The May Scientae blog carnival, with posts from women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, is currently up at A Cat Nap. It's a really great collection about changing career goals.
P.S. - I will be hosting October's Scientae carnival here on DP.
If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.
A Rapleaf study concludes women care more about social networks.
(Hat tip: Christine.)
As Kottke famously pointed out over a year ago, the number of female speakers at tech conferences is pretty dismal. But that's exactly what new site Geekspeakr is trying to fix. It offers a directory of women tech experts, tagged with hundreds of different specialties and all available for speaking engagements. If you're an event organizer, you can use the site to contact desirable speakers, and, if you're a female speaker, you can create your own profile and wait for the speaking invitations to roll in. It's a fantastic idea - I also wonder if a site directory like this might also benefit other male-dominated fields like the sciences and skepticism.
The latest in Shiny Shiny's women in tech series is a talk with one of the minds behind website builder Mr Site, Bea Hatherley:
It's taking ages but I do think things are gradually improving and thankfully more women are starting to see IT/technology as attractive career choices. 10 years ago, it was a different story and our industry was 99% male-dominated. I did a straw-poll in my office today about the percentage of women:men on their IT courses and somewhat surprisingly, the ratio of men:women was 6:1 whereas even 10 years back, I think you would have been hard-pushed to find any women studying for careers in technology.
Hey, did you know that, starting today, women can use Yahoo!, too? Now there's a nice little portal/blog/magazine called Shine with female-centric topics like horoscopes, and parenting. Fear not the wild web anymore, ladies - now, it's Yahoo!-approved.
Okay, so it's not that bad. It's a hell of a lot better than the also recently-launched WOWOWOW, but it's also pretty easy to beat a website for women that displays the weather in terms of its effect on one's hair. But - where's the tech news? Astrology gets its own section, but nothing for world news, politics, or science? Is this really an accurate representation of women and the full spectrum of their interests?
The biggest problem, for me, with sites like Shine is that they're targeted towards women who are non- or casual web users, while the females already regularly on the web - who don't need entertainment news, or any news, spoon-fed to them - are overlooked. We need more involved methods of gathering and sharing information - like Digg ... except what we end up with is Sk*rt.
Update: I just noticed my new favorite female tech blogger also mourned the missed opportunity of Shine.
I must have missed the day when all the TechCrunch male bloggers (and for the record, most of the male tech bloggers) turned into something I'd want to see shirtless. I haven't seen any women begging for an Arrington or Scoble calendar; have you?
Since my long-neglected blog about women and technology news is undergoing a drastic format change and won't be ready to go for a while, the links I collect in that topic are piling up with no where to go. So I've decided to temporarily round them up in a semi-regular post here.
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