Finding The Women in Tech and Women in Search
A post about women in search engine marketing and their history was written about in length by Danny Sullivan, in SEM No Longer A Boys Club? He defended the number of women speakers at his conferences and pointed to other articles that congratulated or noted recent contributions by women to the search marketing industry.
Having been around in various incarnations myself, I read this stuff out of curiosity.
There was Where will search be seven years from now? by Jacqueline Dooley, who told a fun to read tale of the difference in her search marketing conference experience from her first in 2000, to now, 7 years later. It took her seven years to finally get a spot as a speaker, but aside from that, she’s excited about the future.
There was the recap of a lunch thrown for women in SEO, written by Rebecca Lieb called Search Chicks. Nice write-up, but I got stuck on this sentence, “Evans’ efforts to be inclusive and accommodating and to communicate to a group are typical of the way women operate.”
It doesn’t explain why, out of the several thousand attendees at the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference, a lunch honoring “SEO Women” filled two tables in a small resturant. Ignoring the fact that Liana Evans couldn’t invite everybody she wanted to, due to space limitations, and several women who were invited didn’t show, the fact that even 100 out of the huge SEO/M population might be “famous SEO women” is pathetic.
As hard as she tried to be “inclusive and accommodating”, you know damned well the same kind of lunch gathering would have required a ballroom if the invitees were “famous men in SEO”.
I tend to not attend conferences because I have a blended family and my own business, both of which are complicated to get time away from. To NOT travel to speak, or party and get plastered in any industry event becomes an issue in an era of “linkbait”, invites to private parties, and even who will link to you at all. My cool rating is sliding, and I’m well aware of it.
This brings me to something that Shari Thurow wrote in her comments to Danny Sullivan. She’s been around for a long time. I used to send my site visitors to her website back in the late 1990’s because she impressed me. Shari wrote:
So maybe the SEM field as a whole is well represented for gender. But SEO? I don’t think so. We need more women with technical skills.
I remember when I was one of the technical ones in SEO. There weren’t the tools that exist today. There was more manual work involved and more search engines to track. I had a website that taught SEO methods for years, until I retired from the field and took that final, last dying breath version of the old Cre8pc site down in 2003. (Now there’s a new dying breath version up there, but that’s another story.) I had moved on to software QA testing and user interface usability testing instead and loved being an IT person. SEO was getting boring and I wanted something that challenged me.
I think the fact that I launched a Yahoo! club in 1998 on “Website Promotion” also counts for something in the historical archives, but I worked quietly there for years. I didn’t promote my place when I visited others, like MarketPosition’s community or WebmasterWorld or even JimWorld. Nobody really knew who I was until the club became Cre8asiteforums. By that time, I was easing out of freelancing as an SEO but I was loyal to the industry. I watched SEO’s promote and make themselves famous in Cre8asiteforums, because that’s how the game is played.
Which brings me to Jeffrey Zeldman and his brilliant write-up today, Women in web design: just the stats. He writes,
The under representation of women and minorities in the information technology workforce is like the weather: everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything.
Sometimes people do little things. Like when I wrote Where are the Technical Industries Women Bloggers?, another woman, Liana Evans, was deeply inspired and set out to find them. She did this after reading my blog post, so talking about the topic was helpful.
Zeldman wasn’t satisfied with yack about his possible part in the gender gaps.
“We hired researchers at The New York Public Library to find out everything that is actually known about the percentage of women in our field, and their positions relative to their male colleagues.
He actually studied it. They found:
All that out of the way, the picture that emerges is disturbing:
* Men outnumber women in this workforce by over three to one.
* The percentage of women employed in the field is declining instead of growing.
* Women who participate in the field may not be promoted as often or as high as their male colleagues.
I asked a friend today if what sets men apart from women in IT or Search Engine Marketing has something to do with ego. I’ve been content to be a “workhorse”. A lot of the effort I put forth is volunteer oriented, so payment is a link or thank you. It’s honorable to be remembered but the opposite is the terrible hurt when you know someone you admire ignores your contributions to the industry.
Do men in IT boast about their skills more than women? I saw some of that when I worked for several IT departments, and it never bothered me. Did I have to prove my worth? God yes. Three times more so than the men did and as a single mom in my IT days, I made sacrifices. However, I was lucky. My male coworkers were like brothers, once I could show I wasn’t stupid.
