Accidentally in Code

Tag: attention

  • Lists of Women Don’t Change Anything

    Lists of Women Don’t Change Anything

    Group One Odd Huddled Meerkat Family Meerkats

    I have mixed feelings about lists of women. Well I say mixed: my feelings on lists are, broadly, negative.

    I understand the appeal — either people genuinely believe that people not being aware of women is a problem. Or they think that with a list this can really, finally, be refuted.

    It seems unlikely that either of these two things are actually the problem. It really should not be news to people (men) — in 2017 — that women make up fully 50% of the population. And if that’s not news, then does a list of women change anything? Can they just continue to apply the same filters like “oh she’s not qualified”, “I’ve never heard of her”. Maybe they find someone who is “qualified” (which usually means “massively overqualified”) who they can offer an unflattering last minute invitation to, and then complain when she turns it down?

    The phrasing of “qualified” is deliberate, because it is the phrasing that allows us to go from “fully 50% of the population” to “zero” and put the blame squarely on the people who apparently did not show up, did not do the work, did not “qualify”.

    Except this isn’t the Boston Marathon, or some kind of standardized test: it’s a subjective and largely undocumented process. The word “qualified” is just a vague descriptor for a bias vector.

    These lists are really just another packaging of women for the male gaze. Like, you couldn’t see individuals, so let’s make you a collection.

    Regularly, I see some kind of list of women. Sometimes my name is on it, but mostly it is not. The only time being on a list had any kind of effect on my life was when it was a list of 👾🐊 harassment targets. Note: not a good one. It inspired a level of paranoia over who can know where I’m going that I still live with today.

    But I understand — especially with more comprehensive lists — that being left off feels like being left out. That it can seem like — yet another — way for our achievements to be erased. Yet another way to remind us that we don’t, in fact, belong.

    We think, in tech, that attention is valuable. I think the pervasiveness of the ad-based business model has corrupted our thinking here. Attention is not an inherently valuable metric — it’s only valuable when people act on it.

    If you click an ad, it has value. If you don’t, it doesn’t. There is some nebulous concept called “brand awareness” that tries to capture attention as a metric. Overall you can calculate another metric called “return on ad spend”. Marketing is a numbers game, now.

    But when it comes to diversity, we don’t have those metrics. We start to buy the idea that attention is valuable, when mostly it is not. Only some attention has a little value.

    “Diversity attention” is at best worthless and at worst harmful. The only valuable attention is to work and/or impact. It’s easy to conflate the two — when I write about D&I it gets some attention, and that attention has (some) value. That value is a little higher than attention I might get for being “diverse” (better: “under-indexed”). The attention that has made a difference to me, though, has been the attention that focused on my work. Sometimes I worry that the work I have done on D&I has obscured that. I have become “Cate, woman in tech”, to the exclusion of everything else.

    If I’m on some list by virtue of being a woman in a field with few women, and a few people have heard of me, it doesn’t mean anything. And if you aren’t, it doesn’t mean anything about you, either. I’m sure what you do is valuable, I’m sure you have interesting things to say. The amount of attention we receive does not define us — what is more important is who we are and what we do.

  • The Attention Game

    The Attention Game

    Danbo al Sol
    Credit: Flickr / Andrés Nieto Porras

    There are many things that alarm me about the tech industry, but one of them is how much of it runs on ads, and therefore on attention. A business model of millions of users -> ??? -> Profit. And the answer to ??? is: sell them shit.

    There are two main themes that I think result from this. The first, the way that what we do is divorced from how it is paid for. After-all, we don’t click on ads ourselves. Nor do people we know. The second is this metric of attention like attention is inherently valuable. It’s not.

    Maybe it’s hanging out with the kind of techies who get three meals a day and a significant part of their wardrobe too provided at work, but sometimes it feels like tech workers, despite the 6 figure salary, are unwilling to pay for things. This culture where everything is “free”, only it isn’t really, the money comes from somewhere, we just don’t have any concept of where that is. We don’t serve users, we serve ads. When we want a job, we give our labour away for free which somehow helps us get a well paying job and then we profit. Let’s ignore the number of open source projects going bankrupt…

    Then, attention. This idea that you do things for “exposure” where the formula is exposure -> ??? -> profit. OK maybe you can argue that this model works for Kim Kardashian but not, I think for most of us. It didn’t work for Monica Lewinsky.

    Exposure is not inherently valuable. The value is in what results from it.

    Also we can make a case that exposure is just worth less for women. Firstly, because as covered the Male Factor around 20% of men are inclined to dislike women. So we can make the case that say, when presenting to an audience of primarily men, the audience is just worth 20% less to a woman than to a man.

    This relates to my distain for Token Women Work for “exposure”. Exposure for being a woman doesn’t lead to paid work, it leads to requests for favours – at best.

    At worst it leads to harassment.

    Which brings us to the second reason why exposure is worth less to women – because the risks are higher. The fear of harassment is real, and it’s one I hear about often. It’s something I, and my friends experience.

    Once I connected these things together, I felt like I understood idea that attention has value. Because it does, if you are selling ads. Less so as a woman trying to survive in the tech industry, though. For everything else… probably somewhere in between.