How did the conference reach out to the “women in technology and politics” network, Shes Geeky, Women Who Tech, the womanist and feminist blogospheres, and organizations like Women in Technology and the Anita Borg Institute?
• Did the conference organizers investigate the possibility that the unfamiliar five-minute rapid presentation format might be a barrier to entry? What coaching or mentoring did they offer? [In conference general manager Jennifer Pahlka's response on the act.ly petition about increasing representation of women at another O'Reilly conference , she said she's been meaning to start up an "Women's Ignite" series, which implies to me that there's a perceived need here ...]
• As the program committee noticed early on that the proposals were skewing male, what did they do to adapt? For example, did they discuss inviting specific women who hadn’t submitted proposals in order to get a better balance?

Mark ended his post with the comment that “no one likes being publicly blindsided with baseless accusations,” and I certainly hope these questions don’t come across that way.  I certainly don’t mean to be accusatory, and I hope it’s clear that I’m not attributing bad intent or blaming anybody.  With over a month before the Expo and the related Gov 2.0 Summit (whose initial speaker list is 90% male), there’s still time to adapt and improve gender equity and other aspects of diversity.  A better understanding on all sides of the dynamics that have led to the current situation is crucial for making progress.

And I also don’t mean to single out the Government 2.0 Expo.  While a 2-1 ratio is a long ways away from gender equity, it’s much better than a lot of other technology conferences out there.  In part 2 of the series, I’ll take Tim and Jennifer up on their requests for suggestions on  improving gender equity at the Web 2.0 summit.*

jon

PS: While I’ve followed the lead of the discussion so far by focusing on gender, this isn’t the only dimension of diversity to consider.  How many blacks and Latin@s speak at the Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit or similar events?  How many people with disabilities?   People under 25, or over 70?  So while the increasingly-well-organized women in technology are taking the lead here, it’s important to view it as a more general challenge.  Hopefully the conference organizers will take this feedback and generalize it to other dimensions as well.

* Update, September 4: I did a very rough draft of this, but never actually published it.

Scott Page’s book The Difference highlights the importance of diversity in situations like this. The way I think of it is that a non-diverse crowd will fail to explore a lot of the possibilities.  Strategically the best opportunties are likely to be in the areas that the are getting marginalized today.  So whenever I see a #diversityfail related to the “web 2.0″ and mobile technology/business world, my ears perk up and I start paying attention.

Alex Iskold’s Free: It Works, It Cries, It Bites on ReadWriteWeb is a roundup of reactions to Chris Anderson’s new book FREE — as well as his own opinion that free can be dangerous. Alex does a nice job summarizing opinions from Malcolm, Seth, Mike, Fred, Mark, and Brad … hey, wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …

Alex replied to me on Twitter, asking for links to posts by women and saying he’d be happy to add them. Janet Maslin’s Absolutely, Positively Free … if You Think You Can Afford It from the New York Times was near the top of Google’s main page so I sent him the link — and also suggested that he try reaching out to women. After thanking me, he told me that he thought it was better not to reach out.

Responses like this don’t even surprise me at this point. Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) of Social Media Women of Color describes this as a “your problem not ours” attitude: we can’t find them, so it’s not our fault. Intelligent women with plenty to say on this subject are out there, and easy to find if you make the effort.  If you don’t bother, who else is responsible?

A big problem with not reaching out is that it tends to confirm your own blind spots. For example, in environments where you’re listening primarily to guys, you’re a lot less likely to hear women’s perspectives. Virtually all the commenters on Alex’ ReadWriteWeb post are male; so is just about everybody who replies to or retweets him on Twitter.  And a lot of the guys he’s talking with also seem to be the kind of guys who don’t talk a lot with or about women — look at Chris Anderson’s blog and Twitter feed, for example.*  The net effect is what network theorists describe as a clique of male nodes with preferential attachment to other male nodes.

Guys talking to guys who talk about guys.

It’s not like this is new behavior. Shelley Powers described it vividly four years ago in Guys don’t link. Plenty of others have documented it too, including me (1, 2).   Same old same old.  Oh well. However …

From a startup pespective, great products together with a business model that takes advantage of a collective blindspot creates the potential for a unexpectedly huge opportunity that everybody else is overlooking.

Who knows for sure, but it’s distinctly possible that there are a lot of promising variations of “free”-related business models that all the guys talking to each other on the subject haven’t aren’t explore.   And there are may also be some aspects of what makes a product great that the guys aren’t paying enough attention to either.  With the right people and company culture, there could be some really interesting opportunities here.

So stay tuned for my upcoming post: #diversitywin: pithy title here.

jon

PS: If you want to check out Chris Anderson’s FREE, he’s providing it in a time-limited free version in a variety of formats: a Scribd ebook, Audible audiobooks, and GoogleBooks.  If any women — or anybody else whose perspectives aren’t getting heard in the discussions of “free” business models — have any insights, please feel free to share!

* or Chris’ book Free, for that matter, where almost every name mentioned is male.

7-8PM Pacific/10-11PM Eastern
Draft agenda and discussion here
Please join us!

Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”

– Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus, The #p2 Hashtag and Strategies for Progressives on Twitter on The Exception

#p2 is a resource for progressives who prioritize diversity and empowerment

– #p2’s wiki and Twitter profile

Because #p2 (aka “progressives 2.0″) is the closest thing to a broad communication mechanism for progressives on Twitter so far, I’m not sure how many people realize that the primary focus is on diversity. So here’s some background reading about #p2 for Thursday’s tweeting  on how progressives can organize more effectively on Twitter.

Let’s start with a question that I think doesn’t get asked enough.

Do progressives care about diversity?

A few weeks ago, a large corporation with an unhealthy amount of market dominance changed its online search so that information for LGBTQs, feminists, people with disabilities, and other marginalized people no longer appeared. You’d think that progressives would be all over it. Yeah, everybody’s busy … but most of the action for #amazonfail was on Twitter and blogs, so it took almost no time to help. How many progressives who weren’t members of the affected communities got involved, or even paid attention?

This follows on the heels of progressives’ obliviousness to Join the Impact. Last November, as JTI got over 150,000 people in the streets in ten days for marriage equality (another cause progressives support), there was virtually no coverage in the “progressive blogosphere”. Since then, I’ve seen very little discussion — at the Politics Online conference, for example, progressives and conservatives almost completely ignored it.

Or consider this tweet from Sunday’s #fem2 Twittercast laying the groundwork for Equal Pay Day:

Yeah really. And sure enough on Tuesday, while the #fairpay hashtag was hopping, only 15 or so of guys helped out.** For that matter, well-known progressives were almost completely absent. The same dynamic occurred in the “progressive blogosphere”, where the big blogs studiously ignored it.

Notice a pattern here?

The same dynamics occur in a lot of other dimensions of oppression: class, race, age, geography, language … the list goes on. How often do most progressives think about — let alone do anything about — accessibility or bilingual issues? Access to knowledge and technology?

A lot of progressives say they care about diversity … but don’t act like they mean it.

Why it matters

This is a huge problem for progressives for several reasons. Most obviously, these are all causes that fit in squarely with progressive values. By failing to act as good allies, progressives weaken their cause and expose their intellectual inconsistency And if progressives don’t actively helping feminists, people of color, people without computers (etc.) why should they help progressives on other priorities?

And there’s so much learning to be done. On Twitter, for example, conservatives have out-organized progressives … which makes it all the more critical to apply techniques like #fem2’s effective conferences and Twittercasts, #dayofsilence’s and #rword’s outreach-to-Twitterati, or #amazonfail’s attracting coverage and building community. Elsewhere, Join the Impact has similarly set the bar for wiki-based activism; Get FISA Right on my.barackobama.com; the DREAM Activists for a networked blogging campaign. Alas, most progressives don’t bother to pay attention — which makes learning very difficult.

There are even bigger opportunities. In The Difference, Scott Page shows the advantages of cognitive diversity. On Twitter, in Cognitive evolution and revolution: #polc09 and a #diversityfail, I illustrated how Twitter hashtags can enable effective collaboration by marginalized groups.***  In a political environment where the vast majority of youth, blacks, Latinos and Latinas, LGBTQs, migrant rights activists, and feminists oppose conservative policies, this potentially creates a huge advantage for progressives …

If they prioritize diversity.

Which we have on #p2, And the results are great. The quality of conversation is high (especially if you filter out cross-posts to #tcot****) and the range of topics and people is very diverse. We’ve spawned technology like Chris Meserole’s TweetLeft. Our Ask the President activism was very successful. People consistently tell me that our Twitter overview page is useful — including its mention of Accessible Twitter. We appear to have the only list of progressive hashtags out there. And so on. Scott Page is right: diverse groups outperform.

Of course #p2 is only one piece of the puzzle on Twitter, and Twitter’s only one part of the online world. Still, there’s a lot to build on here.

