Glamour Magazine's Fall Issue Covers….Women in High Tech!
When I saw the headline at BoomTown about Kara Swisher doing an interview with Glamour on Women in High Tech I nearly got whiplash doing a double take.
Those two just don’t obviously go together.
Not that Kara isn’t glamorous nor Glamour Magazine capable of covering issues other than “Pajamas During the Day? YES!“
But honestly a seriously sassy, smart, high tech Diva and a Glamour bible read by millions of us for their fashion, relationship and makeup tips just doesn’t seem obvious …. until you think about it and see what’s been going on in the blogosphere regarding women in high tech.
There’s not enough women and its not clear why.
Back in September of last year I covered one of the more visible “shouting matches on this topic” between Shira Ovide in the WSJ and Michael Arrington in TechCrunch. The upshot? Ms. Ovide’s felt that with such an incredible dearth of female executives in high tech (and particularly in startups) that only awareness of the issue would raise the potential for change (in particular at TechCrunch’s technology conference). For Mr. Arrington part he felt that, “statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them. Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them”, and then he noted TechCruch’s enviable record of having women executives in high tech.
And the “conversation” on the lack of women in high tech is continuing
Which brings us back to Kara’s piece in Glamour. What better place to raise awareness among women themselves and to use as a springboard to sound off on this important issue, as Kara notes in her post on All Things Digital, “”Diversity is at the heart of true innovation and more of it is needed for tech to thrive in the coming years.”
Oh and a P.S. …. Kara’s thought is supported by research in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review: having more women in groups makes the groups smarter (and this is independent of other factors). See the abstract of the study here and its defense by the authors here.