Zeldman touches on training women in IT. I’m self taught and later, company taught. I thought I was lucky with that too, but no one took a chance with me until I showed the willingness to learn. I see that quality in only a few women I’m watching who are new to search marketing. The ones who keep asking questions rise far faster than those who don’t.
How many companies encourage women to keep learning new skills and send them for ongoing training? Is there a fair balance between investing in women vs investing in their male employees?
In my first paying job as a web designer in 1995, I beat the college educated, technically trained male applicants who knew more about programming. Every one of them. I was the only woman, and the only one my new employer felt could handle the job.
I marveled at that until I later learned I got the job because they could pay me less money. Welcome to IT, ladies.
I come away from these discussions feeling conflicted because my Internet work journey has been different. I just wanted to feed my kids and not be homeless, which I very nearly was. As I moved up and gained new skills and learned new disciplines, I needed to only ask someone my questions, and help was there. Few of those people were American women. Two come to my mind. The rest of the women I worked with were from India, Russia and China. The USA imports technical women because it doesn’t have enough of its own.
Each of those women had no intention of remaining in the USA. They came to get the money and later return home to either live better lives, or get married when custom said it was time. In any case, their skills left America when they did.
I don’t believe we’re doing enough to encourage women to train in technical fields. The hours alone, in IT, are demanding. Most of the best paying jobs are in or near cities, requiring commutes, which means longer days away from their children. The same thing happens to men, but how often do you hear about fathers demanding daycare on the premises for their children?
How many men can up and travel whenever they want because there is a wife at home taking care of things? I noticed that my male counterparts brought their kids to work with them on the weekends we worked overtime, but as a single mom, who worked weekends and overtime during the week, my kids came to work during the week because I had no one to watch them at night.
There are reasons women aren’t here in high numbers. Those that are want to be respected and noticed as contributors, alongside their male counterparts.
Like some of the search marketing writers mentioned above, I also looked at the sea of female faces at the conference in New York. My thought was that I hoped some of them would find their way to front of the room, standing before the microphone, because I want to hear what they have to teach me.
Hopefully, old folks like me have something left of value for them too.
Update April 23, 2007 Women Make Less 1 Year After College:
Stumble it!NEW YORK - Women make only 80 percent of the salaries their male peers do one year after college; after 10 years in the work force, the gap between their pay widens further, according to a study released Monday.
The study, by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, found that 10 years after college, women earn only 69 percent of what men earn.
Even after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the study found that one-quarter of the pay gap remains unexplained. The group said that portion of the gap is “likely due to sex discrimination.”
“Over time, the unexplained portion of the pay gap grows,” the group said in a news release.
Comments (14) to “Finding The Women in Tech and Women in Search”
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iamlost wrote:
I know the numbers: in most trades and professions women have to work twice as hard to get one quarter less. It seems a given that at any given tech/managemant level the woman (if there is one) will be better qualified than the men. And much more willing to share.
Even I, the island hermit, know a couple dozen wet coast ’silent’ women in IT (including SEO/M) who simply see no reason to join the larger conversation. These are self-employed women (consultants, contractors, entrepeneurs) who pass along or turn away far more clients than they accept, refusing to let work overwhelm family and/or personal needs, while making much better than average income. They continually talk about female friends who do similar work in-house. Perhaps it is a wet coast phenomona?
These women do not ‘do’ conferences and browse IT fora/blogs simply to stay current; as a start point for updating skills. They network and lunch and pub locally and regionally with each other and a few ‘on sufference’ male collegues, share work and leads and rec time…quietly, so far as the greater web is concerned. They do mom-and-pops to billion dollar corporate work and they do their own sites. They are 20s to 70s and many ethnic backgrounds; some are single, some not; most Canadian, a few not.
The conference and blog social set is actually a very small subset of all web professionals. A loud subset many of which apparently need to continually market their still available services.
I do not dispute the male-female number disparity but do believe there are far more successful women ‘under the surface’ than is generally acknowledged. Some men too.
Posted on 19-Apr-07 at 10:46 pm | Permalink
Erica wrote:
There is definitely a need for more women in tech and search, and it is a reality of life that we are outnumbered. I have a degree in Computer Science, have worked as a programmer, web designer and now work as a marketing professional; my sister is an Engineer. Both of us have worked in environments where we were outnumbered by 10-1 and a high of 25-1.