Hopefully #p2 can serve as a catalyst and proof point to get more of the progressive community to start acting like diversity matters. Or even better, prioritize it.

jon

* Twitter-based meeting … like a Twitter chat, but with an agenda and action items

** kudos to @jespi55 @joegerstandt @davidhodgson @rootwork @adrielhampton @matttbastard @adamsargant @KansasJackass @TheFakeJoeBiden @GottaBook @Stardragonca @SFCityAttorney @_kbm and @BrettBrownell

*** Julie Germany’s Avoiding the old white man syndrome followup has some broader discussion of this dynamic as it relates to Social Media Women of Color and Women Who Tech

**** a lot of which are trolling, by progressives as well as conservatives

According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2007 the ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings reached almost 78 cents on the dollar for full-time year-round workers, up from just under 77 cents in 2006. This is the narrowest the wage gap has ever been, but it’s only an additional one cent on the dollar. One cent is chump change. It isn’t real change.

– from AAUW’s Equal Pay Day, April 28

African-American women earn 62¢ and Latinas earn 53¢ for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. #fairpay #fem2 #p2

– @NWLC on Twitter

One of President Obama’s first actions in late January was signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law.  That’s only a first step, though; the next battle in the fight against wage discrimination is the Paycheck Fairness Act.  The PFA updates the 45-year-old Equal Pay Act in many important ways, and passed the House with strong bipartisan support, and is currently before the Senate as S.182.

The AAUW’s site has a bunch of ways you can help: call your Senators, wear red,* blog about it, share on Facebook and join their group and cause, and tweet about it using the #fairpay hashtag.  It’s all important; do as much as you can.  There are a couple of things I’d specifically like to highlight.

Let’s start with Twitter, where this is another great opportunity for hashtag-based diversity activism.  Activity via #fairpay accomplishes several things.  Most obviously, it raises awareness: whenever you tweet, all your followers are reminded of the wage gap.  If some of the Twitterati start retweeting, or there’s enough activity that #fairpay winds up in the top 10 “trending” hashtags, a lot more people will see it.  So tweet away!  If you’re not sure what to say, the National Women’s Law Center has some tweeting points you can use as inspiration.

Even more importantly, people interested in gender equity can find each other via #fairpay, make connections, exchange information, and start working together on this and future projects.  Equal Pay Day has already benefited from a similar dynamic via the #fem2 hashtag:  the Sunday night Twittercast helped get people up to speed on the issue, resources, and talking points — and generated ideas for more effective activism.**

However there are plenty of people interested in fair pay for women who don’t identify as feminists, or don’t know about #fem2.  The issue-oriented and inclusive nature of #fairplay is a valuable complement to hashtags like #fem2, #woc, #sgp, and #p2.

Tweeting doesn’t substitute for other ways of getting involved … but that’s okay: it takes very little time (a lot less than a blog post, for example) and it’s something anybody can do.  So what are you waiting for?

Looking beyond Equal Pay Day, if you haven’t already read Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s Women don’t ask,  Ask for it, or similar books about the effect of gender differences in negotiating styles, you should.  Even more importantly, make sure that women you know are aware of the underlying dynamic: in general, men are more likely than women to try to negotiate a higher salary.  Of course, this is far from the only factor; the structural discrimination issues addressed by the Lilly Ledbetter and Paycheck Fairness acts are critically important as well.  And especially in the current tough economic climate, negotiation options are limited.

Still, this kind of empowering information can make a big difference.  Back when I was at Microsoft, the stated policy for new college hires was that the company wouldn’t negotiate salary and stock.  However, what nobody told the new hires was that if they pushed back there was often some flexibility in relocation packages … and if there was an offer from a competitive company like Google or Amazon, gee, it sometimes turned out that salary was negotiable after all.

If women don’t negotiate this as aggressively as men, they’re at a disadvantage from the get-go — and differences in initial salaries tend to be reflected in career earning potential.  So I made it a point to recommend Women don’t ask to every female intern I met.  Wouldn’t it be great if everybody at Microsoft and other companies did the same, and so did professors and mentors?

Again, this isn’t a substitute for other things you can do … but it’s easy enough, takes virtually no time, and can really help.

So please, get involved — on Twitter and elsewhere, today and in the future — and let’s help create some real change.

jon

* which is why my blog’s colors are temporarily red instead of their usual blue or pink

** In fact the  tweeting points came about because I mentioned that this approach had been useful for other campaigns.

Image: The People I Follow On Twitter (June 18, 2007), CC Chapman
licensed under Creative Commons

Today, on Twitter, I saw another woman, Allyson Kapin (who goes by @WomenWhoTech), get frustrated when she saw a list of “top” folks in social media that, once again, omitted all but one woman…. Soon after, a discussion ensued, and, within minutes, Kapin started a new “event” on Twitter…

– Denise Graveline on The Eloquent Woman, February 25

The idea behind #Women2Follow Wednesdays is straightforward: to recognize and promote women in the technology and social media field — and help people find each other.  If you’re on Twitter, it’s easy to participate.

1. Tweet a list of one or more women on Twitter you think people should follow, along with some info about why.  Make sure to include the #women2follow hashtag!
2. Watch others’ recommendations and find interesting people to follow

Like I said, easy.  Here are my recommendations over the last three weeks.

An important point about this approach is that it potentially spreads the benefit around, rather than directing it primarily to the already-powerful.  Looking at #women2follow via Twitter search, recommendations from people with a few hundred followers are just as visible as those from people with thousands.  And thus far the women being recommended have only a few hundred or few thousand followers, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands for those topping the charts of Twitterholic’s ranking.

This matters a lot from a gender perspective.  While women are 53% of the Twitter population, guys outnumber them by almost 3-to-1 on the top 100 rankings.  As @maegancarberry points out, Twitter’s dynamics allow a bunch of “ordinary” users (with tens or hundreds of followers) to collaborate in ways that complement the “superusers”.  The first few weeks of #women2follow is an excellent example.

Will it stay that way?  #followfriday, a longer-running male-dominated version of this approach,* provides a glimpse of a possible future.  According to TopFollowFriday’s statistics, there’s a bit of “the rich get richer” going on.  @mashable (with 200,000+ followers) tops the list of recommendations.  Eight of the top ten already have more than 10,000 followers.  On the other hand there are plenty of “real people” in the top 100 as well, and I only spotted a handful of the Twitterholic top 100 on the TopFollowFriday list.  So my guess is that #followfriday tends to distribute power rather than concentrating it (although it also strongly reinforces male dominance).

It’ll be interesting to see whether #women2follow has a similar patterns.  At least in the US, predominantly-female groups collaborate more effectively than male-dominated groups — and thus farther are only a handful of guys participating in #women2follow.  In any case, it’ll clearly empower women.

It’s a fascinating and empowering experiment.  Please join in!

jon

PS: Here’s my tweet from a couple of weeks ago, using #p2 (the “progressives 2.0″ hashtag) to indicate that these are women who are interested in progressive political issues and value diversity.

jon

* while theoretically #followfriday is gender-neutral, 90% of the top 10 and 75% of the top 30 recomendees are guys — at least according to TopFollowFriday.

Hilarity ensued, with “#skittles” shooting to the #1 Twitter term for the day. With over 4000 blog posts and positive articles in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, the Financial Times and Advertising Age, it’s a viral marketing success story for the ages!  Emily Steel’s Skittles Cozies Up to Social Media, David Amaro’s Skittles Goes Modernista! With A Distributed Experience on Logic and Emotion and Tiphereth Gloria’s Why it takes balls to Skittle on Digital Tip are some thought-provoking discussions.

What’s particularly fascinating to me, though, is something Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org pointed out on the Progressive Exchange mailing list: the significant gender differences in people’s reaction.

Sure enough, the pattern is there in blogosphere as well.  I classified the opinions in Skittles articles on the Google News page and a handful of the top hits on Google Blogs as positive, neutral, and negative. The results:

• women: 6 positive, 4 neutral, 0 negative
• men: 12 positive, 3 neutral, 8 negative

And when I say “negative”, whoa baby.  David says “By just about any rational indication, Skittles went too far.“    Noah characterizes it as “generally A Bad Idea” and “a gaffe”. Harry sees it as “social-media marketing nihilism.”  Riche thinks it’s “the worst strategic decision I have seen online in a long time.”  Yow.

There’s no easy way to know how much this reflects an actual difference in opinions.  It could be that women avoid harsh criticisms in favor of neutrally-worded posts like Allyson Kapin’s and Shannon Nelson’s raising questions about the effectiveness of Skittles’ strategy.  One way or another, though, it’s really striking.

Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”.

– Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus, Strategies for progressives on Twitter in The Exception

There’s an important lesson here for anybody trying to understand social media, and Twitter in particular.  Make sure you’re getting a range of opinions — as well as gender-based differences, there are also age-based differences.  In particular, if you’re getting your political news from the male-dominated “progressive” or “conservative” blogospheres (or the mainstream media and pundits who look to the big bloggers as being on the cutting edge), be aware of the possibility that you’re getting a distorted view of social network sites and their value.**

Today Skittles’ home page instead redirects to their Facebook page.  Any bets on how people will react?

jon

PS: in the credit where credit is due department, Modernista! took a similar approach with their own web site almost a year ago.  Allison Mooney’s Modernista!’s new siteless site on pfsk has more.

Skittles photo from ambibambie39507’s flickr page,
Twitter graphic from joomlatools on flickr,
both licensed under Creative Commons

* a horrible trans-fat-based chemically-tasting candy, if you ask me, although some people loooooove them.

