I don’t want more women in the web industry

This is probably not the kind of entry I wanted to do as my first real post on this site since the redesign. Oh well, it’s done now! Yes that is a purposefully controversial title. If you’ll read on you’ll see that I don’t quite mean what you may think I mean when I say that I don’t want more women in the web industry.

While procrastinating on Twitter this evening and catching up with all the day’s news, instead of working on my backlog of Daily Design work, I was led to an article on Noupe titled “Women in Web Design and Development”.

Now before we go any further I need to make it very clear that I am in no way a sexist, male chauvinist pig, and am all for all kinds of equal rights. So please try to avoid reading this with those tints on your glasses. However, when I read the title of the Noupe article I sighed to myself as I knew exactly what was coming.

Andy Walpole writes an excellent article about the issue and offers some good insight and information for women interested in getting into the industry. I have no bad things to say about the article proper, nor do I condone any of the disgusting behaviour exhibited during the 12 hour Boagworld podcast. The problem for me is highlighted by one very prominent quote toward the end of the post by Kathy Marks.

“I am concerned about the lack of women in our industry and in IT in general. It bothers me that there are so few of us and that our numbers are decreasing rather than increasing. We need more women in the sciences and in engineering. Why are there fewer and fewer of us?

“The problem isn’t that we need to be separated out—we’ve been separated out. That’s the problem, not the solution”.

There are two major concerns here, conveniently separated in the quote, and I’d like to address the second paragraph first.

Women and men should not be separated – that’s the problem, not the solution.

Quite true! And yet here we are discussing the role of women in the web industry. The focus is quite clearly on women and women alone. This quote comes from the middle of a section discussing PHP Women, a website formed to promote the status of women within the industry. Just a few paragraphs after this quote Elizabeth Naramore (founder of PHP Women) offers advice to women looking to get into the industry, including the suggestion to join a community group you feel comfortable in, whether that be PHP Women or not, and Andy follows up with a suggestion of something like Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners. This seems to be encouraging further segregation of the sexes, not unity.

We should all celebrate our achievements, that should go without saying. But wouldn’t it be far more effective for the cause for everyone to be invited to celebrate those achievements?

Another quote from Vivien Anayi looks at why there aren’t many women found at conventions or conferences.

“The problem is, who are women are going to leave their children with, because they are mothers. Fathers can go to a conference, and their wives will stay at home with their children. I see in the industry that if there is an acclaimed woman designer, she either doesn’t have any children yet or her children are grown up and she can spend time promoting herself.”

While there could certainly be more done to accommodate child care facilities at conferences, this seems to highlight an ingrained level of sexism that exists within Vivien herself, and society as a whole. The assumption made here is that all women are the primary care givers in the parent-child relationship. This is becoming less and less the case in recent times, and does an incredible disservice to full time fathers and continues to force a divide between men and women, as well as further contribute to out-dated parental stereotypes.

We need more women in the sciences and in engineering.

The other major concern I have with Kathy’s quote is blanket statements like the above. I guarantee that you will find a similar quote on any recent article covering this same topic. One commentor on the article, Krishna, says “I often wonder myself how many women there are in the Web Design industry – quite clearly not enough!!”

The problem is that blanket statements like these lack any kind of figures. Who has arbitrarily decided that there needs to be more women in whatever industry? Who gets to decided that there needs to be more men? Should we have more women just for the sake of having more women? That seems to be the case being made, and that is certainly not a good idea. What good would that accomplish? Positive discrimination is never a good thing and only breeds discontent.

A number of commenters on the article try to give us some reasons for why there should be more women in the industry.

Dzinepress says

“as per my experience women have extra sense about colors and thats why women better the man in this creative field”

Anne says

“Women are well suited to the design/development industry because we are naturally intuitive, which brings a whole new dimension to problem solving and creativity.”

I don’t know whether these claims are scientifically valid, that’s definitely not my field, but it seems to me that they don’t hold much weight. I know that there are many men in the industry who are just as intuitive and colour sensitive as any woman. I also know a good number of women that are about as intuitive as brick. The same can be said for a good few men I know too.

I have a female friend who works in the web industry. She is the lowest paid in her company and she gets given all of the grunt work – the stuff no one else wants, or has time, to do. Is this because she’s a woman? Not in the slightest. It is quite simply because those tasks match her skillset. Her gender plays no role in that.

Cara Jo Miller adds “Many times while browsing articles about the ‘best web designers this month’ … it’s all to often men.”

This may not sit so well with some people, but maybe, just maybe, those best web designers are actually the best around that month?

Another commenter, Sam Richardson, sums up my thoughts almost perfectly.

“I am a bit concerned as this is the first time I have seen any “Women in…” nonsense in the web design industry. It is prevalent in so many other industries and although it may start with good intentions, it always seems to end up being more about women than the industry. This is just as backwards as the dynamic which started the group. You want recognition for what you do, not because you are a woman right?

Let’s stay focused on good work and good people, not on gender, race etc.”

I don’t want more women in the web industry. But then nor do I want more men in the web industry. I want more people in the web industry, and I want those people to be the very best that they can. I want those people to push the industry onto bigger and better things. I want those people to experience the same joy I experience working in this field. The only way for that to happen is for us to focus on us and our industry.

John Robinson - designer, developer, coder... John’s not quite sure exactly how he should be labelled. Why not check out his blog and make a decision for yourself. He mostly talks about CSS, jQuery and the crazy world of the Interwebs, with a little bit of personal life thrown in for good measure.