Thanks, Sean, for linking to the Wired article in your comment about the Anti-Spyware Coalition.

Towards the end of the article, there’s a quotation from Ben Edelman that has gotten under my skin. What he said was, "You don’t need a committee of 50 smart guys in D.C. sipping ice tea in order to decide [people don’t want spyware]." (emphasis mine)

As one of the group of people who sat in a room in DC for 2 days, and on numerous heated conference calls, debating and revising these documents, that line just made me feel invisible. And indignant, not only for myself, but for the surprisingly large number of other smart women who actually were in that room and on those calls.

For as long as I’ve worked in the high-tech world, both as a lobbyist and inside tech companies, I’ve had a practice of actually counting the diversity in the room in Big Meetings. (No wonder I didn’t make it as an academic; I’ve never kept those notes.) Men nearly always outnumber women, sometimes 4:1 or more, and the room often has no African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans. Usually there is at least one Asian, but the room is generally very white.

The Anti-Spyware Coalition meeting, by contrast, was roughly 30% women. And it wasn’t just women from corporate communications offices, as occasionally happens. There were women hardcore technologists, product people, and lobbyists too. And while the room was very white, there was at least one African American and there were at least two Asians.

But even though it is a frustrating fact that there are not very many women in these technology/tech policy circles, it is even more frustrating to have the myth that "there aren’t any" constantly promoted. That simply isn’t true, but repeating it and repeating it and repeating it, and behaving as if it were true, does make women feel unwelcome, and weirdly defensive.

I know that I used to be pretty humorless about inclusive language, and I swear, I’ve lightened up a lot since college. But there’s just this visceral reaction I have to feeling invisible — I hate it, and I can’t ignore it. I don’t think Ben was trying to be sexist. I think he had a picture in his mind of what that meeting probably looked like, and women just weren’t in it.

And I guess the bottom line is that’s what sucks.