** see for example my comments in Petitions are soooooo 20th century.

For about 80-90% of the people participating, it’s possible to able to infer the like gender of the tweeter based on self-descriptions (”mom” or “dad” for example), visual information, name, and so on.  Of course there’s room for error here,* so don’t treat this as gospel; and my apologies to anybody I inadvertently misclassified. Still, it’s enough to get some useful information.

To start with, notice that there are at least three different discussions overlapping on the #p2 channel:

- “debating with conservatives“: tweets that also include #tcot.

- “progressives on Twitter“: tweets that also include #rebelleft and/or #topprog, but not #tcot.

- “#p2-only“: tweets to #p2 that don’t include any of those other hashtags.

With that as a framework, here are the numbers:

The much lower rate of participation by women in the debates with conservatives isn’t surprising at all.  These frequently degenerate into unpleasantness and insults; research has consistently shown that women are less likely to participate in this kind of environment.**

And sadly, the much lower percentage of tweets by women also isn’t surprising.   In most mixed-gender online forums, the loudest participants are almost invariably guys.  @kurtismarsh, for example, has contributed 33 tweets himself; and another 25 tweets respond to him, meaning that he’s responsible for over 30% of the traffic on the entire #p2 channel.  In situations like this, the magic search query I discussed in Dealing with trolls on Twitter can be very useful for improving gender equity.

It’s pretty clear where the challenges are going forward.  Most obviously, we want to encourage more women to participate; and that means being able to articulate why it’s worth their while.  And we’ll need to keep the loud voices from drowning out everybody else.  In addition, we’ll need to keep the heavily-male-dominated “debating” from overwhelming the rest of the #p2 channel; @martinschechter and @txvoodoo’s A modest proposal for #bipart could help a lot here.

Of course, gender’s far from the only dimension to keep in mind: for #p2 to reach its potential, we also need to be aware of race, age, orientation, language, and much more — as well as intersectional issues.  Still, you gotta start somewhere.  So hopefully keeping these considerations at the front of everybody’s minds will help #p2 be a diverse and inclusive environment.

jon

* and I computed these manually, another potential source of error.  If anybody has any suggestions for an automated utility that’ll help here, I’m all ears — I’d love something like “Tweetstats for hashtags”.

** see Susan Herring’s Gender and Power in Online Communications for an overview and references.  if you’re a blogger (or otherwise active online) and for some reason haven’t read this yet, you should.  right now.  seriously.

Update: #topprog Tweetup : Tuesday Night 7:30 EST : Subject – topprog.org features, functionality, and community. Please Retweet!  H/T @cacardinal

The new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives continues to make progress with a good range of topics and tweeters — including big names like @blogdiva, @PunditMom (who’s moderating a breakout session at fem2pt0 tomorrow), and @JoeTrippi.

The progressive blogosphere’s ignoring it, of course,* but the conservatives of #tcot are nervous enough that they’re already labelling it a #fail, thinking about flooding it, and coming up with euphemisms for trolling.  And in fact @The_Anti_Guru’s “active engagement” probably accounts for over 50% of the traffic, counting replies.  Guy attempts to disrupt and dominate conversation in potentially-woman-friendly-space, film at 11!

Gender issues aside, a lot of people are skeptical whether it’s possible to have meaningful conversations on Twitter.  Won’t the loudest voices drown everybody else out?  The three loudest tweeters yesterday had 46, 30, and 29 tweets yesterday.  As calibration, @drdigipol, aka Alan Rosenblatt, who as the creator of the list presumably has as much to say as anybody else, had 7.   So it’s easy to overlook @lizandra311’s updates on the Rootscamp in Philadelphia, or the occasional posts from @blogdiva, @Heardtfelt, @myrnyatheminx, @GetFISARight and others.

It’s a place where a little functionality would help a lot.  If only each user had a way of ignoring people they thought were trolling and everybody replying to him!  Or wouldn’t it be cool if I had a knob for the RSS feed that said “ignore everybody who posts more than 10 times in a 24-hour period”?   As more political debate discussions happen on Twitter, hopefully Twitter user interfaces will incorporate funcationality like this [in fact for all i know they already do].

In  the meantime, oh well, people will probably learn to ignore @The_Anti_Guru quickly enough.  “Please don’t feed the trolls.”  And with a little practice it’s easy enough to skip over the posts by the loudest posters even using Twitter’s generic search page.  At least for now, with a little practice it’s not too hard to separate out the wheat from the chaff.

And now back to the gender issues.  Thus far, according to Google, there have been four blog posts about the new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives.  Here’s what the linking pattern looked like between mine on Liminal States, Nancy Scola’s on techPresident, Stefan Deeran’s in Exception Magazine, and Colin Delany’s on e.politics.

- I didn’t link to anybody

- Nancy linked to me

- Colin linked to Stefan

- Stefan didn’t link to any of us

To be clear: nobody linked to the only woman who posted about #topprog.  See Shelley Powers’ Guys Don’t Link on Burningbird for more discussion of this dynamic.

It’s also interesting to look at who gets quoted in the articles. Nancy quotes @anotherpundit and me; Stefan quotes Alan and Michael (aka Mr. #tcot).  Colin quotes Alan.  I wonder if women have any opinions on this?

Hmm.  These all sound like good topics for fem2pt0.

jon

* on the surface it seems like the kind of thing that should interest “progressive” bloggers, but it’s on a social network site so it might as well not exist

Of course as Twitter Vote Report and the Motrin Moms have shown, Twitter hashtags are potentially useful for far more than that.  From the Get FISA Right perspective, for example, it’s another great way of broadcasting our dailyish update — and the same’s true for every other grassroots campaign out there.

One especially intriguing aspect of this to me is that Twitter is a far less male-dominated environment than digg, email and the blogosphere — and indeed the early posts to #topprog include @WomenWhoTech, @nerdette, @PunditMom, @myrnathemynx and many others.  So it’s a great chance for a key piece of progressive infrastructure where feminists and womanists — and women in general — can participate on a fairer basis.

For an example (and putting my personal competitive issues aside for a second), let’s return to the digg front.  Politically, Digg is generally seen as dominated by libertarians and conservatives; from a gender perspective, Jen Nedeau’s two-part series Is Digg Sexist? series on change.org starting with is a good overview (short answer: yes).  Suppose that progressives, feminists, and womanists are able to use their Twitter advantage to equalize the situation — and maybe even dominate — on digg.  That’d be kind of cool.

Assuming #topprog actually clicks, that is.  In addition to overcoming #tcot’s early lead (with a mentor program and a ning already in place), progressives will also have to come up with conventions for how to communicate effectively: hashtags for topics and locations, ways of communicating high-priority information like action alerts, graphical views and other kinds of filters to deal with information overload.  It’s all fairly straightforward, but does require collaboration … not always something online progressives are good at.

Still.  There’s plenty of research that shows that groups with at least 30-40% women are more effective at collaboration, so a case could be made that it’s far more likely to happen on Twitter than in blog- and email-dominated environments.  And there’s plenty of experience in the progressive community from non-partisan projects like Twitter Vote Report.  On the whole I’m optimistic.

So check it out!  For now the easiest way to get a taste for it is to go to http://search.twitter.com and type in #topprog.  If you leave the browser window up, it’ll update you as new posts come in and you can hit refreash.

And if you’re already on Twitter, just add the #topprog hashtag to any posts of yours that are interesting for progressives.  Congratulations, now you too are a top progressive!

jon

Update, 5:30 p.m.: R. Stefan Deeran’s Progressives Try to Match Conservatives on Twitter in Exception Magazine quotes Michael Leahy, the Republican strategist behind #tcot:

“We would love to have a dialogue” Mr. Leahy told the Exception. According to Mr. Leahy, Twitter facilitates a decentralized discourse for people on both the left and right.

Indeed.  Nancy Scola also covers it in Progressives have a hashtag on techPresident, linking here.

First draft July 26; substantial revisions August 2.

Originally written as a three-part conclusion to

Gender, race, age, and power in online discussions, chapter n

Introduction

The “mutual guest-blogging” project I’ve been leading on OpenLeft has been taking place in the context of a surprising amount of coverage of diversity issues in the blogosphere in the mainstream media recently. Articles like Amy Alexander’s The Color Line Online: Minority Bloggers Fight Inequality in The Nation and Karen Jesella’s Blogging’s Glass Ceiling in the New York Times (nicely analyzed by PhysioProf in Teh Laydeez Are So Cute When They Try To Blog on Feministe) are the highest-profile treatments I’ve seen of this topic since Jose Antonio Vargas’ A Diversity of Opinion, if not of Opinionators in the Washington Post a year ago.

It’s also come up in a broader context in stories like Jose’s Liberal Bloggers Brace for Victory in the Washington Post, and Kirsten Powers’ Net-roots Ninnies: Dem’s Left Dum Bam Slams in the New York Post.* As Kirsten, who’s also a Fox News reporter, says:

Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.

Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they’re a loud anomaly in a party that’s wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.

