Where are all the women?
Mike Treder
2011-01-15 00:00:00




We want to include perspectives from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, South America, Canada, and Mexico, as well as the United States.

We want to hear from technological optimists and pessimists, from realists and idealists, from promoters of radical techno-transcendence and from thoughtful critics.

We want to know what gay, lesbian, and transgender folks think about the issues we discuss, what both the rich and the poor have to say, what the military mind is thinking, and what pacifists are proposing.

XHowever, there is one group perhaps more than any other that is not represented at the levels appropriate to their population percentage. I'm speaking, of course, about women, females, humans with two X chromosomes - those who make up about 52% of the people in the world, but who write only about 10% of the articles we post here.

As the main editor of this site, it is my responsibility to review submitted pieces and to decide whether or not they get posted. I also go out of my way to solicit new authors whom I believe can contribute productively to our topics of discussion.

I make a special effort to find women with good writing skills and strong points of view who will post regularly here, but let me tell you, it's not easy. I get many more submissions from men than from women, and I have to actively seek and cajole and almost beg for articles written by females.

It's not that we aren't getting any contributions at all from women. We've posted fine pieces within the last year from Andrea Kuszewski, Maria Korolov, and Darlene Cavalier, as well as from IEET staffers Melanie Swan, Linda MacDonald Glenn, Akansha Bhargava, Kristi Scott, Natasha Vita-More, and Martine Rothblatt.

But even with that, nine-tenths of our articles are authored by men, and such an imbalance just doesn't seem right.

So, my female friends, are we doing something wrong? Is there some reason in particular why you choose to write so much less about the issues of ethics and emerging technologies than do your male counterparts?

Are you perhaps satisfied with authoring only one in ten of the articles we post? Does that level seem appropriate and reasonable to you? Is there in fact a good explanation for it that I'm not seeing?

Please try to help me understand.

[NOTE: For this thread, I'm going to approve comments from women only.]