Sex and drama have filled the social media world this week. Between prominent tech figures and investors spouting more crude images of women to make their points about Web site usability to a Harvard study that claims men have more of a following then women on Twitter, it's been a whirlwind. And lets not forget the AOL debacle where senior management supposedly fired liberal blogger Tommy Christopher for standing up to Playboy and their super empowering article "So Right, It's Wrong" which ranked 10 conservative women they would like to "hate fuck". Talk about a #FAIL! Lets get down to business.
I Like Big Butt-ons!
Dave McClure blogged about user-interface design and raised excellent points about keeping things simple and moving beyond big buttons to give people visual cues as a call to action. Dave goes on to say "these days is less about reading text, and a lot more about looking at faces, icons, and other visual representations of people." All great points and relatively easy concepts for his readers to understand. But Dave felt it was important to emphasize his points further by using a crude image of a woman who appears to be topless and sticking her "big" behind in a front of a camera in a suggestive position. Yea, I get it sex sells, yada, yada. But where do we draw the line as professionals in the tech sector where young people look up to us for advice, resources, and yes as mentors? Do we draw the line here or here? Somewhere else?
Susan Mernit debated Dave and Dave Winer about these issues on Twitter and posted on her blog "Dude, do you think the people you want to speak to are only capable of listening if you dish up porn with your message?"
We complain how the tech sector desperately needs more women, but how can we recruit more women when some men in tech are using crude images of women in tech blogs and tech presentations. And even worse--influential men are defending it.
Battle of the Sexes on Twitter!
Harvard surveyed over 300K random people on Twitter and found that although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers then women. The study also noted that men are twice as more likely to follow another man than a woman and an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Many were surprised by these results because over the past few months, women have started to outnumber men on Twitter. Frankly, I'm not surprised. Up until recently men dominated Twitter. With the influx of 19 more million people jumping on Twitter in the past month after Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey publicly embraced Twitter on the Oprah Winfrey show, many of these new users are just getting used to Twitter. Also, historically men seem to promote each other more on Twitter. Just take a look at some of the stats and trends from the popular FollowFriday#. BTW this is one of the reasons I started #Women2Follow on Wednesday's--to encourage women and men to promote and connect with other women in their Twitter community.
AOL Fires Popular Blogger After He Attacks Playboy
Is it a coincidence that liberal blogger Tommy Christopher who criticized Playboy (right on Tommy) for posting an article ranking 10 conservative women to "hate fuck" was fired by AOL just three days after he initially posted it? AOL immediately deleted the article from the site claiming that the Playboy story was too profane. Tommy wrote on his personal blog "I get that Playboy is a sex magazine, but I don't see what hate has
to do with sex. While the author might think it's funny or edgy, none
of these women consented to be "hate f***ed," and the whole exercise is
just foul and creepy."
Interestingly, Time Warner (who owns AOL) is a major distributor of Playboy! In another twist, after receiving a ton of negative feedback from readers and the public about the article, Playboy also removed the article from the site. Perhaps Tommy can start blogging and editing for Playboy and can be the voice of reason when a writer attempts to put out such hateful crap.
What would you do if your customers revolted against a new company policy? Would you put it to a public vote on the company blog? When Amy Muller and her business partners were looking for an inexpensive CRM or trouble ticket solution for their side project “Valleyschwhag” to help improve customer service, they couldn’t find one, so they built it. Soon after, the “people powered customer service” company Get Satisfaction was born to bring customers and the right company employees together to solve consumer issues.
Inspiration To Start Get Satisfaction
The inspiration for Get Satisfaction was from a side project called "Valleyschwag.” It started out as this just-for-fun idea of sending tech schwag care packages to people around the globe who otherwise didn't have access to all the logo t-shirts, pins, caps, etc that are filling our drawers here in the web 2.0 community in the Bay Area.
We (myself and my business partners, Thor Muller & Jonathan Grubb) started a subscription service for these carefully curated care packages. The first month we had about 50-60 sign ups. But then we got covered on TechCrunch and BoingBoing and by the second month we had about 1500 subscribers. Suddenly we had CUSTOMERS. A lot of them, which also meant we had to provide good customer service.