Not everybody sees it that way. Chris Bowers’ OpenLeft post The Myth Of The Non-Diverse Netroots, for example, presents a different perspective.  (See Is netroots non-diversity a myth?, as well as my responses in Chris’ thread, for my opinion.)   In the aftermath of the nastiness with race and gender we’ve seen so far this election year, with the McCain campaign and New Yorker throwing gasoline on the fire on the race and gender front and a lot of Democrats doing their best to get equally nasty about the age dimension, it’s certainly a good discussion to be having.

Mutual guest blogging on OpenLeft: what happened

The first mutual guest-blogging series, with a goal of bringing diverse voices and perspectives to OpenLeft’s front page, featured four amazing posts: Melissa McEwan’s Perfectly Logical Calculations, and Why They’re Actually Not, Pam Spaulding’s Sexism and racism – what lies beneath…, and rikyrah’s Update: Michelle Obama As Racial Rorshach Test. The broader discussion has been excellent as well, including Invasion of the QCoFM on Shakesville; cross-posts (with very different comments than on OpenLeft) on Orcinus, Pam’s House Blend, Jack and Jill Politics and Mirror on America; and most recently Sara Robinson’s An Open Letter to Open Left followup on Orcinus.

My summary so far in Mutual guest blogging: intermission and discussions elicited a lot of interesting responses, especially after I banned Paul Lukasiak for disrupting the thread, and then repromoted it a couple of times. Some email discussion then ensued between me, Matt Stoller, and Chris Bowers (Mike Lux was on vacation). When it became clear that we saw things differently, I offered to turn the reins over to somebody else and give up my front-page privileges, which they accepted.**

It’s somewhat disappointing in that this has the feel of a missed opportunity — look at the enthusiasm in the comments on Invasion of the QCoFM, skeptical admittedly but nonetheless an encouraging sign. In particular, there’s still time to address issues related to minority blogger representation at the DNCC***, but as long as the issue continues to be ignored in the progressive blogosphere it’s not likely anything will happen. I had really hoped that the bridges built here would lead to some progress on that issue. Sigh. There certainly are some things I’d do differently in retrospect … it’s difficult when everybody’s under a huge amount of time pressure and not used to working together.

Looking at things from a more positive perspective, though …

There were four great posts that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and hopefully at least some new audience for the guest bloggers — and readers for their own. We measurably affected the diversity of OpenLeft’s front page, and several strong non-straight-white-male voices emerged in the comments. The threads are continuing to spark discussion, in posts like zuzu’s Hillary and intergenerational dynamics on Shakesville. And I think the series of threads captures the state of discussions about race and gender in the progessive blogosphere in June/July 2008 about as well as anything out there. These are great results from a first attempt.

What next? These have been amongst the more popular comment threads on OpenLeft recently, with voices and perspectives that are very different from the norm there, so I certainly hope that people will find a way to take it forward there. We shall see.

“As purple is to lavender”: some personal reflections

Over the last week, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on this. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into this project over the last several months — and unsurprisingly, gotten a much much more out of it than I put in. In the aftermath, how do I feel about it?

On a personal level, getting a chance to work with the guest bloggers was like a dream come true for me. Not only am I a regular reader of all their blogs, three of them are in my personal short list of best sources for political news. On top of that, one of the inspirations this project was first inspired by Melissa et. al.’s We Write Letters on Shakesville. I could scarcely believe my good fortune when their names came up in the nominating process. What a treat to be able to collaborate with them on something like this!

And on top of that, I made connections with a lot of people I wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise, which is leading to new friendships — as well as a better base for activism. As I said in my wrapup post:

We’ve already seen some tangible evidence of that in a totally unanticipated way with the Get FISA Right movement: the connections, shared experiences, and developing trust relationships around the guest-blogging project made a big difference in our ability to use OpenLeft as an early base and start up quickly on Facebook. It also helped us keep the rapid growth going after key links from Nancy Scola, Dawn Teo, Jane Hamsher, Susan G, mcjoan, digby, Sarah Lai Stirland, danah boyd, and many others.**** A focus on diversity almost always brings some unexpected benefits; this was a doozy.

Moving on to implementation details, the mutual guest-blogging approach seems like an effective one, and the “mothership post” (coming soon!) is a significant improvement on the original idea. The clear documentation of goals and making the process as transparent and inclusive as possible both proved very effective. I made a major botch by failing to communicate what many people saw as a subject change; on the other hand, in my wrapup thread, I thought I dealt with Paul’s trolling fairly effectively. [The sequence of threads also provides a particularly good illustration of how guys, including me, tend to dominate online conversations due to volume.]

And of course, I learned a lot. debcoop and others gave me a much richer understanding of the ways in which many older feminists feel marginalized — and that as a result some of them are too angry to speak or so angry they can’t stop speaking. Conversely I think in some cases there’s a real lack of awareness that behavior and attitudes that have been tolerated in the past are seen and reacted to differently today. Not sure if there are any easy answers here but I think everybody trying to treat each other respectfully would help a surprising amount.

And rootless2’s comment is worth quoting one more time:

The “feminist” perspective is defined to be a particular political take from which Code Pink, Kate Michelman, and certainly Barbara Lee, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Lani Guinier are excluded.

Indeed (and a point I had completely overlooked about Code Pink).

In the discussions, I was repeatedly shocked at how little awareness of the womanist perspective there still is even among people who are knowledgeable about feminism. From Wikipedia:

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, self-declared feminist and womanist – the latter a term she herself coined to make special distinction for the experiences of women of color.

As Alice Walker says, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” . At the intellectual level, privileging feminist perspectives over womanist perspectives is just as wrong as privileging “the” definition of feminism. Ignoring the racial and intersectional implications of this is unexamined privilege.

It’s not like I’m an expert on womanism (or feminism for that matter). Still, you don’t have to do very much reading in the feminist or woman of color blogosphere before you run into the term, or run into the increasing number of women — including, I believe, at least two of our invited guest bloggers — who are very public about not identifying as feminists. And in any case, I really thought that after both Melissa and I made such a point of it, people who didn’t know the word would look it up and think about the implications.

Conclusion

Like I said above, I think we’ve captured an excellent snapshot of discussions of race and gender in the progressive blogosphere at this moment in time. Here was my attempt to summarize it:

1. dudez in the progressive blogosphere (with many exceptions of course) and elsewhere are remarkably clueless about issues related to gender and race, unwilling to examine their language or privilege, in some cases actively misogynistic and racist, and become hostile while this is discussed
2. they don’t get intersectionality either*****
3. this is a real problem for the progressive movement, the Democratic party, the Obama campaign, Michelle Obama, and more generally women, blacks, persons of color, and most especially women of color everywhere. As Jane Hamsher says And the Big Announcement Is…, the conversation in the blogosphere is — I sincerely hope — about to change. So now would be very good time for OpenLeft to take a leadership role in addressing these problems in the progressive blogosphere.

Others’ diagnosis may vary of course. In any case, there’s a wealth of raw material here to study, both for those who want to change the dynamics as a whole, and for those (including me) who want to reflect on their own behavior and look for opportunities to improve it. And there’s still almost a month until the convention; maybe somebody can learn from this and figure out how to get the “progressive” blogosphere to start discussing issues of blogger representation in Denver in ways that reflect race, gender, age, and other dimensions as well as geography, partisanship, and status.

As for what next, we shall see. For the time being …

Thanks once again to all the participants: guest-bloggers Melissa, Sara, Pam, rikyrah; Aviva, sb, Paul, and Daniel for their help; those who helped come up to the original idea, including Natasha Chart for first linking to Melissa’s post, Taylor for suggesting it as a guest blog and dr anonymous for promoting it, and everybody for suggestions and refinements as it steadily evolved. Thanks also to OpenLeft for giving the space for this experiment; and to all the commenters, including sb, debcoop, Spitball, Englishlefty, fladem, Pam, Joel, Aviva, NCDemAmy, rootless2, L Boom, dr anonymous, sisterfish, Daniel, and Syrith in the “intermission” thread.

I hope you’re all as proud of what we accomplished here as I am. It’s been a pleasure working with you on this, and I look forward to collaborating in the future as well!

jon

* I only ran into Kirsten’s article because she also mentioned Get FISA Right. Much to my relief, she confirmed in email that she didn’t think of us as ninnies. Interestingly, when I posted about it on the on the Get FISA Right message boards, two guys responded by attacking Kirsten without addressing her points, while the one one woman who responded thought as I did that she made some good points. But I digress.

** This in turn immediately led to some unintended consequences: my Get FISA Right, the video! was only on the front page very briefly, so it got more visibility on techPresident and NPR than OpenLeft

*** for example, by training minority delegates (who already have floor credentials) as bloggers and work with the state blogs to use their on-floor stations for filing reports. Not only does this give better diversity in the reporting from the convention, it also helps address underrepresentation in the blogosphere moving forward, both at the state level and the netroots in general.

**** guys linked to us too, of course

***** speaking of which, a resource I’ve found very helpful in understanding the intersections between race and gender is prof bw’s Feminist Reading Tools For Recognizing and Countering Racism on WoC PhD.

Second draft, posted on OpenLeft with a different poll.

the version on OpenLeft continues to evolve

please link and comment there rather than here.

