cruel to be kind

Women are not as competitive as men, and mostly this is considered to be a good thing. In tech and entrepreneurship though, this very often leads to women being in the “too late adopter” crowd. I am happy to encourage people, but it is like the saying: You can carry a horse to the water but it has to drink on its own. Some thoughts on this.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, known for TheNextWeb.com, TwitterCounter.com, has started a site name SocialStatistics.com where top users on Google plus are listed.

I – and most people in the industry I know of – see such a list and add themselves right away. It is like basic promotion / marketing etc., you don’t even think about it. We don’t care about where we are on the list – we do, but only to a certain degree – and use it more for the data point. There will always be people who cry “but it is not a popularity contest” and they are right. But that is not what I am talking about.

Boris has added an interesting sidebar:

This lead me to ping my circles with a call to action “girls add yourself“. It does not surprise me that the number is that low. And I bet if I go through my list of contacts, I can tell you exactly who would register for this site and which would complain at a later time that they are not included.

The 10% are not a real number, I expect there to be roughly 30% females at least in my circles and there is an unusual amount of 2nd and 3rd wave people in my circles with the usual suspects still missing. I attribute that to Google’s current invite setup.

Nonetheless, the people I find on Boris top list are 100% the usual suspects. Currently the service tracks nearly 12K users and you can bet, that these are the usual suspects as well. And they reap the benefits of things like this (you can click through to the site to see the articles linked):

(btw: Reading the last sentence you should realize why I encourage you to click on that link instead of linking the articles right here. You should also understand why I write half of the article about that blog list below but still use Google plus in the title.)

In a totally different circumstance I came across the domain http://www.blogsbywomen.org and was not surprised to find the numbers below. On a total of 3.025 blogs submitted only 2,5% can be generously considered to be tech [Games (16), Technology (33), Science (9), Internet & Computers (19)].

It is by no means a complete list and they do take a submission fee of $5 now for the work, but that is not the point. If you look at the number of women interested right now in Google plus and the list below, you do have an impression on why women always seem to be late adopter. If tech / entrepreneurship etc. would be a person, the answer would be “They are just not that into you.”

Part of why there are so few women in tech is not that there are so few women in tech. There are so few women in tech visible. Because they do not participate in the the ‘dick contests’ the guys are throwing and frown on this. They don’t like to compare themselves and stay away from it.

That is absolutely fine if you are that way. But then stop complaining to others when they understand how the game is played.  If you want to be in the picture, stop being a cheerleader on the sideline and start playing in the game.

Now go over and add yourself to Boris list. :)

Tags: women, womenintech