The third wave embraces contradictions and conflict, and accommodates
diversity and change.

 – Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction

The web site for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this week credits venture capitalist John Doerr with coining the term “third wave” when Charlie interviewed him at the first Disrupt earlier this year. John’s not talking about third wave feminism, of course, but the “innovations taking place with social, mobile and commerce platforms and applications”.  In either case it’s hard to argue with Erick’s conclusion on TechCrunch that a panel with John and his partner Bing interviewing Mark of Zynga (TechCrunch’s CEO of the year) is the perfect start for #TCDisrupt.

John’s known for his 2008 quote about the pattern he sees correlated with success: white, male, nerds who have dropped out of prestigious schools and have no social skills. Michael Arrington’s overwhelmingly-white, overwhelmingly-male,  preview The Agenda of Awesome also features the author of The Diversity Myth and the founder of a social network that’s been described as one of the most sexist sites on the internet.

Awesome.

As well as shameless plugs by and for conference participants, the main news on TechCrunch this last week has been "Angelgate."  Kara Swisher of BoomTown nicely characterizes it as a “manly hissy fit amongst a passel of white dudes”: a circle-jerk of mutual promotion sparked by Michael’s allegation of collusion by angel investors and “leaked” emails being published. Guess where? Meanwhile conference sponsors Google and Intuit have just admitted to collusion with other valley icons including Intel and Apple.

All in all it’s a vivid snapshot of the clubby overwhelmingly-white, overwhelmingly-male network of technologists, bloggers, and investors who have been in the driver’s seat in Silicon Valley for a while now.

But the time’s they are a-changing.

As Allyson Kapin pointed out in last week’s Women Who Tech telesummit, women in technology have made a huge amount of progress storming the clubhouse this last year. J’ame Ohm, winner of this weekend’s Disrupt Hackathon is a great example. The all-female panel Tuesday morning discussing women in technology is another.

Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan describes the kerfuffle that led to the panel. Shira Ovide’s Wall Street Journal article quoted Rachel Sklar of Mediaite and Change the Ratio on the conference’s “overwhelming maleness”. Michael responded sharply with Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.  Or at least stop blaming me. Hilarity ensued.

Rachel is on the panel, along with web marketing strategist Michelle Greer, who took the lead (and the brunt of abuse) in the comments in the TechCrunch discussion. They’re joined by Lauren Leto of Bnter, Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource, Sara Chipps of Girl Developer, and Cyan Banister of Zivity, who Michael’s quoted as saying “women [stink] as entrepreneurs a lot of the time because they are nurturing and not risk-taking enough by nature”. Alas, as Zennie Abraham points out on SF Gate, there aren’t any blacks or Latinas on the panel, at least not yet.* Still, it’s a very good step, potentially analogous to Lynn d Johnson’s 2005 SXSW panel on Blogging While Black, and it should be an interesting range of perspectives.

Between now and then there are all-white guy male sessions on topics like building internet gems, power, the future of venture capital, consumerization of enterprise, and design vs. engineering. Because, y’know, what could women possibly have to say about any of those subjects?  Oh, and Beth Comstock of GE is speaking about Cultures of Collaboration. Hopefully she’ll cover the value of diverse teams and an inclusive environment.

White guys are allowed to talk about diversity too, and it’ll be interesting to see whether any of them do.  With women in the majority on most social network sites, avid use of Twitter in the Black and Latin@ communities, and statastics showing what women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men, it seems a mighty important topic for the Silicon Valley elite (and the startups battling it out for $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup) to discuss.

To be continued …

jon

* or the rest of the conference, as far as I can tell. It looks to me like rapper/CEO Chamillionaire might once again be the only black speaker; see Shireen Mitchell’s perspective on this.

This article originally appeared on Liminal States.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are….  Statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs.

– Michael Arrington in TechCrunch

Privileged much? *

The lastest firestorm about women and entrepeneurship got kicked off by Shira Ovide’s excellent Wall Street Journal article Addressing the Lack of Women Running Tech Startups.  With some fine quotes from Rachel Sklar, Dina Kaplan, Yuli Ziv, and Fred Wilson, as well as solid discussion in the comments, I thought it was a great read.  But not everybody agreed.

Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.

Oh please.  Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan.

Yes, it’s hard.  Stop whining.  Take some responsibility.

Allyson Kapin’s Stop Playing the Blame Game, Ja-Nae Duane 5 Simple Ways to Help Women as Tech Leaders, and Jessica Wakeman’s 18 Reasons Your Company Might Be a Sausagefest all have some specific suggestions for Michael and TechCrunch — or anybody else who’s working on diversity.  Here’s my perspective.

If you really want to make progress, treat it the way you would any other business problem you take seriously. Set goals, put a plan together, hire good people to help you, and do some real outreach.  Work with organizations like Change The Ratio, Women Who Tech, Anita Borg Institute, GeekFeminism, BlogHer, Fem2pt0, TechMavens, Women 2.0, ASTIA and so on. Invite them to guest post regularly on TechCrunch.  Go to their events.  Pay a diversity consultant and invest in their recommendations.   Oh and while you’re at it please work on race, age, and other biases in TechCrunch and your other enterprises.

Or not.  It’s up to you, of course.  But if you ignore all this input and keep acting defensive, don’t expect people to see you as taking diversity seriously.

