Once again, I was spotted and nabbed for a quick video interview by Webpronews’s Mike McDonald. Mike says he doesn’t watch himself on film; sorta like how actors love to do the work but refuse to view the final product. I can so relate to this.

Ours was the first interview in the morning of the last day of Search Engine Strategies NYC held in April 2007.

I look tired and it may be time to re-tell my famous “breasts on the bathroom scale” story again. Or, just listen to the interview and feel inspired. You decide.

The theme is usability but it’s not heavy or long. As always, sneaking a bit of usability into a conference on search engine marketing is something I’m grateful for. He also asked me about my other home, Cre8asiteforums. My thanks to the folks at Webpronews for thinking of me.

View the interview with Kim Krause Berg here.

“It’s my blog,” Bill Slawski says, towards the end of a debate about blog ethics and the possibility of adhering to a Code of Ethics. The interview of Bill Slawski and Loren Baker by Webpronews’ Mike McDonald features two discussions. One is on local search and the other, blog ethics.

Bill dominates the discussion, which I expected because there’s a ton of information in his head. He can pull out facts and figures as effortlessly as my husband does. They have brains that work like databases with Google installed. A quick search, prompted by a discussion and they have the information in seconds. I’m so jealous.

Loren Baker and Bill Slawski have worked together and individually on local projects. They bring to the interview personal observations based on their work, as well as pointing out how differently search engines handle local search. Bill points out a patent in China and how it’s specifically designed to locate businesses there. They point out that Yahoo! and Google get and compile their local search data differently from one another. The differences in their approaches directly affect SERPS.

The discussion on blog ethics begins with Bill’s describing what prompted the outcry for a code of ethics in the first place. They roll around topics like moderating comments, and who is responsible for what appears on their blog property. The consensus is that we can’t tell people how to aspire to certain conduct because it’s too indefinable. Bill compares it to how laws start out, and gives an example of how a basic idea for a rule builds from something to aspire to, towards something based on behavioral data and circumstances. Kinda like it’s not helpful in the long run to fit everybody’s blog into a “one size fits all” type of box.

I get the biggest kick out of the Webronews interviews because of the background silly stuff. Half the fun for me is watching people behind the interview table who forget the camera is on. It’s funny to see how many times Bill moves his soda, and is it me, or did Mike’s subtle southern accent get stronger after he mentioned he’s from Kentucky?

Two good topics. For anyone seriously interested in local marketing, Bill injects some great ideas based on simple, easy techniques he’s already seen in action. Great inspiration there.

Get comfy. You can watch the interview here.

I just took a web design survey. It took me less than four minutes, if that, thanks to the multiple choice options and easy questions. What slowed me down was the chance to speak up about women, driving long distances to work and single parenting.

There is no shortage of web design/development talent. There is, however, a shortage of companies who want to hire talent, understand the value of well-rounded skills and are flexible enough to accommodate their needs. There are three companies I can think of off-hand that I wish to chuck my work at home self-employment life for. Two of them have sent their recruiters to me four times. Each time, as much as it frustrates me, I turn them down.

I can do what I do best from here. I have the software and equipment, and am one of the most self disciplined home office workers I know. I love working off-site and am extremely fond of team projects. But, I live one and half hours (one way) from companies worth dropping my tax deductions for.

I have no interest in paying $3.00 a gallon in gas to get there. Three hours of driving every day, on a day where no major traffic tie-ups occur, is not in the cards for a parent who has kids active in school and sporting events. When I did commute to my IT jobs, I was a single mom. Dinner was at 7:30 pm and the rest of the evening was devoted to kids’ homework, house related work, and staying up until 1am teaching myself more skills, checking my Yahoo club, and freelancing in SEO on the side.

A giant company in California knocks on my door periodically. How cool would that be? Working for a cutting edge company? I’ve done that before and it was the best experience working with brilliant people everyday. But I turn them down because I’m not a twenty-something relocatable potential property. They have other offices, but they’re also in big cities that are too far away.

Who decided the best and brightest workers live in cities?

