I listened to part of #learntrends at http://bit.ly/42i7ke but didn’t feel moved to contribute (as corporate education/ training is a little outside my comfort zone). It was all quite interesting and then someone pointed out that of the circa 100 participants, about 50% were women but the conversation had been male-dominated to that point. Dave (Wilkins??) was very positive about the opportunities that Web 2.0 technologies offer to women, given their communication skills, and the possibilities for more transparent recognition offered by recommender systems.
I sat up very straight at this point and tried to contribute but failed miserably with mike failure despite having done the audio wizard. So what was I trying to say?
1. I experienced a sense of déjà vu at the sense that the web would bring liberation for women. That was claimed the first time around but researchers like Susan Herring soon showed us that gender was not invisible even online.
2. And really, why would we expect things to be different online? There is no previous evidence of technology liberating and democratising groups in general and women in particular, despite the many examples of women making effective use of online communication.
3. A better way to find out what men and women are doing is to ask them and to observe them where we can. Women, say, may be engaging in (semi) private spaces and so their traces may not be publicly discernible.
There are differences between tools e.g. differences in Relationship Symmetry but the significant differences are in people’s practices. If you look at men’s and women’s blogs, do you find a difference in their blogrolls - do men cite men and women cite women or what? Women can still be the subject of harassment online .
Let’s not rely on technology to bring equity for women and other groups. Let’s invest in research to to tell us how technology mediates changing relationships between men and women in organisations and society.
2 responses so far ↓
1 David Wilkins // Apr 23, 2009 at 1:51 am
Hi Frances,
I’m glad I made you sit up straight… ; ) I’m sorry you weren’t able to contribute your thoughts at the time, but I’m happy you did so after the fact.
Let me try to be clearer in this reply than I was during the conference. I wasn’t trying to suggest that social media instantly solves issues of gender or racial inequality. I was trying to suggest that given the increasingly social nature of interactions online, women *may* have a leg up. Lots of research over the years has shown that women *on average* have much better social skills than men in terms of things like reading people, showing empathy, collaborating, sharing credit etc… These will become increasingly important skills as work becomes more social.
Maybe this is off-base, but it seems to me that one of the reasons we have male dominated leadership in most orgs is because most orgs are run through “command and control.” And the reason things are run through “command and control” is because most orgs are run by men. Self-fulfilling.
But what happens when that cycle is broken and the work becomes collaborative, open, social? I think *maybe* that women *on average* might have more opportunities to lead. All of this is conjecture, of course, but when you consider that the fastest growing Facebook group is women over 55 and the biggest users of social media overall are teenage girls, it suggests to me a bright future for female leadership.
Is this a substitute for more analysis or other initiatives to drive female leadership? Absolutely not. As the father of two girls who I love passionately, I’m one of the biggest feminists I know, and I’m keenly interested in helping level the playing for them before they get into the workforce.
I hope this helps clarify my position a bit. I wasn’t trying to speak in *statements* as much as I was laying out a supposition and a line of inquiry for research and analysis. None of which has been done to date.
Warm regards,
Dave
2 Frances Bell // Apr 23, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Thanks David. We have the same goals and I certainly wasn’t suggesting that you thought technology would bring equality to the workplace. I really am not all hopeful about that, given that where women display collaboration and effective communication in the workplace face to face, they do not automatically receive reward and recognition for this.
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