It was just instinctual to us to want to be really hands on with our customer service. We really enjoyed interacting with them. We responded to every email and were very active with our blog.
Then there were a series of Eureka moments where we simultaneously realized that about 80% of the email was about repetitive issues AND that our customers were really creating a community with each other in the comments of our blog and on Flickr including posting solutions to any technical issues they were having.
We also had one business situation where we made a policy decision and our customers revolted! So we put it to a vote on the blog and tallied the "votes" as they came in as comments to the blog post. Everyone was really happy with this more democratic way of making a decision.
Due to these experiences, we had this idea that we needed a better solution for customer support than Gmail and blogging. And we also knew that we didn't want qne couldn't afford some enterprise CRM or trouble ticket solution. We figured there must be some free/cheap web-based solution out there that used the principles of community for customer engagement and support. Well, we were wrong. We couldn't find anything. So we decided to build it.
Social Media And Technolgy Landscape The power has shifted -- media has been democratized. Anyone with access to a computer can be a content publisher now. Also, with the emergence of the open source community it is SO much more feasible for someone with a great idea and the right skills to start building something without much capital. That is a huge difference from the first wave of the web. The open source community has really contributed to an overall collaborative spirit that exists in the tech community today. I'm sure some people will think I sound pollyanna-ish, but I really believe that the prevailing attitude is less about "me" and more about "us" these days. There's more sharing and collaborating going on -- you see this with the growing population in co-working spaces and events like BarCamps (and all the spin-off "fill in the blank"Camps, many of which have taken a "social good" path) and SuperHappyDevHouse. There's a lot of "What cool thing can we build together?" -- even if it's not ever intended to return a profit.
Challenges Of Being A Women In Tech To be perfectly candid, I would say being ignored. Not by those I'm working with or directly doing business with, but by the media and the power brokers. Being the female partner with two very extroverted and charismatic male partners (Lane Becker and Thor) who do a lot of public speaking, I tend to be the forgotten partner. And I think it's just expected by some that the founders of a tech startup are going to be men.
To be fair, I've long shied away from the public podium, preferring to stay in the background. But then it's frustrating, for example, when you're left out of news articles when they mention the company’s founders.
I'm doing more now to push myself out there into the public -- even though that's not the most comfortable place for me. I'm overcoming it by acknowledging that it's up to me to do something about it. I just need to put myself out there more. Make my voice heard.
We've also recently hired a female CEO (Wendy Lea) and she's been a real inspiration. Working with her has been really empowering.
Why Mentoring Is Important In Getting More Women Involved In Tech
It would be great to go to tech conferences and not be in the 10% minority!
I feel like I know a lot of women who *are* in tech, which is great! I know that's not the case in certain sectors of tech. I think it’s important that we set an example for our daughters. That girls who are in school today, interested in technology can look to us as role models and see that it *is* a real possibility for them too. The more women involved with tech, the more women who will follow.
Amy’s Advice To Women Who Are Interested In Launching Their Own Startups?
1. Do it with a partner or two. Doing it alone is a big burden to carry. You need to divide and conquer. And you need a variety of strengths and skills, some of which don't generally come in the same package.
2. Don't spend too much time on the "business plan". Yes, do some research. Talk to advisors -- mentors, people you look up to and trust. But then start building it. Build, learn, iterate. When it's time to raise outside money (if that's what's appropriate for your business), you're much better off if you have a proof of concept rather than just an idea.
Shireen Mitchell, Founder of Digital Sisters/Sistas, Chair of the media and technology task force of the National Council of Women's Organizations (Geekette '84) and one of the founders of the Fem 2.0 Conference and Social Media Women of Color is at the forefront of the nptech and social media world. This pioneering woman sat down to discuss the obstacles and successes she has personally faced in the tech sector not only as a woman, but as a woman of color.
Inspiration For Social Media Women Of Color So many "top ten" or other lists continue to post a majority of young men. I wrote about this in All the Tops are Missing Something in common. Women are generally missing altogether or there is only one or two noted. Women of color are rarely found among the "top," unless it's Oprah of course. When the list gatherers are asked why are there so many top women missing, the answer is generally that they don't know where to find these women. Social Media Women of Color is one answer to knowing where to find some of these women. SMWOC website is designed to highlight women who are relevant in their sectors, ie politics, social media, tech, PR, etc., and are generally overlooked. In many instances it's who you know and not how many followers/readers you have. When one of these lists gets posted we can send links to the profiles of women that are missing from the list.
