Thanks for your comments and for visiting Nokia’s Ideasproject website. It’s absolutely true we have to do a better job of representing women on the site. We all know that the gender balance is not 50/50 in the technology world — even, weirdly, the social media world..but that is no excuse. We just interviewed two female new Ideators last week, a step towards a better ratio…and plan to make it a priority in the next year. Hopefully in the coming months we’ll be able to attract Big Ideas from more women — you’re right that there are a lot brilliant female voices out there.

Valerie Buckingham, Forum Nokia Developer Communities

Until you brought it up here, I barely remembered “The IDEAS Project.” If you had asked me what it was, I wouldn’t have had a clue. I remember being pulled aside at a Nokia party on the roof of a building at SXSW in March, giving an interview, and going back to the party. I just checked back through old emails and found that I had been navigated there by a friend who was involved in the project. For what it might matter, that person was a woman.

I had assumed it was a Nokia project. I didn’t know Monitor Talent was involved. As it happens Monitor Talent is here in Cambridge (where I’m based these days). A couple years ago I had thought that Monitor might consider representing my Talent. I met with some people there and nothing came of it. Whatever the reason for that, it wasn’t because I’m female.

For what it’s worth, the number of women interviewed for the IDEAS Project was seven, not five. That comes to about 14%. According to Kirrily Robert’s presentation on women in open source, the tech industry average is 20%, but the average among open source developers is much lower: 10% for Drupal, 5% for Perl, 1..5% for Drupal overall. As she also points out, there was just one woman at the Linux Kernel Summit. This squares with the readership of Linux Journal, where female readership is in the low single digits. This is at a magazine that is owned and run by women. We’ve tried to raise the percentage. It ain’t easy.

You also say you see “No one under the age of 30 and not that many under the age of 40.” How about the number over the age of 60? I count just one: me. Not that I care. (I really don’t.)

I think there are several overlapping problems here. One is a demographic imbalance of highly lopsided dimensions, for which there are many bad causes, some very deep and long-standing. Another is lame conferences that keep inviting the same yakkers to stand on stage or sit on panels. (This IDEAS thing holds a mirror up to that system.) Another is the buzz business of Twitter and blogging and traffic-driving, which also tends to smoke its own exhaust.

You know how to fix all that? Do exactly what you’re doing already.

It’s interesting to me that you’re complaining about broken systems you’re already doing a great job replacing. You’re doing it with IIW (which is very much your show, and quite successful — as a productive thing, rather than as a show business thing, for which I say Bravo). You’re doing it with Open Space, for which you are by far the most vigorous and effective advocate and practitioner on the whole planet. You’re doing it with She’s Geeky, with this blog… the list goes on and on.

You need to face the fact that you rock. You don’t need ordinary conferences and other Business As Usual crap to give you validation. You’re doing great.

Keep it up.

Doc

I have a strong sense of urgency, that something must be done about this. I have some of the credentials, and I’ve written papers, presented at conferences, and developed/designed a plethora of websites. The decisions is that moving forward I can continuing to learn new technologies and techniques in my spare time, or spend my time telling people about what I already know. This reminds me of an observation I had over a year ago when twitter was beginning to flood with social media *experts*. There’s often a division between people that do technology, and people that write about technology. And now I see a new division – one between the people who’s careers depend on public speaking engagements (authors, VCs, consultants), and those people who’s careers depend on executing (entrepreneurs, developers, engineers, designers). Some people are lucky to be able to do both, and one day I’d like to call myself one. But for now I’m too busy doing technology, a.k.a. too many ideas for projects and not enough time.