Kathy Sierra points out that there is a difference in being passionate for the company and being passionate about the work, saying that employers should hold on to employees who are passionate about their work.
She lists four questions which can be asked to determine if someone is passionate about their work. I thought I’d answer them here.
When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute “attended an industry conference or took a course”)
If you count industry related blogs a “trade/professional journal” I read everyday. I also keep up with the latest industry related literature and right now I’m in the middle of About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper.
Name at least two of the key people in your field.
Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeff Veen, Eric Meyer, Andy Budd, Dave Shea, Mike Davidson, Shaun Inman, Jason Santa Maria … the list goes on and on.
If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work?
Absolutely. In fact, I’ve already spent some of my own money on tools.
If you did not do this for work, would you still do it (or something related to it) as a hobby?
Certainly, that’s how I became interested in this work in the first place, it was simply a hobby that I am attempting to turn into a career.
First, I just want to say that any criticism here is not meant personally towards any individual mentioned. These are all guys I respect incredibly. They are my heros. Eric Meyer, John Gruber, Jermery Keith and Anil Dash are all people I look up to for inspiration. I must just speak my mind and hope that the questions I ask might somehow get answered.
The issue of gender diversity at web conferences is still a hot topic around the web. Big names are throwing their opinion into the ring.
Jermery Keith is disturbed and vows to do better next time with his web conference, d.Construct.
Anil Dash rails on both Eric Meyer and John Gruber for being dissenters. He calls Eric’s desire to have a marketable conference “boring and unambitious” because he already has an audience. Anil calls John’s argument the “laziest, least persuasive argument of all” and questions if he is not being “willfully naive.” Funny, he doesn’t seem to address John’s argument at all. It seems to me that Anil has missed the big point John was trying to confront, the very same that I raised with my post on the topic.
I’m not defending the status quo, not in the slightest. I don’t disagree that seeing more women speakers at web conferences is important. What I’d like to see even more, though, is more women in the industry in general. I think picking on web conferences is far too shortsighted an approach, and I think the energy is better spent somewhere else.
In our rush to solve this problem we need to figure out what the real cause is. People are blaming the organizers of web conferences. Perhaps fairly, perhaps unfairly, but I think it’s reasonable to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the problem is a larger one inherent in the industry, not with any particular person, organization, or conference. Without addressing the big picture, we’re going to be stuck spinning our wheels.
I don’t have the answers, but I think these questions haven’t really been asked or addressed. Without doing so next year this debate will come up again, like it always does. And we’ll still be stuck in the mud spinning our wheels.
Anyway, I’m going to be coming back to this later tonight. I would like to search out some female opinion on this and maybe then I’ll have some further comments.
Just a thought: Maybe starting this blog by tackling gender diversity isn’t a good idea. I just started this thing and already I find myself in a heated debate over something like this. Okay, not really debate, since no one reads this blog no one is responding to me. Anyway, I’ve never been one to shy away from controversial topics, and I’m here to speak my mind.
Jason Kottke recently addressed the problem of gender diversity at web conferences in the industry, pointing out that at web conferences men speakers outnumber women speakers by at least 4 men to every woman. This is, indeed, a troubling issue that needs to be addressed by the industry at large.
However, I must raise some issues that Jason neglects. When looking at the statistics we must ask ourselves a few other questions to put them in a larger perspective. What is the ratio of men to women in the web industry compared to the population at large? If it is disproportionate, why is that so? Could these statistics merely mirror the number of women in the industry? Does that mirror the larger population?
The problem could be a larger one, and looking at the overall industry seems to be going more to the root of the problem than merely looking at web conferences. If there is a disproportionate amount of men to women in the web industry compared to the larger population we must address this issue before we start laying blame to those who are putting on conferences. The lack of women speakers could be derived from the larger issue of a lack of women in the industry.
I don’t have any statistics to make a detailed assessment of this problem, if there is one. What needs to be done, before we start burning people at the stake, is to make a general overall assessment of the industry. From looking at the statistics of women speakers at conferences they would appear to closely map to the proportion of men to women in the interactive media design major at my school. This, of course, is not based on statistics but merely my observations. If that is representative of the entire industry (I’m not saying that it is), then we have a bigger problem.
Gender diversity at conferences is a very important issue. Women play an important role in our industry and we need to figure out if there is a reason why there are less women to men and if that maps to the larger population (my guess is that it doesn’t). Bringing up a smaller issue like this is important, but I think there needs to be some context in which these statistics are brought up.
February 24, 2007 7:22 PM | TrackBacks (0)