The goals of the community are to list the top women in their fields, highlight their profiles, and to connect women with one another. We have been happy to find so many women that aren't recognized and we have some exciting posts that will be following. However, the goal is not to create more silos, these silos should be smashed. Until women, particularly women of color, are seen as common tech peers, sites like SMWOC will continue to be an invaluable resource.
The Challenges Of Being A Women In Tech
I wish I could say that I have had no obstacles as a women, particularly as a women of color in the tech/social media space, but I would just be aiming for a "utopia" for women in tech. In so many instances, I have been completely ignored for my tech knowledge and actually once had a man repeat exactly what I said (in the same room) and then have people think it was a great idea while ignoring the fact that I had previously stated the same. In my early days of html coding, I would lose bids to men. Clients thought a tech guy knew more than I because of all the words he used that they DIDN'T understand. The same clients would later come back to me asking me to fix the mess, all the while expecting to pay less. They would spend big bucks on the big words, but expect me to work out of sympathy. I've been given various explanations, my age, appearance, or some other reason as to why someone wasn't really listening or had made a decision about my tech ideas (good or bad), when none should have mattered.
Overcoming these obstacles is not easy, but I love a challenge. I remind myself that coding at 14 years old is considered normal today among the "digital natives," but coding at 14 during the 80's was NOT normal for a girl living in Harlem. My tech clique was always a bunch of guys behaving badly, so when I see them behaving badly in meetings, conferences or at my speaking engagements, I smile. I am not condoning their behavior with a smile, I am waiting to display my knowledge and to watch the look on their face when I do. Truly, I love tech, I always have, even on difficult days I smile. Nothing anyone does will change that.
Creating Change In The Tech World
One of the biggest obstacles is that there are not enough women in tech careers or social media. It becomes a cycle when both men and women aren't used to seeing women in the space, and so they assume it's by choice. I have heard so many stories, theories, or perspectives about why this phenomenon exists. In some ways our social dynamic is a small factor. This habit of giving radios and objects to the boys to take a part and tinker with but then give dolls & kitchen toys to girls. Many women will opt out of math, science, and technology as early as the 8th grade. For those women who are excited by tech, they are asked to prove their knowledge over and over again, while young men are simply encouraged. I have met so many women who spent years in the tech field and then left because they were just sick of the way they were treated. Sadly, this means we are losing ground instead of increasing the number of women in tech and social media.
Higher visibility is the key to meaningful change. Projects like Women Who Tech, Anita Borg Institute, Women of Color Technology Conference, and Social Media Women of Color are all ways to help with that visibility. At the NYC She's Geeky conference Liza @blogdiva and I joked about using #estroswarming as a way to highlight and bring attention to women in the social web. It was one of the ideas around using crowdsourcing as a method to increase visibility and begin to change perspectives. Lastly, we have to get more women speaking at tech conferences and on tech issues in the media. These are not easy tasks, but all of them are needed to create meaningful change.
Shireen’s Advice To Women In Tech And Social Media First and most important, don't fear putting yourself out there. It is easy to say but hard to do. Many women, for various reasons, get on the social media web but then hide themselves and their updates. For women to be seen as key influencers they have to be seen. Most women want to know everything there is to know about a topic or new tech tool before they claim the status of expert. I would like to say to these women, many "experts" are still learning. The tech and social media world continues to change and evolve every day. If you wait you will never be sure you know all there is to know.
On Monday I posed the question on the Fast Company blog “Who’s to Blame for the Digital Ceiling?". Technology and social media change makers Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Shireen Mitchell of Social Media Women of Color, Amy Muller of Get Satisfaction, and Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare are not only transforming the way women, nonprofits, and consumers use the web, these inspiring women are putting cracks in the ceiling.
First up Lisa Stone, Co-Founder of BlogHer.
