There she is in the corner. We all see her, but so far we haven't talked about her.  She's Henrietta, the 600 lb. gorilla.  You know the one I'm talking about—the fact that, of all the regular bloggers at InsideRIA, I'm the only one that's female. I didn't even really notice her at first, but it seems events have conspired more and more to bring her to my attention.

First, the social media sites were abuzz with the fallout from the presentation by Hoss Gifford at FlashBelt 2009. One of the more prominent blogs detailing the reaction to this presentation was Geek Girls. I'll state right off the bat that I did not attend FlashBelt, and I will admit that I'm a fan of shows that feature racy humor, such as Family Guy, American Dad, and SouthPark.  So I'm probably not the right person to venture an opinion on whether this presentation was beyond the pale.  What intrigues me about it, however, is the way in which this event became an event for women in technology to band together and venture their opinions on something that was of interest to them as much as women as IT professionals.

Next, Eileen Brown, whom I follow on Twitter, posted a wonderful link to a project she is involved in, Connecting Women in Technology. This project reminds me, in a kind of sad way, of a time shortly after I was hired to work for a division of Litton based in Ocean Springs, MS.  That division shared a building with another division of Litton. We were filling out the team, and a few months after I started work, we hired an African-American gentleman.  It seemed like every African-American in the building of both sexes in both divisions came out to welcome him.  It was a lovely sight to see, but it underlined the fact that the women in the building had no such solidarity.

Finally, of course, there was the election in Iran, where the women of that country are working to attain equal treatment with men in ways that we take for granted here. 

In my travels around the web, collecting the links that pepper this post, I came across a Geek Feminism wiki.  I admit I have mixed feelings about it.  On the one hand, it's nice to have a collection of resources on the subject, but on the other it seems like the main people who will read and contribute to it are not the ones who need to be educated.  That probably sounds like a contradiction, that I don't necessarily have a problem with Hoss Gifford's FlashBelt presentation, yet I still think there are people who need to be educated.

Let me explain what I mean.  I recently came across a post about The Matthew Effect, which, in a nutshell says that if people in management don't see you as having management potential, they're less likely to give you the mentoring that's likely to make you successful if you're promoted to management. I don't really think that male managers intentionally go about plotting how to keep women down, but I believe it's more a case that they think "I'm wonderful at this job, and I have characteristics x, y, and z.  Bill has these characteristics, while Jane is completely different.  Obviously Bill is the best management candidate."  This could be a real loss, not just to Jane, but to the organization she works for, because her very differences could be the things that could take her organization to the next level.  And of course this doesn't just apply to management, but to all sorts of positions where primarily men make the hiring and promotional decisions.

I think it would benefit men, women, and the organizations they work for, if not just men, but women also, learned to value those things that make women different from men.

Read more from Amy Blankenship.