Now, 20 years in? I am not token. If someone asks me to speak somewhere, mostly it’s because I’m good at what I do. If it is still because I’m token, well, I just tend to make my male peers uncomfortable by my presence, skill, intelligence, flawless makeup, expensive perfume and tasteful, powerful, but in-n0-way masculine apparel. Because now it’s a grudgingly conceded “aren’t you pretty for being such a talented girl” (because men like that always say “girl”).

I find, though, that women are just as quick to make men tokens, and it doesn’t lead to positives, I find. I’m on the planning committee for a small-business conference, which was created by a women’s business organization. The first few years of the conference were excellent – lots of practical advice offered and good speakers of both genders. Now, though, if they can keep from having male speakers or male-owned businesses in the expo-hall, they do that. They manage to keep one or two token male speakers, but they stick out like sore thumbs on the day, and are treated in a hostile manner by some of the women.

What kills me is that the once-practical expo – previously filled with small business agencies, banks, accountants, and the odd lawyer who could pleasantly rack up some pro-bono hours – has turned into a hall half-filled with small crafts/jewelry businesses and make up vendors of various brands. Because – and I quote the committee – “women like to shop”. The business agencies are shunted to an exterior corridor of the hall. No wonder I prefer our token businessmen and this is my last year on the planning committee.

The two spesific law-examples I was thinking of was one in education, the sex that is underrepresented gets a few points extra tacked on when applying to schools in norway that are more unbalanced than 1:2, so a male applying to study as a nurse, or a female applying to study as a engineer, will be prefered over equally qualified persons of the majority-sex.

The laws on discrimination are very strict here, however there *is* an explicit exception, saying that discrimination based on gender, age, religion or race may be permitted if the discrimination can be said to advance the goal of equality. (i.e. what is here sometimes refered to as positive discrimination) This exception is controversial, but there are feminists and well-meaning people on both sides of the issue.

The other example is that a publicly traded company in Norway point blank MUST have atleast 40% representation of both sexes on their board. It’s not a joke-law either, it’s got huge teeth, the penalty for noncompliance ? One warning, thereafter, if the warning ain’t heeded, forced liquidation i.e. the corporate death-penalty. I personally find this ridiculous [edited for ableist language], but there’s well-meaning people on both sides of this too.

Which is why I wondered who the “we” are that all agree that positive discrimination is the wrong solution. I’m not sure myself. I find it wrong in the extreme cases, like the latter above, but I must admit in some cases, when choosing between equally qualified candidates, I would perhaps be tempted to let “more diversity” push me towards the more rare choice, is that wrong ?

For the events I am involved with, we also strive for diversity as far
as length of time involved in the community. We particularly want to
encourage people by showing them “Hey, look what this one person
accomplished in just a year or two of being involved in free software!”
It keeps it fresh and it’s inspiring to new people, but I also think it
makes it easier to break away from the habit of picking only speakers
who have spoken at a dozen other events.

Oh: the use of football as the conversation opener at lunch is always a dead give away as well.

Actually the case with my tutor is as unambiguously wrong as it gets: I placed into that class by virtue of exam results. “Token woman” means “someone who was included by virtue of being a woman.”

As for your point in general, here’s the problem. Given which site this is, I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the existence of the patriarchy is a given. Part of it is that pretty much everyone carries around a default assumption other things being more or less equal (and even in many cases, not so), men are more worth listening to and following, and given which site this is, I am just going to also go ahead and say that that’s wrong in the general case.

Thus, at some point we all need to challenge this internalised bias. Some people will be more lucky than others and will be constantly surrounded with women so immensely talented that it won’t require challenging. Ideally this will change, but at the moment most of us won’t. We will have to make sure to deliberately expose ourselves to chances to meet talented women, because our surroundings are set up to disproportionately expose us to talented men.

If you do this often enough, you won’t regard an individual woman as someone you’re including because she’s a woman. I think it’s unlikely, admittedly not impossible but unlikely, that you’re going to think “Oh Sarah. Well, her name only came up because I met her through Kate who I met though Angelina who I met at that breakfast for women entrepreneurs, gah, what a token, I’d never have met her if it wasn’t for knowing women.” This is as opposed to “Oh Sarah. That’s the woman who got included in the selection after we all dug through the mailing list at the last possible second after Barry and John remembered that blogger who complained last year that we haven’t selected a woman in 5 years, gah, what a token.”