Originally posted July 17; revised July 18-19.

We’re now at the midpoint of our first, more-leisurely-than-anticipated mutual guest blogging series. Thanks to Melissa, Sara, Pam, and rikyrah for their time, energy, and extraordinary posts. In retrospect, our original plan of getting all the posts on OpenLeft and the mutual posts on the guest bloggers’ blogs all in one week was a little over-ambitious. Oh well, live and learn.

Some people were confused by the unannounced broadening of the topic. Oops. Pam and the Jack and Jill Politics folks both said they’d like to take a more forward-looking approach than in our framing, and I said “sure, just relate it in some way to the original topic and it’ll be fine.” Apologies to all for having forgotten to communicate this. In the future, when something like this happens, rather than attacking the guest poster in angry posts, consider simply asking “did I miss something?” or perhaps even contacting the people involved (me and rikyrah in this case) directly. Thanks to desmoinesdem, sb, and Paul for their replies in the thread. For those who would like to read more specifically on Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal, there were several links in an earlier thread, and of course there’s a ton of great stuff out there elsewhere.

And on a similar “oops” theme, apologies to Sara for missing her email and not promoting her post; thanks to Daniel for stepping in and helping. Not one of my better moderation efforts, alas.

Our “stated purpose”

Before talking about what’s next, it’s a good time to revisit how we’re doing against our goals. I’m going to go into some depth here, and start by mocking a remark somebody made in rikyrah’s thread:

what bothers me is the idea that Jon and OpenLeft think that they are actually acoomplishing anything close to their stated purpose of including a feminist/womanist perspective on the primary campaign.

This is one of those comments where there’s so much wrong with it, I don’t know where to start. For example, the incorrect restatement of the topic leaves out a lot including the all-important “… and why it matters to progressives”. And how could the commenter have missed that the guest bloggers are writing from a feminist/womanist perspective? So these posts are squarely on-topic; and some consistent themes in their posts and the discussions relate to lessons from Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the race.

For example:

1. dudez in the progressive blogosphere (with many exceptions of course) and elsewhere are remarkably clueless about issues related to gender and race, unwilling to examine their language or privilege, in some cases actively misogynistic and racist, and get hostile while this is discussed
2. they don’t get intersectionality either
3. this is a real problem for the progressive movement, the Democratic party, the Obama campaign, Michelle Obama, and more generally women, blacks, persons of color, and most especially women of color everywhere. So now would be very good time for the progressive blogosphere to take the lead in trying to do something about it.

Returning to the comment, it’s also an unusually clear case of confusion between “topic” and “purpose”. The specific topic we chose is just a means to an end; I had already modified it once without mentioning it (changing “feminist” to “feminist and womanist” in the invitation).

And we’ve been explicit about our stated purpose with mutual guest-blogging. From the initial proposal:

If you look at the front page posts on OpenLeft, it’s rare to see anything by a woman, a person of color, anybody 26-and-under (”Facebook generation”) or 60+. OpenLeft is dedicated to building a progressive governing majority, and understanding the great movement of left-wing activism in America today. Neither of those will happen if most voices continue to be marginalized.

So let’s start changing it.

A good start

Indeed, I think we are off to a good start with the posts so far, and discussions in the comments. Encouragingly, a lot of the people in the meta-thread on Shakesville spoke very positively about this effort, even though reviews as to OpenLefties’ (?) collective performance were decidedly mixed.

Overall the discussions of these difficult issues went far better than I had expected … and of course the posts were magnificent, exceeding even my absurdly-high expectations. rrp made an excellent point on Shakesville that Liss took advantage of the “length and form” here; the same’s true of all the posts. From a personal perspective … wow, what a privilege to be part of this; and how exciting to have a measurable impact on demographic diversity in the netroots!

The original proposal also suggested

The result is improved mutual understanding, links with other tightly-connected networks, and a base for more collaborative and effective strategic actions.

We’ve already seen some tangible evidence of that in a totally unanticipated way with the Get FISA Right movement: the connections, shared experiences, and developing trust relationships around the guest-blogging project made a big difference in our ability to use OpenLeft as an early base and start up quickly on Facebook. It also helped us keep the rapid growth going after key links from Nancy Scola, Jane Hamsher, Susan G, mcjoan, digby, Sarah Lai Stirland, danah boyd, and many others. A focus on diversity almost always brings some unexpected benefits; this was a doozy.

So it’s a great start, and there’s a lot to build on.

Now what?

We’re still only partway through this first iteration. The next step is the “mutual” aspect: posts by OpenLeft founders on the guest bloggers’ own blogs. There’s a lot of interest in this from our guests, so while we still haven’t worked out any details on this yet, it’s still planned. Also, there are still open invitations to Egalia and brownfemipower; we should once again reach out to them and see if they’re interested. And we have about 20 nominations for followon posts on this subject; we should find a way to expand the discussion to give them all a way to participate — details TBD.

And we’ll try to get re-started on choosing a subject for the next round; momentum kinda petered out, but hopefully these stimulating posts will recharge it. More on this front soon as well.

There are certainly ways to improve on the guest-blogging process; please use this thread for discussions and feedback about the series as a whole: things that worked particularly well, what you observed or learned, ways to do better next time, etc.

And shifting to a broader focus …

Mutual guest blogging has taken a concrete step on the path to getting more diverse perspectives on the front page of OpenLeft, an important step in working through the challenges of becoming an inclusive and multicultural space. How do we build on this promising start?

Poll

on a scale of 1-10, where the average front-page thread on OL is 5, how would you rate the overall quality of these posts and discussions?

Comment: useful background reading

If I can get slightly professorial for a second here … as a social computing researcher who’s been spending time in the progressive blogosphere over the last six months, I think it would be helpful if we all had knowledge about some basic texts here. A good place to start is with the pairing of Guys don’t link and Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs.

Shelley Powers 2005 classic Guys don’t link on Burningbird discusses the interaction of links and “Google juice” (ewwwwww). A brief excerpt gives a flavor:

Point of fact, if you follow the thread of this discussion, you would see something like Dave linking to Cory who then links to Scoble who links to Dave who links to Tim who links to Steve who then links to Dave who links to Doc who follows through with a link to Dan, and so on. If you throw in the fact that the Google Guys are, well, guys, then we start to see a pattern here: men have a real thing for the hypertext link.

Well, huh. How about that. Not being a guy, I couldn’t understand this male obsession with the link, so I decided to call on an expert on gender roles about the issue: Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s current President.

If you don’t know the specific guys she’s talking about, you probably know the types. It’s a great party game: which netroots personality would you cast in which role for the upcoming Guys don’t link Showtime series?

In a more traditionally academic style Women and children last, Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright discuss the how media coverage skews towards a particular kind of blogs:

It is [these] blogs that are privileged, consistent with the notion that the activities of educated, adult males are viewed by society as more interesting and important than those of other demographic groups. However, the blogs featured in contemporary public discourses about blogging are the exception, rather than the rule: all the available evidence suggests that blogs are more commonly a vehicle of personal expression than a means of filtering content on the Web, for all demographic groups including adult males.

So-called “objective” measurements of influence like Technorati and Memeorandum reinforce these tendencies. For a quick deconstruction of how this works in the tech blogosphere, see my comment here.

Relating this back to the progressive blogoshere: see Kay Steiger’s The “new” new left is white, male, Morgaine’s and my comments on A.J. Rossmiller’s Myth of the meritocracy, blogosphere edition on Americablog, Kirsten Powers Net-roots ninnies in the New York Post … and many other discussions. It’s not like this is a big secret or anything. It’s just not something the dudez talk about.

Update, June 21: first round on track for week of June 30!

Thanks to all for the feedback and review!

We propose that OpenLeft feature 5-7 guest bloggers each week, prioritizing diverse voices and perspectives not usually heard on the front page. OpenLeft front page posters will reciprocate, by blogging on the guests’ sites, and the combination will (with luck) create a temporary hub in the progressive blogosphere. The result is improved mutual understanding, links with other tightly-connected networks, and a base for more collaborative and effective strategic actions.

Note: This diary entry refines several ideas from the “American Blogger” thread including input from Taylor, Syrith, me, and several others who asked to remain anonymous. Thanks to all the reviewers of the earlier versions!

If you look at the front page posts on OpenLeft, it’s rare to see anything by a woman, a person of color, anybody 26-and-under (”Facebook generation”) or 60+. OpenLeft is dedicated to building a progressive governing majority, and understanding the great movement of left-wing activism in America today. Neither of those will happen if most voices continue to be marginalized.

So let’s start changing it.

Mutual guest-blogging is an easy way to create discussion and connections while improving diversity. It gives benefit in all directions: bloggers get their work exposed to new audiences, commenters get new topics to discuss, readers get to see new ideas and perspectives.

The progressive blogosphere’s (temporary) hub

Focusing each week on a specific topic is a good way of attracting guest bloggers. Most people who write as clearly and articulately as the usual high standard of posts on OpenLeft have plenty of other things they could do with their time, and so guest-blogging here needs to be worth their while. A reciprocal guest-post from an OpenLeft founder is likely to be seen as valuable (one of the reasons their participation is so crucial), but that’s not likely to be enough.