I’m not certain why more women aren’t encouraged into math, science and technology. It may be the demands and long hours of working in those fields the distance for the commute or a lack of interest. It may be the intimidation of being outnumbered, I know I’ve had to modify the way I interact with colleagues to be taken seriously, especially when working as a programmer.
All of this is why I continue to encourage young women who have an interest in technology, I make time to help them learn and share my experience with them.
Posted on 20-Apr-07 at 10:02 am | Permalink
Nathania Johnson wrote:
I’m an SEO copywriter who has some basic HTML skills (self-taught). I’m hoping to start learning CSS this weekend b/c I’m launching my own blog (unrelated to SEO), and I’m using Wordpress. I wish I knew more. Thankfully my husband is an autocad developer who also knows a bunch of other software development stuff.
What should women be learning? Granted, I’m not going to be a full-fledged IT person or anything. But when I look at a page source, I wish I understood more than I do.
Posted on 20-Apr-07 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
cre8pc wrote:
Nathania, good question
I think there is not enough understanding of analytics. For starters, you have to learn the software, and pick the right one. And figure out what all the numbers and pretty pictures really mean. Another is learning PHP, because its a popular language and with the new book that’s out, that I covered earlier in the blog, it can be optimized for search. At least there’s a book for self taught folks. I have a bookcase of books from my early days that have been badge of honor for me because they kept me company in my early years when the kids slept and I was teaching myself new skills. SEO, however, was trial and error and testing and remains so.
DianeV may show up here. She’s been around a long time and also teaches herself stuff, if only to understand what her staff is doing. She has a knack for the tech stuff, which I’ve always admired.
Posted on 20-Apr-07 at 12:57 pm | Permalink
Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing wrote:
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 20, 2007…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:……
Posted on 20-Apr-07 at 2:17 pm | Permalink
Nathania Johnson wrote:
Thanks, Kim!
I think my husband knows PHP so he can help me out with that.
The only analytics I’ve dabbled in is Google Analytics. Hopefully that’s a good start at least.
I read in a blog somewhere yesterday (can’t remember where) that SEO is part marketing and part developer. I think that’s really true.
Posted on 20-Apr-07 at 2:54 pm | Permalink
RaJ wrote:
Nathan,
To begin with you can Start using old version of Dreamweaver, you will get it in cheaper in ebay or cragislist. You can learn HTML & css yourself with out any support. I learnt basic HTML and css from dream weaver my self in less than 5 days and its best as of now.
Posted on 21-Apr-07 at 5:29 am | Permalink
AbleReach wrote:
Kim, you are one of my heroes. I trust you. I admire your holistic approach, among other things.
I want you to know that in my eyes at least what you do with the community you’ve built at Cre8asite is priceless.
Posted on 22-Apr-07 at 12:33 am | Permalink
Gloria wrote:
Yes, I agree with AbleReach, thank you Kim for such a great resource of information. I recently finished a whitepaper on website usability for my company, and your website is one of the best resources I found for this paper. I recently completed the paper, and would love to gain your advice on it. It is available at: http://www.blizzardinternet.com/whitepapers/whitepaper_form.htm
Also, thank you Nathania for asking about advice on what to learn on the developer side of SEO. I and one of my co-workers, we both work with the marketing of SEO, but are about to start classes in html and web design. The information above is very helpful as to what classes to decide taking. Thanks!
Posted on 25-Apr-07 at 4:25 pm | Permalink
DianeV wrote:
Hi, Kim. These threads are amazing; thanks for pointing me to the Zeldman thread with its lengthy discussion of women’s issues regarding IT as a career and in the workplace. (Although I have to say that I wasn’t quite sure what was meant by “IT” — it appears that it runs the gamut from computer and network maintenance to programming to web design and, in our sphere, SEO and other disciplines necessary to website development. That’s a rather broad topic.)
I haven’t a clue why there aren’t more women in web design, nor even if that’s really true. Maybe there are, and they just aren’t so visible? One could put forth questions and suppositions all day and, without a proper survey, not know whether correct answers have been arrived at.
I can also feel for those women who have had poor experiences with working in a male environment. But I suspect that everyone, male and female alike, has at times had poor working experiences; to me, that’s just a big flag warning that it’s time to leave. After all, it’s good to help people, and it’s good to have a career, but being miserable in doing so is simply not worth it.