There’s plenty more privilege (along with some sexism and misogyny) in the comment thread.  More positively there’s some good stuff as well, including perspectives from Michelle Lee of Mamabread, Michelle Greer, LToTheWolf, Cindy Gallop of If We Ran the World, and many others.   Women and allies are underrepresented in the thread but more than holding their own     There’s also a brief appearance from Fred Wilson, and a great riposte by self-described angry feminist Millercan, who responds to a clueless comment about meritocracy with:

have been in tech (my guess) since before you were in kindergarten. i’ve been rewarded based on merit. but never as well as men who actually shipped shitty products, or took out 16 million organizations with narcissistic behavior.

There have been some excellent followup posts as well, including from  Cindy Gallop, Michelle Greer,  Jamelle Bouie, K. Tempest Bradford and Terri on Geek Feminism,  Eva Smith, Ivan Boothe, Laurie on Seldo.com, Alyson Shontel, Kay on Feministe, clarely on Mavenity, Helena Stone, Fred Wilson and Irin Carmon’s What Do “Where are the Women” Sh*tstorms Achieve? article in Jezebel.

That said, Arrington’s position has gotten some support, too. Here’s what the all-male team at Charles River Ventures has to say on Twitter:

I think of articles like this as a fascinating snapshot of how privilege, combined with the "guys talking to guys who talk about guys" cliquing behavior, leads to a remarkably convenient blind spot for Arrington — as well as a lot of his readers, and so many other privileged white guys.

At the same time, though, it’s also a great sign of the momentum that the women-in-technology networks and their allies are making.  The steady coverage in Fast Company, Mercury News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other high profile sites, along with the overwhelming evidence, increases the pressure on the “objective” defenders of the status quo.  It’s getting harder and harder to deny there’s a problem, and that the advantages moving ahead will go to those who address it most quickly.

So I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more “anxious masculinity under threat” blog posts.

Something to look forward to!

jon

* In fact, most don’t agree. Michael presumably knows the data that’s been published in TechCrunch and elsewhere about the superior performance of women-run startup. And yet less than 10% of the successes are by women. Unless you’re sexist enough to believe that women don’t want to run companies or are for some reason less qualified, there’s no way to reconcile this a belief that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy — let alone that women have systemic advantages.

Check out many insightful comments to Jon’s post here.

It’s not that Twitter is a utopia by any means. However, the power structure is still in flux. So a collaborative effort between progressives, youth, feminists, women of color, LGBTQ activists — across the US and internationally — has a chance to make a big difference.

One simple way to start is to set up a new shared hashtag for the different groups to collaborate. In Seth Godin’s terminology, the users of each hashtag can be viewed as a tribe; we need a place for the tribes to get together to discuss how to work together effectively.

We propose #p2 (for "Progressives 2.0") as a shared hashtag. The name is a hat-tip to the #fem2 hashtag as well as Web 2.0 social computing technologies.

The #p2 hashtag and strategies for progressives on Twitter, Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus on The Exception, February 13

 At the Fem2.0 conference in February 2009, a presentation by linkfluence highlighted the asymmetrical relationship between the larger "progressive blogosphere" and feminist and womanist blogs. It’s the latest in a long line of work including Shelley Powers’ Guys Don’t Link, Susan C. Herring et. al.’s Women and Children Last, and many more discussions of diversity issues in the blogospheres.* After seeing the rapid spread of information about Twitter Vote Report via the "women in technology and politics," the success of #motrinmoms, and the #fem2 work, Tracy and I started to believe that Twitter provides an opportunity to engage with communities marginalized by the "progressive blogosphere."

In the four months since we started it, #p2 has steadily grown to be the largest progressive hashtag on Twitter. According to wthashtag, over 1300 people have tweeted in the last week. The steady stream of LGBTQ activism on #p2 and our experiences working together with #fem2 on #fairpay and #diversityfail/#diversitywin are both strong indications that we were on-target about the opportunity for engagement on Twitter. The Paycheck Fairness Act activism on April 28 was a particularly vivid example of this: while the "big blogs" conspicuously ignored it, #p2 members helped out on Twitter and in the blogosphere.

How can we build on these early successes?

How can we improve things that haven’t gone as well — for example, the representation biases and ongoing sexist comments on the #p2 hashtag?

Thanks to fem2pt0 for inviting us to host the June 21 Father’s Day Twittercast on this subject — Sunday, 7 p.m. Pacific/10 p.m. Eastern! No need to wait until then to start the discussion, though. Please use this thread for ideas, discussions, criticisms, questions, and suggestions.

Here’re a few ideas to kick things off:

* Coordinate on flash activism efforts like #fairplay, with joint work on retweeting tactics, tweeting points, highlighting blog posts, and Digging. By combining the strengths (media and activism expertise,networks, well-respected blogs) of the people involved in #p2 and #fem2, we can be an incredibly powerful force.

* Work to bring feminist, womanist, and other diverse perspectives to multipartisan issues like privacy as well as "progressive issues" like EFCA.

* Continue to put effort into creating a progressive discussion space where women and women of color are fairly represented. #p2 chats are typically about 40-45% women; in the "raw" discussions on the hashtag, though, 80% or more of the tweets are from men. (There are detailed statistics and discussion here and here.)

Thoughts about these? Other ideas, discussions, criticisms, questions, and suggestions?

Please discuss!

jon

* Diversity Online, on the #p2 wiki, has a short bibliography; more about my own perspectives in the gender and diversity categories on my blog Liminal States.