So we’ll also offer guest-bloggers something even more valuable: access, in the form of front-page posts at the progressive blogosphere’s temporary hub for the topic of the week. Here, on OpenLeft.

Well, of course, there’s no guarantee that OpenLeft and the mutual-guest blogs will turn into a hub each week. However, with the site’s reputation for high-quality discussion, and the networks of the front-page posters (the founders, the regulars, and occasionals like Robert Fuller) supplemented by those of a half-dozen or so diverse perspectives, we’ve got a real chance — especially if we pick topics that haven’t gotten a lot of good discussion in the progressive blogosphere. See the comments for a few suggestions.

The selection process

Just how to select the guest bloggers? It’s a tricky question: we want to avoid reflecting our biases and self-selecting to a narrow sample set. On the other hand, this also presents an opportunity to create a good resource list for each topic, and understand gaps in our collective information sources. It’s hard to know what the right answer is, so rather than pick a long-term process, let’s focus on how to get started.

1. select three initial topics. use a similar process to “American Blogger”: a nomination thread that lasts for a couple of days, and then a voting thread
2. for each topic, start up a nomination thread: each reader can propose up to three names [with a little editing, this thread can then be turned into a resource list]
3. filter the topic list to emphasize diverse perspectives, and if necessary have a vote to select the top 10-15 (presumably only half or less will have time and interest)
4. invite the guest bloggers, and schedule topics based on which get critical mass quickest
5. each guest-blogger gets to select a future guest blogger on a topic of their choice (as well as nominating three per topic just like any other reader)

The last point is important for two reasons. First of all, it’s a small token for the guest-bloggers: they allow somebody access to OpenLeft’s front page. Secondly, it helps expand our connections and information sources beyond our initial shortlist.

Next steps

If we want to take this forward, a key next step is to get the founders’ and other front-pagers agreement to participate. In addition, we’ll need somebody to run the initial topic nomination/voting thread. Paul’s already done this for “American Blogger”, and so has a rough idea of how much time it’ll require. After that, we’ll need people to run the blogger nomination/voting threads; and to reach out to the selected bloggers; and, once we’re ready to go, to coordinate the individual topics.

[As the description implies, for this to work, we'll need to get a lot of people involved. If you're interested in helping, please mention it in your comment!]

Before any of that, though, we need to make sure there’s interest — and perhaps to improve the idea. [For example, are there ways to simplify the blogger selection process?] So please use this thread to discuss — and if you think it’s a good idea, let us know if you’re interested in helping.

when reading blogs, make a point to get a range of perspectives, starting with those that are shut out from the mainstream news.

Reviewing an earlier draft of Allies in the blogosphere, one of my friends asked me for more details on this. Rather than bury it in an comment, I figured that it was worth a thread of its own — because that’ll also give me a chance to ask others the same question.

As an experiment, for the last year I’ve been getting virtually all of my political news online, mostly avoiding newspapers, magazines, and TV. At first I’d start out each day by checking Google News, the New York Times, and a few blogs on specific topics, like Juan Cole’s Informed Comment on Iraq. Then I added Yahoo! News (which gets feeds from Huffington Post and Real Clear Politics as well as CNN). This gave me some different perspectives and a few more stories but it was still pretty limited.

So then I experimented with getting a lot more of my news from the progressive blogosphere, experimenting to get a broader range of stories. My choices evolved over time, for example dropping dKos as the abusive attitudes became overwhelming; a thread on Facebook has snapshots from March. My mid-April list was in more or less the following order: Talking Points Memo, Marc Ambinder, Matthew Yglesias, OpenLeft, MyDD, The Nation, TAPPED, and Jack and Jill Politics. And Slashdot, of course, which despite being primarily tech-focused often does have coverage of political issues.

These are all excellent sources but with the exception of Jack and Jill Politics are all heavily male-dominated and (to the extent I know people’s race) mostly white. Even on group blogs like TAPPED and The Nation which have several women involved, most of the posts are from the guys. Not only does this mean I’m potentially getting limited perspectives, it also tends to affect what stories do and don’t get coverage. dnA’s Thanks Kos on TooSense is an interesting window on the lack of coverage of Sean Bell in the “progressive” blogosphere; as I write this, the same dynamic’s going on with lack of attention to the Phyllis Schlafly protest.

So, as I was working on Allies, I decided to change things around — and be very conscious of the order in which I’m reading. These days, my first news source isn’t a blog or aggregator; it’s the One Million Strong for Barack group on Facebook. It’s a great example of a “wisdom of the crowds phenomenon”: the headlines gives a good broad survey of what people think matters from the mainstream media, and in the comments there are often links off to more stories and videos (although there’s always a risk of getting rickrolled). I don’t think there’s anything magic about this particular group; any large and relatively diverse discussion forum could have the same effect.

And then, at least for the last couple of weeks, here’s the order in which I do my political surfing.

• Pam’s House Blend
• Firedoglake
• TAPPED
• Jack and Jill Politics
• digby’s Hullabaloo
• Talking Points Memo
• Shakesville
• OpenLeft
• Marc Ambinder
• The Democratic Strategist

It’s a very different experience. Now, very often my first introduction to a story is from a perspective that’s not straight, white, and male. And I get exposed in detail to topics that are getting superficial if any attention elsewhere — for example, Pam’s recent series on Tasering, and the multiple threads on OpenLeft’s front page from different players in the complex SEIU/CNA/NNOC/UHW situation.

Of course, no list of 10 sources will be diverse in all dimensions, and so I’ll continue to evolve this over time — Rural Votes, Racialicious, Wired’s THREAT LEVEL, Feministing, and the sources on my earlier top 10 list will all be getting their turns. Realistically, I’ll probably also return to somewhat more random reading, rather than the somewhat artificial “check in the same order each day” I’ve been doing as part of the experiment.

There’s no question, though, that I’ve come away convinced that while it doesn’t happen of its own accord (at least not with me), with a little effort I can use the blogosphere much more effectively to get a diverse set of perspectives — and that it’s well worth doing.

Turning this around, a couple of questions for any readers:

• other suggestions on techniques for getting diverse perspectives?
• after reading this, what (if any) changes will you make in how you get your political news?

So I started working on an essay building on the discussion in places like Melissa McEwan et al’s We write letters on Shakesville, Chris Clarke’s Is a humane online politics possible, and Theriomorph’s An ally 101 thread. not currently publicly available

While I was working on it, though, I was also becoming more and more irritated with the way that broader political blogosphere continues to ignore the marginalization of the voices of women and persons of color — and the especially intense intersectional effects on women of color.

Update, May 31: Yet another example: Pam Spaulding’s The DNCC state blog dustup continues discusses the controversy over minority blogger representation — or lack thereof — on the floor at the Democratic National Convention. The story got attention in the Washington Post and other mainstream media, but no pickup in the “progressive” blogosphere.

A.J. Rossmiller’s Myth of the meritocracy, blogosphere edition on AmericaBlog didn’t get picked up anywhere; and while I thought it was an excellent post, as MorgaineSwann pointed out in the comments there are problematic aspects to the use of Markos as an example of diversity. [I helpfully added the citation of “Markos is latino, Jane is a woman, John is gay” as the rare counter-examples highlights the absence of women of color, just in case anybody had missed it, and started hanging out more at Firedoglake -- and Pam's House Blend.] Kay Steiger’s The “new” new left is white, male was similarly ignored, except for a passing reference in a post by Matt Yglesias the bulk of which was responding to the far more important issue of a perceived insult to Bakhurin; I started reading digby and others on Hullaballoo.

And I wasn’t the only one who was noticing how intensity of campaigns has highlighted both the racism and sexism; witness Betsy Reed’s “Race to the Bottom” in The Nation, Shakesville’s 84-part (and counting) sexism watch, and thread after thread on political blogs turning into a endless string of attacks, flaming, racism, and sexism. Obama supporters, Clinton supporters, and progressives are “allies” in a different sense of the word “allies”, but there are a lot of common issues here. Could I address this as well?

The essay morphed, and continued to as review feedback came in. Eventually it turned into an essay about online discourse, and how that applies to allies in multiple senses of the word.

Being able to engage in discussions is vital to making progress on the deeper issues. Online discussions are particularly valuable because they leave behind threads that can be examined later: valuable resources, shared experiences, trainwrecks to ponder. At the same time, communication’s difficult online, with only text and a handful of emoticons. And although it’s not something people talk about much, the dynamics of the online environment reflect, and often accentuate, existing power imbalances.

Issues become particularly acute when groups with different perspectives, priorities, goals, and backgrounds need to work together. Even with the best of intentions, miscommunications, thoughtlessness, privilege and unexamined assumptions can easily escalate to attacks and flaming, which winds up making the situation worse rather than better.

It’s going to take a lot of work to go against those default tendencies. Still, if we want to be able to work together as allies, it’s something we’ve got to pay attention to.

This essay focuses on our behavior as individuals. That’s not the only place effort is needed, of course: we also need to consider community aspects such as defense mechanisms against trolls and a viable “101″ educational area (and good ways of getting people there); and technology assistance like Slashdot-style community moderation/meta-moderation can make a big difference in shielding readers from hate speech). First, though, let’s starts with ourselves — and, please forgive the egocentricity, but the the best way for me to do that is to start with myself.

