Comments on: mesh: a conference by, for and featuring white men

By: Off Topic :: Playing in your walled wurstgarten

Off Topic :: Playing in your walled wurstgarten — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:33:49 +0000

[...] this week, after my post about mesh’s lack of visible reasons for a having a bunch of white guys as their keynote [...]

By: Off Topic :: Out come the long knives

Off Topic :: Out come the long knives — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:54:17 +0000

[...] organizers explaining why they were yet another tech conference with no women keynote speakers, I wrote a post that parodied their unnamed reasons for this. I didn’t give a lot of background to this in [...]

By: Podonomics » Blog Archive » Pink Divide Credo

Podonomics » Blog Archive » Pink Divide Credo — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 01:43:15 +0000

[...] God, this argument again? Geez, we keep harping on the same problems over and over. When does this end? [...]

By: Betty

Betty — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:42:56 +0000

What idiots. Everyone knows that girls get cooties from boys, not the other way around. (insert rolling eyes emoticon here)

By: sandy

sandy — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:42:13 +0000

Mark, I sent the following email to Stuart on March 12th, and have received no response, so felt that you weren’t really interested in a conversation:

I was at mesh last year, and I saw a lot of the pre-conference noise around how few women speakers were there. I’ve also be participating in a lot of conversations with others in the TorCamp community lately about the difficulties that some companies have in hiring women engineers/technologists: many small technology firms have no women engineers at all, although I’ve run a 40-person company as CEO/CTO, and my entire technical management team was female, so I know that it can be done. I believe that some of the reasons for the lack of women in these jobs is cultural, but much of it is corporate culture/personality, which can be unwittingly unfriendly to women who might consider applying for jobs at a company. Given the high participation rates of women in using social networking applications, and the different viewpoints that women engineers can bring to a development team, it’s critical for Web 2.0 companies to be aware of whether they’re sending the wrong message to potential female job candidates.

I’d love to hear and participate in a conversation about hiring women in technology, particularly from companies with good hiring ratios about their reasons for success. Is there potential for such a panel at mesh this year? I’d be very interested in contributing to such a panel.

I’d be happy to have a conversation, but it seems strange that I have to resort to public ridicule in order to make you pay attention to my request.

By: Mark Evans

Mark Evans — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:20:35 +0000

Sandy,
If you’d like to talk our mesh and offer us some feedback, I’d be more than happy to speak with you.

cheers, Mark