There’s a huge wave that Internet people are paddling like fools to catch right now. It’s the “women are starting to realize they’re under-represented in tech and startups, so we’d better start to care or at least pretend we do” wave. Some effects of this wave include a rise in women-in-tech organizations and an effort by tech event organizers to give women more visibility.
It’s great to see that tech events are giving women a little limelight of their own. I’m going to an event soon that has given women their very own panel! And they’ve called it “Women’s Panel.” Kind of like Women’s Room. But with the latter, there’s little doubt about who uses it or for what. But what about this mysterious Panel…?
As a woman, when I hear “panel” and “women” together, certain images are evoked. The famous cotton panel that lets things breathe… The modesty panel on a desk that allows you to cross and uncross your legs without pulling a Sharon Stone. And another kind of modesty panel that prevents anyone from peeking into your cleavage. (Cleavage peeking is encouraged in France, so I don’t see much of that here.)
The problem with this particular event is that every other scheduled segment has a title that indicates what’s going to be discussed: “Going international,” “Can you be an entrepreneur without any experience,” “Startups have to be flexible.” There is one other panel without a topic, the “VC/ISF Panel,” but it doesn’t need one. We all know the venture capitalists are going to talk about investing: how to get investors, what investors are looking for in a startup, investment trends — the usual.
But what could the Women’s Panel be about?? Is “Women’s Panel” self-explanatory, like “VC/ISF Panel” is? No. It’s reductive. It’s dismissive. And this is insulting.
I’ve tried to find the common denominator of this panel by examining the panel members. The moderator is a dynamic, young geekette grad student who blogs for the people organizing the event and does other Internetty things. There’s a woman startup founder (a site where you can organize group gift buying), a woman investor, another woman investor, and a young – male – startup founder who launched a fashion-related startup (which I wrote about a year ago).
Of course, the women investors couldn’t be on the VC/ISF Panel because they have vaginas. The two startups are about clothes and shopping. And the geekette, being a blogger for the major tech blog organizing the event and a recent transplant from Silicon Valley, will be received by French entrepreneurs as if she were Moses coming down from the mountain with God’s Terms and Conditions.
But I still don’t know what they’re going to talk about.
Because I know event organizers are trying very hard to make an effort to include women in their events these days, I wrote to the organizer of this event a couple of months ago, asking what the panel topics were going to be, offering to participate, explaining that I’m an anglophone tech blogger living in Paris with a little startup project of my own and familiarity with the local startup scene. I’d met him briefly at last year’s edition of the same event. But he never wrote back. This was before my article You can’t launch the next generation of startups without women* was published by his blog’s biggest competitor, so it couldn’t have been because of that…
So in typical politically correct fashion, this event has given women a nod. And that’s about it. They slapped a few vaginas together and one guy who knows about fashion (because fashion is a priority of all women) and figured they’d done their bit.
Seriously, now. The organizers could have bothered to find out what issues women in tech are concerned with, and given the Women’s Panel a title that gave some indication of the topic(s) to be covered. Even a nebulous title like “Women and startups” would have shown they’d made a modicum of effort. A panel needs a focus, like an essay or a documentary does, and there are plenty of topics that are meaty, relevant, meaningful and interesting to women and men. “Is discrimination an issue in the startup context?” “How to find mentors.” “Women-only incubators: a good idea?” I can think of any number of them off the top of my head. But obviously they didn’t think it was necessary.
I’m sure fashion boy will have much more to contribute to the Women’s Panel than I would have. And I’ll be sure to let you know what they do end up talking about.
*One of the blogs I respect the most published this article but, caught up in the wave I described, they changed my title to make it sound like it was all about women when, in fact, it was mostly about startup founders of any gender who don’t have a technical background.
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