I’m at #EMCworld, in the social lounge. I have booth duty in a little bit, so I’m playing catch up. My [lady] dev manager wrote a killer blog post that I need to get posted. This is her first blog post, and honestly y’all she’s a natural. I also need to get my schedule worked out for tomorrow (heading to #Interop!), write a couple of blog posts; one wrapping up my launch — Spanning Backup for Office 365 now supports OneDrive for Business!!, and one summarizing EMC World that I’ll publish on 24 x 7 IT Connection.
I was trying to get all this done before folks start trickling into the lounge to watch Chad’s facemelting demos during the keynote. Then someone tagged me in a response to this tweet:
@Rimmergram@vmiss33 yeah sorry gals, with only 2 in the category I didnt include it, we need to cultivate more female bloggers
— Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) May 4, 2016
First off, I love Eric to death. He does tones of good work for the community, including the top 100 blogger list. But this soundtrack is getting old, and you guys need to do better, plain and simple.
Besides the fact that he could only think of two lady bloggers to include in his annual list, this statement: We need to cultivate more female bloggers just rubbed me the wrong way. As evidenced by the fact that I need to blog about it before I can get to my work.
Lady bloggers exist. RIGHT NOW. But y’all don’t see us. We go to the same events. We use the same hashtags. Hell a lot of times we help y’all be better bloggers by reviewing your posts and suggesting improvements.
WHY DON’T Y’ALL SEE US?
No sense cultivating more lady bloggers if you’ll just ignore them too. But let me help y’all out with some resources to check out, cuz I know y’all can do better.
- Sheryl Koenigsberg blogs here. She blogged about this topic in FEBRUARY (she lists lady bloggers in this post)
- Erin Banks (fellow EMC Elect, former vSpecialist), blogs here.
- Several ladies (including myself) blog on 24x7ITConnect. Theresa Miller runs this blog (and is one of the primary bloggers).
- Melissa Parmer blogs here (I’m hoping she was one of the two women, I haven’t voted yet so I’m not sure who the two are).
- Phoummala Schmidt blogs here. She is truly the Exchange goddess, she knows more about it than anyone I know.
- Amy Manley blogs here. She’s the one who tagged me in a response to the original tweet, and if she’s not on the voting list I’ll be shocked.
- Then there’s me. I blog here on my blog (the one you’re reading now), 24x7ITConnect, and on the Spanning’s Cracking the Cloud blog.
This is just what came to mind immediately, if I missed you please ping me so I can add you! What kills me is I can’t include all the lady bloggers who are ghostwriting for their organizations. Need more? Comb through my girlz list on Twitter.
If you don’t like any of our work, that’s fine. But y’all gotta stop saying there aren’t ladies blogging, podcasting, evangelizing. I created Cloudbunnies because y’all forgot to include ladies on your teams at first. I’m starting a whine and wine meetup in Austin so we [all genders] can have a place to blow off steam and strategize how to make this better, at the same time we talk tech.
What will it take for this attitude that the women who are in tech now don’t matter? We are here.
I’m tired of being nice about this. WE EXIST. Do better guys. Just do better.
UPDATE: Added Amy Manley (thanks Brian!).
Hi Gina,
I can assure you the ignorance wasn’t intentional, my blog list comes from people who self-nominate their blogs via this form: http://thevpad.com/?page_id=56 I typically add 40-50 blogs a year from people who fill out the form and I only maintain a list of the ones that are focused mostly on virtualization.
Maintaining what I have already is plenty of work, trying to actively go out and scour the internet for new or unlisted virtualization blogs on a constant basis is way too much for me. On occasion if I do stumble across a blog that isn’t listed I’ll add it but most of them come from people filling out the form. I have posted and tweeted many many times for being to fill out the form if they want to be listed on my site.
Secondly the female blog category was another self-nomination process that I posted and tweeted many times. Of the 100+ nominations that came in for the categories only 2 of them came from female bloggers. I was hoping the survey would help me discover more female bloggers that were not currently listed currently on my site but that didn’t happen.
Of your above list Amy & Melissa are already listed on my site as they had filled out the form. Amy didn’t nominate herself for the female blogger category though only Jane & Melissa did. The remaining people can certainly fill out the form so they get added as well.
So to answer your question why we don’t see you, it’s mainly because I’m not constantly looking under every rock for bloggers, the blogger crowd is quite huge (400+) and I try and rely on people coming to me to make them seen. My apologies if I offended you, that was not my intent.
http://vsphere-land.com/news/top-vblog-2016-requirements-finalized.html
http://vsphere-land.com/news/last-call-for-blog-o-hol-before-top-vblog-2016-begins.html
http://vsphere-land.com/news/6450.html
http://vsphere-land.com/news/last-chance-to-nominate-for-top-vblog-categories-and-get-your-blog-on-the-ballot.html
Regards,
Eric
Hi Eric,
Thanks for your response. I really do appreciate all the work you do for this poll, I know from experience it’s a thankless job, and lots of extra work that takes you away from other things.
However……
What I had problem with was your statement: “We need to cultivate female bloggers”. No, that’s not the case. We have TONS of them. The guys I shared this post with gave me double of what I came up with in the heat of the moment (and I’ll add them once I get some breathing room).
If you are aiming to have a voting process where *everyone* is represented, it’s on you to do the marketing. I’ve had people reach out to me to figure out how to balance their lists, even if I don’t fit. If you’re simply too busy to do that., I get it. I truly, truly do. But if you come up with a list, and only 2 women have submitted to the process, it’s on you to think how you’re marketing the list. It is not ok to blame this on the lack of lady bloggers. It’s not ok to just assume that there are no lady bloggers. We’re here. The question may be why we don’t see your request to participate – and that’s advice from a product marketing manager (and something I struggle with every day with the product I support).
We are going to continue to call bullshit on being told we don’t exist.There’s too many of us, and we realize we have to support each other at this point. And we are committed to doing that.
I wouldn’t call it tons and I’m speaking specifically of virtualization bloggers, I have no interest in any others as I don’t maintain those on my list. In relationship to the huge number of male bloggers the amount of female virtualization bloggers is very, very small. I challenge you to name 2 dozen female virtualization bloggers as you seem to know the female side better than I do.
By cultivate I simply meant encourage more of them to blog, the number of female bloggers is still very small compared to male bloggers. and that is simply based on my viewpoint and the bloggers that I am aware of that are on my list. Now if you claim there are tons of them, that’s great, point them to my site so I can add them. So I guess we don’t need to cultivate them anymore and now that I know there are so many I take that back.
And I do the marketing to get the word out, I may not have the marketing power to put out billboards and targeted google ads but I make the best effort to ensure people are aware of the list and voting. Also for your information I sure as hell am not marketing the list, it’s a tool to measure the popularity of virtualization bloggers and that’s it.. EVERYONE on it has made the effort to fill out the form and let me know they exist. This voting process has been going on for over 5 years and almost every blogger in the community is aware of it. If someone doesn’t want to make the effort to be included on it then it’s on them not me.
You can call bullshit all you want but don’t aim it at me, you exist in my world if you fill out a simple form whether you are a male or female. The female category this year was a last minute idea I had to try and give special recognition to female bloggers. Since I didn’t get many responses I dropped it, simple as that, it’s not a reflection on anyone existing or not.