Fresh

I attended an awful lot of panels at SXSW, but one that really stuck with me was called “Are Women Taken More Seriously on the Web?” The premise the panel operated under was that women are not generally taken very seriously, and they touched on a lot of interesting points.

The panelists were FASCINATING. I loved hearing their experiences being a woman in tech and how they have dealt with being taken seriously in a dude-centric environment. I didn’t really come away with a lot of concrete notes from that session, but here are some points I wanted to highlight:

Do you come off as a woman online?

One panelist talked about how her mother frequented a college football forum and noticed that the women’s opinions on that forum were never taken that seriously or were mocked. Her mother created a profile on the forum that was deliberately androgynous. She did not state her name; her picture was of something innocuous like a football; her username wasn’t indicative of her gender; and when asked about herself, all she would say was that she had “a son who plays college football.”

She eventually became one of the most recognized and respected members of that forum. Should she really have had to disguise her gender in order to be respected?

They also discussed the notion of how you present yourself online in general – do you consciously present yourself as a woman? This could be anything from using sexy/suggestive photos as your avatar to using “sweetAngelBaby16″ as your handle, versus using a picture of your cat and going by “trapezoid” or even your real name. Definitely something to think about!

Online “handles” have changed and the pseudonym is dying

More and more people (not just women) are realizing that names have power. Using your real name online is less taboo and in some cases (like Facebook or LinkedIn) it is expected or even required. An unusual side effect is such that if you have a complicated or unusual name (like panelist Blagica (”blah-gee-tsa,” like “pizza”) Bottigliero), you may accidentally end up coming off as a man online.

Blagica said she sometimes consciously cultivates this misconception via email by using more “manly” terms or words. (Apparently women tend to use “k” as a word in place of “okay,” and men tend to drop the final g off of “-ing” words.) She related that she had a lengthy conversation with a confused client on the phone, during which she had to really work to convince the person that, yes, she was the developer on the project and not just the secretary that had taken over for the “real” developer. The person could just not believe that the “Blagica” developer he had been speaking with over email was the same, womanly “Blagica” developer on the phone.

Being a woman in tech, I really identified with a lot of the points they raised and it gave me a lot of food for thought. I particularly liked Karen Chu’s perspective as a girl into video games. Karen related her experience being hired as a girl in the gaming industry and how she suddenly found herself in front of the camera, being highlighted as the “girl gamer.” She said it made her uncomfortable, because even though it seemed like they were trying to highlight her strengths and interests, she knew that it was mostly the fact that she was a girl that got her in front of the camera.

Overall, I feel like this panel gave me a more informed perspective on both the good points and the bad points involved in being a woman in tech and how we can support each other in both those areas.

If you’re interested in checking out more about this panel, I found a short “highlights” video on this blog post from SXTXSTATE that gives you a bit better idea of what this panel was all about.