What Inspired Lisa To Start BlogHer? In January of 2005, Kevin Drumm of The Washington Monthly asked a question that kept cropping up, "Where are all the women bloggers?" I didn't want to just complain about the question, which was driving many women who blog crazy because there were so many of us, but I DID want to figure out a way that women blogging could showcase themselves. I’d been mulling the idea of a conference for women bloggers, but I wasn’t sure it would fly. I decided to go for it in February 2005 when I met Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins. They loved the idea and we began asking other women who blog if they wanted to join in.
In Spring of 2005 we blogged about the BlogHer Conference idea, suggesting it as a network for all women bloggers to draw on for exposure, education, and community. We added economic empowerment to that mission after our first conference, where users told us they also wanted a better business model. That’s our goal - greater visibility and autonomy for individual women bloggers -- and, ultimately, for the community of bloggers as a whole. Since we suggested the idea, other bloggers have been running with the idea, making it better and smarter. That's how we grew to reach 14+ million women each month according to Nielsen.
Has The Social Media Landscape Changed? I can tell you that no one asks "Where are the women bloggers?" anymore! In the past five years, women have not only become the majority of Internet users, but power users of social networks like Facebook and status update technologies like Twitter. Here's the data: Of the 42 million American women who engage in social media every week, 55 percent of women participate in some form of blogging activity; 75 percent participate in social networks such as Facebook or MySpace and 20 percent use Twitter. As a result of this increased activity, our study found that women are online now more than ever.
The Challenges Women Face In Social Media And Tech
I've had some terrific experience with men who are leaders in media and social media. David Siminoff invested in BlogHer when we decided two years ago that it was time to stop bootstrapping and really expand. People like Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, Jay Rosen and David Hornik have always been incredibly collegial with advice, recommendations or just paying serious professional attention to what BlogHer's trying to accomplish.
So I feel really fortunate -- because at the same time, women in tech deal with the ongoing factor that women are just not invited to speak or attend conferences other than BlogHer in the same numbers and there's what I'll call the "pr0n factor", the most recent example being the Golden Gate Ruby on Rails conference. Plus the fact that mainstream media has relegated women who blog to "mommy bloggers" or "other", which is frustrating. My advice to myself and to other women whom this all drives crazy? Hey, we all know and work with people (including men!) who don't play that way and never would. So focus on your product, build something extraordinary and successful that can be measured in metrics and/or revenues. It's possible to earn the respect you're looking for. Go for it!
Lisa's Advice To Women Who Want To Launch Their Own Startups?
1. Ask your users, potential or existing, what they want. Don't tell them. Look where that got the print newsrooms I used to work in.
2. Bootstrap for as long as you can before you consider outside funding. It gives you enormous insight and forward inertia, which will help you find the right people to invest who are enthusiastic about your actual business and real-live users. I will be talking about all of this in more detail during my session at Women Who Tech TeleSummit coming up on May 12th.
Let's be honest, no industry is immune from sexism, racism, or ageism for that matter. The tech industry is no different. Moving past the reputation of Digg as a boys club where SOME members use it as their personal platform to bash women or Matt Aimonetti's recent asinine presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference portraying pornographic images of women touting taglines like "perform like a pr0n star", Pew studies show that women now outnumber men on the internet--including major social networks like Twitter and Facebook. However, many women in technology and social media still face a digital ceiling. Women make up approximately 20% (and sometimes less) of panelists at major tech conferences. Even fewer are asked to be keynote speakers. Furthermore, women in tech are rarely quoted and sought out as experts by the mainstream media covering technology. In other words, women in tech and social media are not valued as opinion leaders nearly as much as their male colleagues. In reality though, there are plenty of highly qualified industry women who would make fantastic panelists or provide reporters with thorough analyses on the latest research, trends and general commentary on tech and social media.
So who's really to blame for creating the digital ceiling? And what can we do to break through it once and for all?
Women in tech and social media industries need to do a much better job at promoting themselves as "experts" in their field and showing off their work. Women can aggressively promote themselves by:
Blogging about their area of expertise and posting articles that showcase their successful products, site launches, critical analysis, industry predictions, etc.
Get comfortable with public speaking and submit panel topics to several industry conferences. It's a numbers game. The more you submit, the more you get your name out there and increase your opportunities to be on panels.
Network with other influential women and men who you respect and ask to team up on panel submissions, co-author a blog post, etc. Also don't be afraid to ask for help or seek out advice. People love to offer advice and find it flattering.