I genuinely think that the earlier and more often you seek to diversify your network, the less you will regard individual members of it as “the talented woman [/member of other minority] that I know.” But if you don’t seek to diversify your network, especially in many geekdoms, you can easily get by knowing people who are very much undiverse.

I was mostly thinking about Skud’s entry about her OSCON talk here:

A healthy open source community would show a bell curve of female participation rates, with the hump somewhere around the percentage of women who use that kind of software and/or the percentage of women who have (or can acquire) the appropriate skills — let’s say anywhere between 20% and 50% for most software projects. (That 20% is based on the number of women in the tech industry with the right kind of skills, and the 50% represents the number of female users for applications like blogging, web browsing, graphic design, or teaching.)

As with any bell curve, there will be outliers. Fan fiction, admittedly, is a heavily female activity so a higher proportion of female participants is not surprising. On the other hand, a man asked me at OSCON what to do about his all-male model railway automation project, and that’s one I think is just fine with 100% male developers given the pool of model rail enthusiasts he’s drawing from.

I thought about delving into this a bit more but yeah, I do think that that’s a reasonable enough test of “are we having a major diversity problem at the prominence/leadership level?” which is where the tokenism thing is a problem. That said, mostly writers for this site are experienced with geekdoms in the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK so far, and I don’t think persistent over-representation of women in geek leadership positions is a pattern in any of those countries, so it’s not something we hugely focus on. (We aren’t a model of diversity at all times either, and our lack of geographical diversity is not a good thing here.)

Given that though, I don’t think more diversity among prominent geeks than among geeks in general is a problem for more or less the reasons you attribute to the radio show you listened to. It’s just that achieving it may not be as practically possible, geekdom-wide. At some point the base needs to become more diverse to keep providing the diverse leaders.

You had me up until here. So essentially, I should force myself to add womens names in the name of diversity and then force myself to forget that I included them for that purpose when evaluating them. Essentially, affirmative action amnesia.

It’s impossible to fairly evaluate someone once you know they’ve been included for diversities sake. They are now doubly disadvantaged, first by the (often wrongfully assumed) bias that women can’t “do tech” and then again by the resentment felt that a particular person was only included “because she’s a woman”.

(Much love to my first year computer science tutor who greeted my appearance in his tutorial with: “ah, of course, our token woman!”)

So you’re advocating we make extraordinary efforts to include women, for diversities sake, and then are upset when someone acknowledges that that’s why a women is present.
It’s as if you want us all to follow these guidelines but never talk about them or acknowledge that anyone has benefited from them. I agree that your tutor could have been more tactful but I don’t think he was wrong…

*raises hand* I consider myself part of that “we.” And I’d like to observe that when women are overrepresented in the upper ranks because there are, say, two of them out of the the three in a shop of 31, it’s less a question of whether women are promoted in a fair way, but a question of whether women are *hired* in a fair way. I understand that this relates to the tokenism discussion in a larger sense, but I think it’s not quite the same thing that Mary was getting at in the statement you quoted. (Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re getting at…?)

Also, laws mandating that it be so? Can *really* make some of us question whether we *are* being tokenized. It’s not really a good strategy, as Mary so elegantly discussed – the process of inclusion should be organic.

Who’s this “we” ? I don’t think feminists generally all agree with that statement, indeed by that token, most male-dominated venues I take part in, already have the women severly over-represented, and in some cases I can think of, there’s even laws mandating that it be so.

I work in a typical programming-shop, thus no surprise that out of 31 employees, only 4 is female (and one of those is doing food-and-cleaning so hardly contributes to more-women-in-tech)

Yet of the remaining 3, technical women, 2 have leading positions, and one is on the board, i.e. we’ve got 12.5% women, but 30% women among those in leading positions and 20% women in the boardroom.

The local linux-user-group is about the same: a clear minority of women overall (I’d guess at perhaps 20% females), yet the women are significantly BETTER represented in this both among say those holding keynotes and lectures, and in the head of the organisation.

And 8th of march, I head a prominent norwegian feminist talk on the radio, and rage about the fact that tech-companies in Norway overall on the average have only about 20% female representation in their boards — despite the fact that that is a pretty exact match to the percentage of females employed in these organizations overall. She argued, if one would have a more balanced leadergroup, this would over time have a tendency to lead to a more balanced employee-group overall, i.e. it might make sense to start at the top.

I’m not sure what to think, what she said made sense. But what you say, also makes sense.