I wanted to follow up on what I talked about yesterday. I think the Women in WordPress topic is important and I'd like to continue to roll out my thoughts as I process them. While reading Sarah Pressler's post about WordCamps for Women I get the impression that some people don't like being offended and mean to create environments where it's impossible to be offended.
Tag Archives: feminism
Skip the After Party Bars
There's been a lot of discussion recently about women in WordPress and how we should change the status quo. If you haven't been following along I would start with Sarah Gooding's post about Creating a Culture of Respect. There were some excellent follow ups by Chris Lema & Sarah Pressler.
There's a lot of information to digest and a lot to process. I want to write my opinion in response to these excellent posts but I'm honestly not ready. I work best by breaking things into smaller chunks and digesting those pieces and then moving on. That's why I'm starting with something tangential – why do we host after parties at bars?
Stay Classy Siobhan
Disclaimer – before anything else is said in this post I think it's important to mention that I have a hard time discussing feminism. My first reaction is to be defensive. I feel like I'm being attacked just for being a guy. It usually takes me a while to process the information and to try to begin to understand what's it like to live in a patriarchal culture. I post this not because I pretend to know what I'm talking about but because I want to express my thoughts and have a candid discussion about this really important issue.
Those of you in the WordPress world probably know the name Siobhan McKeown. She's writing the History of WordPress, she writes for Smashing Magazine, she organized WordCamp Europe, she works with all sorts of documentation projects for WordPress, and she's all around awesome. She recently wrote a post about how several members in the WordPress community went about describing herself and other women.
A Lack of Communication with Adria Richards
The internet can be relied upon for two things:
- Pictures of cats
- Firestorms
Over the last couple days there's been a huge firestorm over Adria Richard's blog post about being offended by sexual jokes at tech conferences. The gist of the post is that Adria was offended by two guys making sexual jokes and she reported them to the staff as well as posted the whole story to her blog.
The resulting firestorm consumed not only one of the two guys' job but Adria's job as well.