If you've been to a virtual conference lately or hung out on Twitter, you might not realize what you're missing: women. Hopefully, the conference has a healthy roster of women speakers. And, just as hopefully, you follow women on Twitter. But in both places, you're almost certainly not getting a high-fidelity version of women's voices. Instead, you're almost certainly hearing or reading a dumbed-down version of what they could share if only we'd stop shouting them down.
In a series of conversations with a number of high-profile women in tech, each told me how online abuse has pushed them to retreat. They talk on Twitter, but rarely share insights into hard technical problems. As one senior developer said, "I'm not even able to share 1-2% of the depth of my knowledge on a medium like Twitter." Why? According to another, "It's such a headache dealing with the comments on technical tweets."
And so we get less technical insight from these and other women, effectively turning them into 1950s American housewives who can talk about their pets but not the distributed server farms they may build and manage. What is wrong with us?
Continue reading: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-were-silencing-women-in-tech-one-tweet-at-a-time/
In a series of conversations with a number of high-profile women in tech, each told me how online abuse has pushed them to retreat. They talk on Twitter, but rarely share insights into hard technical problems. As one senior developer said, "I'm not even able to share 1-2% of the depth of my knowledge on a medium like Twitter." Why? According to another, "It's such a headache dealing with the comments on technical tweets."
And so we get less technical insight from these and other women, effectively turning them into 1950s American housewives who can talk about their pets but not the distributed server farms they may build and manage. What is wrong with us?
Continue reading: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-were-silencing-women-in-tech-one-tweet-at-a-time/
