

2010: The Year of Whining About Women In Tech - rewind
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/2010-the-year-of-whining-about-women-in-tech/15283?tag=content;feature-roto

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pohl
When faced with the assertion that tech is a meritocracy — an observation oft
mentioned in open source where getting one's patch into a repository has only
to do with the merits of the patch and nothing to do with irrelevancies such
as whether the author is a hermaphrodite — the author only mentions as
counter-evidence 1) who gets to be on the cover of Wired, and 2) who has
managed to parlay tech experience into soft, people-skills positions like
directors in high-status companies. I'm not sure I would buy either of those
as a metric of meritocracy.

Edit: to put a finer point on it, I don't think anybody has ever claimed that
the politics of business hierarchies or that of thinly-veiled glamour
magazines is meritocratic, and it doesn't help anyone understand the issue to
conflate those things with tech.

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amackera
Linked in the article is a metafilter post which I found very interesting:
[http://www.metafilter.com/98385/Board-diversity-by-the-
basic...](http://www.metafilter.com/98385/Board-diversity-by-the-basics-the-
bottom-line-about-getting-women-into-CXO-roles)

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DjDarkman
> Tech is not a meritocracy, and it does not run on the right thing to do.

This is never backed up. I agree with the 'who cares' message though.