Join The Speakers Wiki spearheaded by Mary Hodder to encourage women to promote themselves on the conference circuit and a central space for conference organizers to find great women panelists.
Be optimistic and toughen up. While it's easy to get depressed if you feel overlooked, channel that anger to stand up for yourself and your fellow techie women, speak out, and take action.
Winer raises a point (although he could have also acknowledged some of the very real challenges women face launching tech startups). When Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page, and Jory Des Jardins became frustrated with the male dominated blogging network they teamed up to form BlogHer, the largest women's blogging network in the world. When Shireen Mitchell was fed up enough with the lack of diversity in social media and tech conferences she started Social Media Women of Color and helped spearhead the Fem2.0 conference. Amy Muller, cofounded Get Satisfaction to address the lack of an online community for customer engagement and support. Several of these forward thinking women will be profiled throughout the week here on the Fast Company blog, leading up to the 2nd annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit. They will discuss their personal experiences breaking through the digital ceiling, launching their own startups, and their battles and successes along the way.
At least that's what Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said last week during a speech at a CIO summit.
"Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is
the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most
secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple
Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
Really? Then why is Microsoft so hard at work at launching Windows 7 ASAP? While Vista may not be quite the horror it was made out to be when it launched, the continuous stream of security patches and updates don't seem to support Mr. Turner's statement.
Perhaps more importantly, it's almost a challenge. If one were in the businees of making malware, you might take that statement to heart and try and prove Turner wrong. Making these grand statements about operating systems, web browsers, etc. never really seem to turn out to well. The pace of change makes it impossible for these kinds of statements to hold true for very long, if they ever were true to begin with.
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By Jared Seltzer, Founding Partner of Rad Campaign
Facebook has redesigned their site again hoping to squash some complaints that the site is cluttered and not user-friendly. Did Facebook succeed with the new redesign and create a clean site with an intuitive interface and good flow? Many users say no. The big problem is that Facebook has transformed itself from a community to easily connect with friends to a website that is trying to become “The King” of all social networks filled with lots of bells and whistles and useless apps and widgets. In trying to become "King" and replicate Twitter, design, ease of use and organization has been sacrificed. The site has ended up cluttered again because Facebook feels the need to feature the kitchen sink. From the second you login, an overwhelming amount of info is instantly thrown at you. Your eyes go all over the place trying to find the information you are searching for.
Remember back in the day when the “Wall” was used to write and display personal notes between you and your friends? Over the last year, the wall has morphed into a space displaying both your and your friends recent comments, recent activity, tags, imported notes and news, etc. It’s a lot to process and less personal.
The Highlights Column on the right hand side is out of control. It features a long list of suggested groups to join, events to attend, more cause and fan pages and of course advertising.
However, the Facebook redesign is not all bad. The improved filter system is cool and lets you create your own filters using Friend Lists. You can also filter by applications, like Photos. The left hand column is clean and also gives the user some flexibility to drag and drop filters and reorder them as well as hide apps.
Despite some modest improvements, the new design has created more clunk and junk and less meaningful interaction.
What do you think of Facebook’s new redesign? Thumbs up or thumbs down?
How far would you go to build your brand? Would you turn
your website’s homepage into a snaphot of what people are saying about your
product via a twitter feed if you knew it would generate buzz and
make your website go “viral?” That’s what the marketers of Skittles were banking
on when they launched their new homepage. Check it out.
In just a few hours, Skittles has became the number 1
topic discussed on Twitter, a social networking community that reaches over 4
million users monthly. Skittles is also integrating other online social
networks. The “Friends” navigation button links to their Facebook fan page and
their "News" page links to their YouTube
page.
While Skittles has already generated some earned media about
their new creative campaign to build their brand and be transparent, will
this tactic increase sales? Is using Twitter even the right target demographic given
that 47% of users are between the ages of 18-34 and 31% are between the
ages of 35-49? For example some of the tweets have nothing to do
with the actual candy but are using the Skittles hashtag to promote their own
campaigns or ideas. “ProIraqi
Refugees need your help. Click here to sign the petition: #Skittles. [Please RT!), or “WFMU Fundraising Marathon now underway. Tune
in: or pledge at wfmu.org #Skittles."
