In our company, for instance, the men are most the technical personnel and the women are the SEOs. Most men are perhaps expected to do the harder tasks.

Of course, my experience is a very small sample set, and it’s very easy to generalise incorrectly in this stuff.

I’ve quite a few years experience as a rare female in computing research and now high tech startups, though, and I’ve watched other women leave the field or move into less hardcore roles: sometimes because of children, but often not.

I completely agree with you that female entrepeneurship is seemingly lacking.

I’m going to see if I can address some more of these issues in a forthcoming post so please get in touch with any ideas, observations etc I shall incorporate these and want to pass them on to a wider media audience.

it appears that you have had similar experiences to my own in the world of media ‘saviness’. what seems to go unnoticed under the radar is the number of incidence, no srub that – what goes unnoticed is the fact that there still ARE incidence where things are less than equal between the sexes.

My chief concern is that feminism is either considered ‘dead’, not necessary, or a tag that is intended to be disparaging in its conotations, perhaps Anon was right to point out the potential to be labelled as a ‘lez’ intended as a derogatory term.

I keep coming back to where ‘we’ go from here though. But it is encouraging to see that comments have come from men in the industry who not only recognise that there is a problem, but also lend support for equal measures. No special favours wanted, just an equal playing field for one and all to play in.

As long as women are willing to work without getting paid, off course profit seekers are going to hire them. As long as there’s a steady flow of girls doing menial jobs to get a foot in the media business, why raise salaries? Unfortunately, you as a woman can’t make other women decide that they don’t want to be exploited, so you’ll have to find somewhere else to work, where the managers treat you right. Kind of a pity, but that’s how life can be.

And as long as women don’t DEMAND the same salary as the males in their office, if they feel treated unfairly, why should they be offered more? Some women need to feel less victimized and protest more. Ask for a raise. I don’t know how it is in the UK, but here in Norway it’s such a high demand on smart people, that you’d get away with it. But a lot of women don’t stand up for themselves, they expect things to be fixed by someone else. I used to be like that too, untill I decided that I was worth a lot more than what I was being payed, went to my boss and asked. I got a raise for £3000, while the guys at my office didn’t get any. It felt good. I’ve done it a few times more, and have gotten raises both those times as well. The managers have seen that there’s been an “imbalance”, and have agreed to give me more money. But off course they would have shut up completely if I hadn’t asked for it.

But exploitation and salaries are general issues, not specific for Web 2.0. Or IT, even. What I’ve found during my 7 years in the industry, is that women for some reason hardly ever get involved in anything work related OUTSIDE work. I’ve been attending user group meetings for the last 3-4 years. If there are 4 women in a group of 80, it would be a record. And these things are free! But they’re being held in the evenings, that might be it. On the other hand, Microsoft has several events during a year, where there’s lots of interesting content, it’s free and you get some quite decent food as well. There, you migh have 10 women and 150 men. And I’m not entirely convinced the number of women would rise even if there were several female speakers…

OK, so what has this rant to do with Web 2.0? It might explain why no women can be found, and if you find a few, that few other women are very enthusiastic about attending the events. I don’t think it has anything to do with Web 2.0, though. Just that a lot of women spread their attention so thinly that what they do for work has a lower priority than friends, family, house, physical training or other “usefull” and “worthwhile” things. If someone invented some technology that was both practical and esthetically pleasing, you might get the big masses of women in IT interested. Web 2.0 don’t come across as being quite that. And then you have a catch 22, because few women will bother to work out what this revolutionary technology could be, so it will probably never show up.
(Yeah, I’m a pessimist. The link in my name is to an article I wrote in 2004, called “Why are there still so few women in IT?”)