For the last month or so, I’ve been trying to apply some principles to my own behavior online, expanding and refining them in light of my experiences — and mistakes, which gave me ample opportunity to beta-test the link from Teh Portly Dyke that I cited below. Your mileage will almost certainly vary, of course; still, I think that the process I went through is a very valuable one, and some of the principles are broadly useful. I really believe that if all of us allies spent a month doing similar introspection and self-monitoring, came up with their variations, and do our best to act in accordance with our individual principles, it will go a long way towards making the blogosphere a more inclusive place.

Here’s my current version, last major update May 11:

1. when reading blogs, make a point to get a range of perspectives, starting with those that are shut out from the mainstream news.
2. spend more time commenting on other blogs and forums than posting on my own
3. when visiting a new blog, listen for a while before jumping in
4. show respect for the people posting — and for the norms and conventions of discourse at a site.
5. cite and attribute generously, respecting the authors’ preferences
6. quote and link appropriately, and respecting the authors intent
7. try to refer to people by name, not just with a link; it gives them more of a voice.
8. constantly look for ways to cite, quote, and link to more women, persons of color, and others whose voices are typically marginalized.
9. think before I link: don’t call attention or direct a firehose of traffic to a person or community that would prefer to remain low profile. Bear in mind that on the web, explicit links tend to give the linked-to page and site more visibility, credibility, and authority; and that a link-based culture marginalizes information that’s not freely available online or is only in partial form.
10. keeping in mind past experiences and perceptions differ, remain conscious of things that are likely to trigger miscommunication or (worse) be perceived as offensive: using terms of art without context or definition; words and styles that have different meanings to different audiences; language or images with sexist or racist overtones; etc.
11. be respectful to the tone, intent, and topic of the site and thread. don’t derail threads by bringing my issues to them.
12. unless it would clash with the tone of the site, challenge other commenters’ personal attacks and racist and sexist speech and opinions — preferably in a way that doesn’t derail the discussion.
13. discuss language and patterns rather than intent
14. remember that offensive statements often stem from ignorance and unexamined privilege.
15. keep in mind the goals of educating and changing behavior (both of the speaker and of others who are reading), identifying patterns, and minimizing disruption and harm.
16. when others challenge personal attacks or racist and sexist speech, if i agree that’s what’s going on, speak up and back them: in the thread if appropriate or in a private message.
17. when the people i support are attacked unfairly, defend them publicly if appropriate — and if not, send them a message and ask what i can do
18. if the site guidelines forbid hate speech, consider asking the moderators to enforce the rules.
19. challenge others when they say things like “you’ve got to have a thick skin in the blogosphere.”*
20. don’t use others’ bad behavior as an excuse for my own.
21. please don’t feed the trolls, unless i’m doing it for a good reason and with the support of the moderators and/or community.
22. when i screw up, follow Teh Portly Dyke suggested 4As of how to fuck up: acknowledgment, apology, amends, action. And, paraphrasing Angry Black Woman, don’t expect a cookie for acknowledging it
23. do my homework: it’s not others’ job to educate me. be open and receptive and a good listener and learner on those occasions when others are enough to take the time to teach.

It’s a long list, and I’m sure there’s just as much I’ve left out; there’s a lot to keep in mind.

Writing and evolving this list has been a very valuable exercise for me, and I’d strongly encourage every ally in the blogosphere to do the same. Feel free to adopt and adapt some or all of these as starting points** — or come up with your own list; your mileage is likely to vary. The important thing is to be conscious of the effect that our individual posts have on the blogosphere, and for all of us to take the responsibility for changing the current dynamics.

Because it really is past time for excuses. We need to acknowledge problems and past mistakes and pain, and figure out how to work together as allies to transform things moving forward — and stop recreating the same dimensions of oppression.

Learning to talk with each other more respectfully is a good first step.

Additional references

Some additional references, originally intended to supplement the links elsewhere in this post and complement prof bw’s excellent Feminist Reading Tools for Recognizing and Countering Racism and Historical Reading List, both on WoC PhD.

For a basic grounding in patterns of online discourse, Susan C. Herring’s Gender and power in online communications and (with Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright) Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs; Clay Shirky’s A group is its own worst enemy; Danielle Citron’s Position Paper for the Yale Symposium on Reputation in Cyberspace, excerpted with context in Frank Pasquale’s Disparate Impact in the Blogosphere on Concurring Opinions.

For more on recent events in the blogospheres, my own Community defense vs. trolls in the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook groups on Liminal States; Pam Spaulding’s “The Blind Spot” on Pandagon; Michael Marshall’s “Don’t Flame me, Bro” on the New Scientist’s blog; alegre’s “Writers’ strike on Kos” on myDD; “nubian speaks” on blac(k)ademic; Sudy’s “Surveying the Damage” (part 1 and part 2) on A Womyn’s Ecdysis brownfemipower’s “Why mustn’t we tear down that dirty little house?” on La Chola; and Blackamazon’s The margin on the margins, One Week and I cry on Having read the fine print.

For a more detailed list on a narrower subject, please see the resource page on Dealing with Hate Speech and Trolls on the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy wiki.

Originally published as draft May 4. Last major update May 14.

thanks to Steven, Mikal, Malron, Greg, Deborah, and others for feedback

apologies for any mis-citations or mis-attributions

* If you’re skeptical that this makes a difference, please read Susan C. Herring’s Gender and power in online communications followed by Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke’s coordinated statement and the discussions of Kos’ response by Nezua, Jessica, Amanda, terrance, BitchPhD, and the many others linked to from XicanoPwr’s The Word According to Kos.

** like all original content on this blog, this post is under a Creative Commons attribution license. Preferred citation:

• reference material: “Allies in the blogosphere” by Jon Pincus, on Liminal States, May 2008
• blog: please mention the title “Allies in the blogosphere” and link here; if feasible also include my name and/or a reference to Liminal States.
  

]]> http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?feed=rss2&p=140 9 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=125 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=125#comments Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:02:49 +0000 jon http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=125 From The Angry Black Woman:

I call a Carnival. The Carnival of Allies. Where self-identified allies write to other people like themselves about why this or that oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.

And when I say allies, I’m talking about any and every type. PoC can be (and should be) allies to other PoC, or to LGBTQ people if they are straight, or any number of other combinations. If you feel like you’re an ally and have something to say about that, you should submit to this carnival.

More, and a submission form, in Allies Talking.  Deadline is May 5, and she’ll be posting the links in the second or third week of May.  It’s a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, so I’ll almost certainly be writing something … I encourage others to as well.

Since first being developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1970s, theories of intersectionality have become a powerful lens for examining questions of race and gender. In the interim, advances in network theory have shown the importance of intersectional hubs; and research in cognitive diversity and problem solving have highlighted the unique contributions of those at the intersections. Does the recent development of social computing technologies, allowing “micro-niche” generation of content as well as enabling people to participate more easily in multiple online social networks, point to new approaches for valuing and leveraging intersectionality? And what does this imply about technology policy in a web 2.0 world?

To explore this area, I propose an joint keynote session (perhaps over lunch or dinner), featuring an expert on intersectionality and an expert on social networking. Crenshaw herself, currently at UCLA law school, would be ideal for the intersectionality expert [unconfirmed; if she's not available, there are many excellent alternatives]. From the social networking perspective, researchers such as TL Taylor, danah boyd, Joi Ito, and Clay Shirky who explicitly consider questions of race and gender would be good choices.

Thoughts? As always, critiques, suggestions and feedback welcome!

1. the “speakers”, presenting the arguments for and against, are both male.
2. the “moderator” (who frames the issue, provides commentary on both speakers’ arguments, and “will peruse all correspondence from the floor and raise points that are of particular interest or merit with the two speakers”) is also male.
3. the women are all “guest participants”

Marginalized much?

Things are even more extreme in the “age” dimension — in a comment in the debate, I asked whether there were plans to involve any current or recent students as guest participants. And although it’s much harder to infer reliably from photos and language, there appears to be even more extreme marginalization in the race dimension … it’s a mighty white-looking bunch of folks they’ve got.

One of the thing that makes this lack of diversity more acute is the Economist’s “Oxford 2.0” debate rules:

In our reconception, the proposition and the opposition are each represented by individual speakers—experts in their fields chosen by The Economist’s staff to match the proposition at hand.

Because, after all, we wouldn’t want those (nudge-nudge) other perspectives to get equal standings with the guys hand-picked by The Economist’s staff.

When Kevin Logan went to his high school prom in 2006, he was hoping it would be a night to remember. What he’ll remember, though, will be standing outside in the parking lot while his classmates danced inside.

As Logan walked up to the prom, clad in a pink prom dress, West Side High School Principal Diana Rouse blocked the doorway and refused to let him inside….