As to where and what to learn, I’d say to start with the basics.
- Learn HTML. Yes, you can use Dreamweaver (love it myself) but, as someone at the cre8asiteforums famously said, “Dreamweaver writes clean code, but it will not prevent you from writing bad code.” The thing is that programs can only do what they were programmed to do, based upon the program writers’ supposition of what you will do, so it pays to learn HTML pretty well because the time *will come* when the lack of ability to read and correct HTML will hamper your efforts and your forward momentum. One place to start is http://htmldog.com, which has a pretty simple and straightforward teaching style devoid of reams of extraneous stuff. Even if you decide you *only* want to design graphics, you’ll still need to know something about HTML because you may be designing in a way that really doesn’t work out well for the medium of the Web.
- An Imaging Program. Unless you’re set on being solely a coder, you’re going to need to be able to design images, manipulate photographs, etc. The industry standard program is Adobe Photoshop, which has its own not-so-little learning curve, but is wonderful when you get up to speed. If you can’t afford Photoshop, Photoshop Elements is cheap and has most of Photoshop’s functionality, as I understand it. If you have difficulty with learning Photoshop or another imaging program, http://lynda.com is has online tutorials (audio/visual) of almost any program you can think of at cheap monthly payments.
- SEO. If you’re really going to be building websites, it pays to know how to “optimize” them for good search engine rankings (skip the 1998-ish style advice that all you need is to “tweak the meta tags”; that advice has been outdated for years). I include this in a short list of “musts” because your clients will likely innocently assume that the bright new website you’ve built for them will automatically rank well. If you don’t either take care of that or, at the least, advise them that SEO will be needed to achieve rankings, one fine day they’ll likely come to understand just that and may look dimly upon you for not mentioning it. Even if you’re going to outsource the SEO, the best advice I can give is to understand enough to ensure that the people you hire or recommend are doing it properly (and are not doing things that are either ineffective or detrimental to your clients’ websites). So I recommend learning SEO after learning HTML. That said, there’s a lot of bogus advice out there (old advice and/or misinformation) but there’s a good thread at cre8 about what SEO books to buy; I haven’t read either of them but they’re getting good recommendations from decent people, so that looks like a good place to start.
And, lastly: this isn’t a quick thing; web work requires a variety of skills and understanding. Truthfully, I wouldn’t worry about that; just start learning and go from there.
Because the first (and last) thing it takes is an enduring interest and willingness to learn. Wherever you are in the learning process, if you have that, I’d consider you one of us.
Posted on 26-Apr-07 at 2:33 am | Permalink
cre8pc wrote:
See? I knew Diane would stop by
She’s one of my heros. She’s been around, working with web stuff, since it was invented practically. She’s also one of the women “iamlost” reminds us of. The ones who are working and achieving, but aren’t begging for worship anywhere, aren’t speaking at conferences and are the silent leaders.
Thank you Diane! And I agree. Zeldman has been HOT lately. I’m grateful to him for keeping these topics alive.
Posted on 26-Apr-07 at 8:57 am | Permalink
Angela Moore wrote:
Thank you for posting this! I’ve been reading Li Evan’s series, Women of Internet Marketing. I love it! A few of my female coworkers and I were discussing this the other day. We work in a relatively large Interactive Agency and search seems to have the highest women to men ratio (excluding HR). It’s exciting to see women stepping up and taking a lead role in all of this. Kudos!
Posted on 26-Apr-07 at 11:28 am | Permalink
cre8pc wrote:
You’re welcome, Angela. I’ve wondered about why I speak up on certain things, because there are other topics that really bother me that I’m silent on, but just as nuts about, like the struggle of the Earth to tolerate our abuse…war. Gas prices. Growing older…heh.
I wrote about women’s issues in college and even in high school, where I was highly involved with the newspapers (I’ve been a high school and college Editor-in-Chief and Assist. Editor). A blog? Too handy, for sure.
Liz, thank you. The admiration is quite mutual!
Posted on 26-Apr-07 at 12:10 pm | Permalink
Gloria wrote:
The other day I was speaking ot one of our blog designers at work to get more advice where to start with learning html, PHP, css stylesheets. She was saying that after working in it for 7 years, she is still learning something new everyday. So I agree with DianeV, the learning process seems something that one must have an “enduring interest” in.
Posted on 26-Apr-07 at 12:54 pm | Permalink