Attack of the virgins from mums basement
Friday was a special occassion. The 200th episode of the excellent Boagworld podcast.
To celebrate, rather than record the usual show of about 1hour the hosts organised a 12 hour spectacular pulling together some of the brightest and most interesting people in the web industry. There were experts on coding and design, CSS and CMS, useability and social networking etc. There were also girls. OMG!!!!!
Suffice to say the mouth breathers in the shows chatroom went ballistic. These women couldn’t have been invited on because they were experts in their field, oh no. They were invited on because they were women. The fact they dared to be attractive women, intelligent women, confident women was just too much for them to bear.
IT is a bad enough field as it is for being male dominated. From university to workplaces the vast majority of people involved are male. If you want to question if this is self-perpetuating or not you only have to have seen some of the reports of comments being made by these people.
Two of the women involved in the show Sarah Parmenter and Rachel Andrew have written brilliant pieces laying into these Neanderthals which I would highly recommend reading.
Take small comfort from the thought that this morning most of those who disgraced themselves will be waking up and falling asleep alone, with only Warcraft to take their frustrations out onto.
Thank you for writing about this issue and highlighting it as a problem that needs to be addressed. Much appreciated. ~ Sarah
February 14th, 2010 at 11:08 amNo problem. I am ashamed that we have to. It is important for both women and men involved in the IT industry to stand up against these kind of sexist attitudes. We just have to hope that they were a tiny minority who shouted loudly on one afternoon.
February 14th, 2010 at 12:40 pm