Logan claims Rouse ordered him to leave and called security. Humiliated, Logan claims, he walked to the parking lot to take pictures with his friends while everyone else danced inside. As they snapped photos, word spread inside that Logan was not being allowed into the prom. According to the suit, students and teachers came outside to voice their support, with some asking Rouse to change her mind. She refused

Mallory Simpson’s excellent article on CourtTVNews has more details, including the encouraging news that a woman student was allowed into the prom dressed in a tux.  It also illustrates the routine humiliations that people in high school for people face if they fall outside societal gender norms:

During the first week of Logan’s senior year in high school in Gary, Ind., he was taken to Rouse’s office by security guards, where he was questioned about the purse he was wearing.  But, he was sent back to class without being disciplined, according to the suit.

How generous: they merely dragged him to the principal’s office, but didn’t actually discipline him, for expressing his gender identity.

jon

PS: A May 2006 article from the Advocate gives some additional background.

• Why do some men insult their partners? concludes “men who habitually insult their wives or girlfriends do so, somewhat paradoxically, as part of a broader strategy to prevent them from leaving for someone else – what evolutionary psychologists call ‘mate retention’”

• Does your boyfriend let you out of his sight? suggests that “certain male behaviours tended to be associated with the use of violence against women.” The ones they discussed in the summary are pretty much what you’d expect: “men who were violent toward their partners also tended to use emotional manipulation (e.g. threatening to hurt themselves if their partner left them), to monopolise their partner’s time (e.g. not letting her go out without them), and/or to punish their partner’s infidelity (e.g. by becoming angry when she flirted with anyone else).” By contrast, ‘mate retention behaviors’ such as telling your partner “I love you” and spending lots of money on her* is associated with a lack of violence.

[The mate retention inventory (.doc file) makes interesting reading ... too bad there's nothing in the digest summary about the assocations of "56. Wore my partner’s clothes in front of others". I'd really like to check out the full paper ... alas, at $29.00 for the online copy, it can wait until I get to a library. But I digress.]

Of course, whether or not it’s linked to physical violence, as a mate retention behavior, insulting the other person clearly has the goal and effect of tearing down their self-esteem. So do quite a few others others on the list, such as ‘17. Told other men terrible things about my partner so that they wouldn’t like her’ and the first batch of the ones listed above. By contrast things like ‘58. Complimented my partner on her appearance’ and the second batch (”I love you/will spend money on you”) show appreciation and are more likely to be done in a way that builds self-esteem. My guess would be that there would be a general correlation between self-esteem-destroying mechanisms and violence … it’d be interesting to see the data. I wonder if the authors would make an anonymized version of their data available?

Anyhow. Two thought-provoking pieces of research, and an interesting synergy. Other thoughts welcome.

jon

* although presumably these results largely generalize in a gender- and orientation-independent way!

A few especially worth highlighting (all previously from Kevin’s list on A Call to Men):

1. Acknowledge and understand how sexism, male dominance and male privilege lay the foundation for all forms of violence against women.

2. Examine and challenge our individual sexism and the role that we play in supporting men who are abusive.

3. Recognize and stop colluding with other men by getting out of our socially defined roles, and take a stance to end violence against women.

4. Remember that our silence is affirming. When we choose not to speak out against men’s violence, we are supporting it.

Well said. Actually, they’re all worth highlighting; and worth reading in context, so please do.

Thoughts on these recommendations, the rest of the article, other articles in the Carnival, related topics?

You were useless (I met with you several times at Microsoft) and it looks like you still are. I am glad to hear you are gone – it made no sense for Microsoft to pay you a hefty salary given the “work” you were doing. All this high level bullshit…

I let the comment through because it’s a great illustration of the kinds of attitude and environment that’s disappointingly common at Microsoft these days, unwilling to take the time to understand new ideas and so threatened by anything “high level” that might actually lead to a change in the system, that the response is to hide behind the cloak of anonymity to spread around virulent negative abuse in completely inappropriate situations.  Yeah, that’ll help.

Imagine working in an environment where this kind of behavior is widely tolerated.  When I was at Microsoft, I got reactions similar to this from maybe 5-10% of the people, and so on large mailing lists or with the 200+ people who attended a mashup the odds were extremely high that somebody would jump in with some garbage like this — with superficially more polite phrasing if their names were associated with it, but still the same mix of knee-jerk uncomprehending rejection and personal attack.

And bear in mind the impact this has not just on the person receiving the abuse (me), but all those witnessing it.  No wonder so many people at Microsoft are unhappy and frustrated.

Andrew Sullivan suggests in Goodbye to all that that Obama’s real significance is that “unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” Putting aside for the moment the question of why Atlantic isn’t embarrassed to be paying and promoting Sullivan, it’s an article well worth reading for many reasons.

In the first section think Sullivan does an excellent job describing several dimensions of divisiveness and the general sense by the vast majority that we’re ready to get beyond that — I remember dignitarian Robert Fuller saying a similar thing after his All Rise book tour over a year ago and so it’s nice to see that it’s now getting accepted even by the testosterone crowd.

For me it started to go off the rails for a bunch of reasons at the paragraph starting with “of the viable national candidates…” Who is Sullivan to be judging who’s “viable”? What affect does his restriction to “Obama and possibly McCain” have on the rest of the discussion? At this stage, how could anybody possibly view McCain as a transformational candidate of healing? And so on. By the time we get to “What does he offer? First and foremost: his face.” — laid out at the top of a page, no less, to highlight its importance — it’s unusually revealing: of Sullivan’s blinders, and of how deeply cultural norms frame our discourse. Too bad there wasn’t discussion of the very challenging intersectional issues related to race and orientation; I would have thought progress here is key to getting beyond our divides, and Sullivan apparently not only doesn’t see it that way, but doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning.  Revealing indeed.

Hey, I said it was worth reading, I didn’t say I thought it was a good article.

Marc Ambinder’s subscriber’s-only Teacher and Apprentice by contrast is a great piece, fully living up to its billing as a “story of nasty surprises, dueling war rooms, and the Drudge Report.” I thought the author did a great job of presenting both perspectives, putting the question of media coverage squarely on the table, and highlighting the challenge Obama faces trying to go the (relatively) high road. How to defend onesself against unfair accusations and framing, how to call out your opponents spin and sometimes outright lies, without looking like you’re “going negative” yourself? How to get real discussion of this in a situation where most media is either co-opted, colluding, racist, or hostile?

The idea of Drudge and the Clintons, together again for the first time, is well worth calling out in the subhead. Do the Clintons really believe this kind of alliance is good either for the causes they believe in, or the party they claim to care so much about? And it’s a nice tie between the articles by illustrating Obama’s transformational bridge-building possibilities: these enemies and ideologically-opposed men and women who have fought so bitterly in the past have indeed joined forces in response to him. Yay! Let’s all hold hands, sing folk songs, and go negative — just like Matt used to do to you!

And at the meta-level, it’s really disappointing to see Sullivan’s (intellectually shoddy, blatantly racist, from a conservative standpoint) piece being freely-available, while Ambinder’s (well-thought-out, noticeably more conscious, from a neutral-to-progressive standpoint) article is locked behind subscriber’s-only walls. Oh well. At least it’s an unusually stark example of how restricting IP invariably leads to a situation where views and people favoring the entrenched power base get preferential treatments to dissenting views.

Male and female employees who said they had witnessed either the sexual harassment of female staff, or uncivil, rude or condescending behaviour towards them, tended to report lower psychological well-being and job satisfaction. In turn, lower psychological well-being was associated with greater burn out and increased thoughts about quitting.

….

Crucially, while these negative effects were not large, they were associated purely with observing the mistreatment of others, not with being a victim of mistreatment oneself – the researchers took account of that (for participants of both sexes) in their statistical analysis.

It’s especially interesting to see “uncivil behavior” called out. There have been several times in the last few years where for one reason or another I’ve spent a chunk of time in environments where this kind of behavior towards women is normalized, and it certainly does have those effects on me — and many others I talk to.

One of the clearest examples was at Microsoft with the Litebulb distribution list (DL), where the attack-based and disrespectful norms of discourse combine with the 99% male participation and lack of understanding of “soft” (i.e., feminine-identified) disciplines such as marketing, communication theory, and diversity to create an enviroment that’s extremely hostile to women. Since it was (and probably still is) the largest innovation-focused DL at Microsoft, and filled with intelligent and analytical people, it was a key potential channel for culture change — and a fertile recruiting ground for my Ad Astra work — so from time to time I participated; and I could really notice the difference in my state of mind just being surrounded by that attitude. Quite a few people, of all genders, who had stopped participating there told me that they felt noticeably less irritable at work as a result; and with several colleagues, I could see real differences in their behaviors more generally that appeared to correlate with how much time they were spending on the DL. Of course this is all anecdotal, but very consistent with the results from this study — and elsewhere. As Bob Sutton points out:

This research is so important because — consistent with prior research on bullying — it provides further evidence that allowing assholes to run rampant in an organization doesn’t just hurt the victims, it hurts everyone.

While the study specifically looked at gender issues, this dynamic is likely to generalize to a large extent to other diversity- or power-based dimensions. It’s also interesting to think about how this might apply to other contexts, such as social networks — so for example the Kathy Sierra episode, and more generally the lack of civility of large factions of both the progressive and neocon blogospheres.

I’m a big believer in the importance of civil discourse for many reasons; looks like I just added another to my list.