Credit: Max Pixel
This is a follow up to last week’s post about lists. Because if lists don’t change anything… what does?
The short answer: hard work.
The long answer:
A common piece of advice is to broaden your network. But… see all these people as human beings. I’m not on Twitter as a woman in tech educator – I’m on Twitter as a full human being with a rich life. It seems like often people broaden their network and then pretty quickly un-broaden it because they don’t want to listen to the whole person (or maybe, at all).
Try and rebalance your consumption to consume more content from under-indexed folk. What if you only watched videos of talks from women, or PoC for a month? Or a year? What if you only went to events that had at least 30% women speakers? How would your perspective change?
Don’t tokenise. It’s tempting to issue a hotfix in the form of what I call a “Token woman invitation“. Every so often these turn into public stories. Factor in your own bias and invite under-indexed people because they have something interesting to say – and do so in a respectful timeframe. Otherwise you may as well not bother. For myself, every time I agree to an invite that I worry is token, I regret it.
Do Outreach. Start early. Don’t start pinging people the day before your CfP closes because you’ve finally realised it’s pale and male. Be pro-active. Reach out to people, encourage them to submit, make yourself available for questions.
Offer coaching and development for first time speakers. There’s a reason why events which have good “diversity” numbers often offer this. If you are going to include people who have historically tended to be left out, you might need to give them some encouragement to get them in.
Functionally, Technically Speaking serves as a list of under-indexed folk in tech – a mailing list, not a public list. But a list. We earned our way to that through the work we have done to make it inclusive, and now we ask that events we include earn their way into it in the same way. When we see events doing the work of inclusion, we’re eager to include them. When they’re not, we close their issues as #wontfix.
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.
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.
There’s an exercise in 7 Habits where you have to list your different “roles” and things you need to do for each of them. Here are mine (in no particular order):
Grad student
Teaching Assistant
Ski instructor
President of WISE
Job seeker
Girlfriend
Daughter
Friend
Skier
Kickboxer
Workshop creator
Programmer
Nice (i.e. helping other people)
Blogger
Information diffuser
Member of tech community
And I look at this list, and think, no wonder I’m feeling overwhelmed lately. Case in point – last week was reading week, so I should get to relax a little. However, on Tuesday I wanted to kickbox, but I also wanted to go to a tech event and thought that would be a good prep for my interview Wednesday morning. And I found myself in the situation that because I hadn’t managed to get up at 6am (on my week off!) two of my roles were in conflict, and I had to choose.
So I go from a career panel (roles: nice, WISE) to briefly hang out with a friend (role: friend) to this panel (roles: member of tech community, programmer, job seeker). And the next day I have my interview, try to be productive, go kickboxing, and have dinner with friends, take my friend to Carleton to return a book, and crash before I manage to call my boyfriend (who was away).
Two realizations – one, I need to prioritize my various roles. Graduating and getting a job are probably the most important things right now, and the sad truth of that is, other ones may have to be set aside. Like skiing, training is a huge time commitment (with the time it takes to get too and from the hill) and I’m injured – perhaps it’s best to just accept that I’m not going to have a great season. Maybe I need to be less nice, delegate more with WISE, spend less time with my friends. I’m still working out how – but I know I need to make some changes.
Second, there’s no “Cate” on this list – just a bunch of things that Cate does. There’s no chilling out and watching movies. There’s no go swimming even though I’m not training for anything specific. There’s no sleeping in, or kicking back and reading a whole novel. No baking of cakes, or skating, or xc-skiing, or any of the myriad of things that I like to do but don’t do enough to merit their own role.
I’m in danger of becoming a list of attributes that you could define in XML – because I’m not making time for anything not on the list. Because I’m not making time for me.
This will – hopefully – be my last real semester. I think this situation is normal, but not permanent.
Remind me, please, when I’m done, to choose something not on the list – and enjoy it.
So these have been on a bit of a back burner lately, with the end of the semester and associated craziness. However I had a suggestion from Treena that’s been sitting in my inbox for a while. She suggested I try @erinblaskie‘s lists, here’s hoping they show more of what I think this visualization will be useful for bringing out (lists that represent actual mini-communities, rather than just grouping people you follow).
First up: metinreallife. After I graphed this for the first time, I removed an outlier who was following/followed by a ton of people, causing every other point to clump together at the bottom left of the axes. removing it improved things somewhat, as you can see below. It’s noticeable that the more engaged people in the list (in terms of conversations) are not those with the most followers. You can get to the interactive version by clicking on the image (for any of the graphs below).
Next: interesting. There were no conversations in this, though, so I decided not to graph it.
Third: askerinlive. Again, there were few conversations in this, so I didn’t graph it.
I’m really looking for lists that represent communities, and perhaps a better way to go about this is to look for lists with more people following them. Erin’s most followed list is one for Ottawa, but that has 500 people in it. Intuitively, I’m looking for lists with a good ratio of people following them to the people in the list.
Let’s try geekylikeme: Following 155, followers 18. This one is better, but the outliers make it really hard to read. I wonder if it’s better to do it by ratio of followers/following plotted against number of mentions. I’d like to try this on a logarithmic scale, but ManyEyes does not support it. Really, I want more control over the graph which does not appear to be supported.
The last list I’m going to try is entrepreneurship, Following 107, followers 14. Again, the points with more influence within the list (more conversation) are clustered in the bottom left corner.
What have I learned from this?
Outliers are rarely the most influential in a list. Interaction is probably limited by followers/following – when very popular interaction will be low proportionally out of necessity.
I’m not looking for lists of celebrities (or wannabe celebrities), I’m looking for lists that represent communities. Thus the GGDOttawa list is the best I’ve found so far.
ManyEyes does not give me all the functionality I want, for example logarithmic scales, and it’s hard to remove outlying data-points (lots of clicks). Going to try Google Widgets next.
I know, it’s been a long time coming. But finally – my new visualization which I’ve created using IBM’s Many Eyes (which is awesome, although very blue).
Since Twitter released it’s new “Lists” feature, there’s been talk about how Lists are a good way to measure influence – someone who is on more lists is likely to be more influential. Likewise, someone with lots of followers who’s not on any lists (or maybe one called “spammers”) is less influential.
However, what about measuring influence within lists? For instance, if you’re using lists to collect a group of people, such as the Girl Geek Dinners list, it might be nice to visualize something that indicates how influential people are within that network.
So, what I’m doing is displaying the scatter-graph of followers vs following, with the size of the bubble being proportional to the number of times the user has been mentioned by another user in the list.
See the dynamic one for my friends here. Static one below:
Here’s the one for GGDOttawa (dynamic version here): Here’s one for @velevetescape/cool-tweeps – see the dynamic one here. This one is hard to see properly because some trailing values drag the axes out. Eliminating the outliers might really improve it.
More coming soon! Taking requests and suggestions!
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where you have to list your different “roles” and things you need to do for each of them. Here are mine (in no particular order):