Other people on twitter are just talking
about the creativity behind the campaign from a marketing and branding
perspective and question how long the buzz will really last. At the end of the
day Skittles needs to sale candy and make sure it does not fall off of consumers radar. Will turning their website into
snapshots of their online social networks do the trick?
The term Web 2.0 is getting a bad wrap these days. Some influential bloggers are tired of hearing the term being thrown around left and right and of people marketing themselves as Web 2.0 experts. On Valentine’s Day TechCrunch posted an article saying that Web 2.0 is dying for two main reasons:
1. The number of startups that contact them and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message has decreased. 2. Google Trends shows the search term Web 2.0 peaking in 2007 and then falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today.
Just to make sure we are on the same page let’s quickly define Web 2.0 - the collaboration and evolution of communities on the web such as social networking sites, niche sharing sites, etc. Are online communities like Twitter and video sharing sites like YouTube dying?
According to Quantcast in the last six months:
• Twitter has grown from a community of 1.1 million people to 4.1 million. • Facebook has grown from over 36 million to over 64 million. • Flickr has grown from approximately 22 million to 24.3 million. • LinkedIn has seen a decline over the past 3 months. In November they had an estimated 24 million and it dropped to 18.3 million in February. • MySpace has seen a decline in web traffic. They went from over 70 million to 67.9 million. • Ning has grown from over 2.2 million to 6.2 million. • SecondLife has grown from over 900,000 to 1.3 million. • YouTube has grown from over 72 million to 77.9 million – although they did experience some dips in traffic from October - December.
Overall the big social networking communities are continuing to grow as more people dive into the “Web 2.0 world” and want to be a part of these communities or use their tools. While LinkedIn and MySpace’s traffic decreased it does not signify the end of these two social networking sites. MySpace is ranked as the 8th most trafficked site followed by Facebook ranked at number 9. LinkedIn is ranked at number 86.
Perhaps the reason the search term "Web 2.0" has leveled off in Google Trends is because more and more people understand the definition of Web 2.0. For example, blogger Asif Anwar pointed out, that Google Trends shows the word "Internet" peaking in 2004 and declining between 2005 and 2008. Obviously the Internet is not dying.
Sometimes terms in the tech and online marketing industry become buzzwords and that turns people off because it becomes too trendy. But let’s keep this in perspective. At the end of the day, Web 2.0 is just a term Tim O’Reilly coined to describe the collaboration and evolution of communities. While it’s not going away anytime soon, Web 2.0 will evolve and transform just like everything else on the web. Just wait until the Web 4.0 revolution. It’s going to knock your socks off :)
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Allyson Kapin is the Founding Partner of Rad Campaign and Women Who Tech. She is also the Editor-In-Chief of Care2's nonprofit tech and online marketing Frogloop blog. You can follow her on Twitter.
As negotiations in Congress on the stimulus bill are nearing the final stage, some attention is being given to the parts of the competing bills aimed at increasing access to broadband. The final numbers on the broadband provisions will probably come in around $6-$7 billion, which in the context of a massive $800 billion+ package doesn't seem like much. But is it really worth it?
Most of the money is slated to come in the form of tax breaks for companies that expand the reach of their broadband and improve their networks to deliver better speeds to the end user. Laudable goals, but should taxpayers really foot the bill to subsidize work that companies would likely perform anyway? There are provisions in both the House and Senate proposals that would open the door for new companies to become involved in delivering broadband and encourage more openness and innovation - which would be a great thing for those of us who would like to see such things.
But this just points out a larger problem. Where is there a national communications policy? If these proposals go through we may get more and faster broadband and many under-served communities may have access they lacked before, but how are they going to connect? Who's going to buy them the computers or mobile devices they need to truly take advantage? How will they afford the cost of service?
Without an overall plan to improve our communications infrastructure and address the barriers to access that exist, there's little hope that this "broadband stimulus" will have much effect. What we need is far more sweeping change that recognizes openness and access as rights instead of priveleges.
-- By Jared Seltzer, Founding Partner of Rad Campaign
Let's be honest, no industry is immune from sexism, racism, or ageism for that matter. The tech industry is no different. Moving past the reputation of 