Why do Internet software companies fail to encourage telecommuting? With the technology available, this is absurd. We can remotely view and test people using websites but can’t consider hiring employees who need or want to be home-based?

More and more men are tiring of spending their adult lives driving to and from work. They’re being pressured by society, and women, to spend more time with their families and communities. Employers pay lip service to their male employees about being flexible. When a man wants to leave early, skip a day to watch his kid do something or even race home when the school nurse calls, he’s suddenly “not one of the team” anymore. His ratings drop because, sadly, he exposes his desire to be with his family.

There’s a stigma to this that requires serious change by companies interested in holding on to valuable employees, men or women.

I’ve experienced vile hatred from women who have no clue what being a single parent is like. These are women who are career driven and “sacrifice”, for them, is no time for self, let alone children. You just put your kid in a box somewhere and go to work. Period. This is why I needed to bring my son to work with me when he was in second grade, on the way to get X-rays for his broken collarbone that he got on the school playground. I was afraid I’d lose my job if I took time off to care for him.

This is what the career ladder can be like for parents. I was one of the few women on an entire floor of IT men. I needed to be there, no matter what. And, I loved the work, so I wanted to be there. I just didn’t feel a child had to suffer so I could be one of the guys.

The survey was about a career in web design. The questions were basic. They don’t shed light on sacrifices or choices made to further one’s career. There were related industries to web design that weren’t represented, other than there being the dreaded “Other” option. Accessibility design wasn’t highlighted. Or persuasive design. Or marketing for search engines.

I’m always asked for referrals for “web designers who know accessibility and SEO”.

The survey hit on age and gender. I know I’ll be in a minority. I know my average earnings for last year are far less than what I used to make working for a big Internet firm. I’ve never been able to replace that kind of income, though I work just as many crazy hours.

The survey doesn’t visit the home office of a barefooted consultant with a dog lying nearby and the sounds of birds coming from the open windows, or me as the working mom waiting for the daily cell phone ring tones of her kids, waiting to be picked up or driven somewhere next.

I’ll be there in “just a few minutes” is music to their ears and a luxury no big company looking for hot talent seems to understand about persons like me. We’re here.

You have to come to us now.

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:

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.

Yesterday my high school age daughter told me a classmate was pulled from a class because it was suspected he had a gun. They were interrupted while taking a test, and the kids were angry this boy was searched because he was a “straight A” student known to never be a problem.

However, he spoke about owning or having access to guns.

I thought it was an isolated incident, related to increased awareness due to the Virginia Tech massacre. However, tomorrow, at her school, the police department will be on the premises all day. The school will be searched for bombs before they arrive for classes. The kids may be subjected to searches for weapons.

Friday marks the eighth anniversary of the Columbine school shootings, when 15 people, including the two student shooters, were killed in Colorado. School officials at my daughter’s school know the kids are talking about Columbine and Virginia Tech, and are preparing for “copycat” acts. We live an hour from where our Amish neighbors suffered unbelievable loss when a mad man lined up the girls and killed them in a one room schoolhouse earlier this year.

Who can blame the students for talking? The video, letters, and photos of the Virginia Tech murderer have been replayed and discussed everywhere, as if he’s a celebrity. As if spreading his message has some sort of productive value to the public. Or our kids.

My mind wanders. As usual. The kid who was searched was pointed out to me by my daughter yesterday as we watched my son at his track meet. Had that “I have access to a gun” boy showed up outside the school, with a death mission, pickens would have been easy. Kids and adults from two schools were there. Several hundred of us.

I “woke up” at around my daughter’s age too. Only I did because of Vietnam and the huge pictures in Life magazine that came to the house every month. We didn’t have CNN, video games in which killing animals and people are the point, and kids weren’t being shot to death during English class.

I came of age during the days of “flower power” and the Kent State killings. College kids were putting flowers into guns, not pointing them at each other.

Twice, in the past two weeks, my eldest asked me about what would be left for her, because of global warming.

I’m hoping that she just gets through the day tomorrow.

Alive.