Category Archive

Carrie Bishop asks why we see the same people – men – speaking at conferences:

…it’s not about women being better qualified to speak on the basis of their gender – no one wants the idiot quota to go up at events. Rather, we want good quality speakers that reflect a diversity of opinion and it’s impossible to get that with only one demographic slice. Women often have a different take on things (not better, not worse, just different) and I like to hear different perspectives. The more demographically mixed an audience is, the better for challenge, difference of opinion, different cultural assumptions, and energy.

She sets out a few possible solutions for getting more women’s voices heard. What do you think?

This article argues that Etsy.com – the ebay-style site for people to buy and sell handmade crafts – has become a women’s ghetto, full of hobbyists making little or no money from the site.

The proportion of male sellers on Etsy is less than 4% – smaller than in nursing.

“I think for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. This, I suspect, explains the absence of men. They are immune to the allure of this fantasy. They have evaluated the site on purely economic terms and found it wanting.”

Research at Reading University has shown women leaders are more likely to censor the language they use at work to avoid being judged.

Students interviewed 10 senior female and 10 senior male leaders from FTSE 500 companies about how they speak to colleagues.

They found that women consciously police what they say so they neither sound too feminine, and therefore weak, nor too masculine, and therefore assertive.

Link in the title. I thought this research was an interesting counterbalance to the Deborah Cameron book we’re reading for the next meeting.