[140 characters: A very male Twitter staff meeting]
While reading today's terrific New York magazine story about text-message broadcaster Twitter, I was struck by a photo of some of the San Francisco-based start-up's 28 employees: Looks like they're all men.That made me wonder about the gender mix among technology workers across Gannett. What's the gender breakdown where you work?
Why messages limited to 140 characters
"Back then," recalls Dom Sagolla, "we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message."
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Surprisingly it is 50%-50% in IT, but only our OnLine department is 95%-5%. The bigger problem is ethnic/racial diversity in both departments.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the breakdown of 40 and up vs. younger? Is age diversity a problem like you say ethnic/racial diversity is?
ReplyDeleteNot an intentionally sexist observation: right now the people at my Gannett property, inside and outside of IT, that truly understand technology, are all male.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the vast majority of the people at the property, inside and outside of IT, don't truly understand technology. Especially management. And the ones who do understand are peons who would get written up for trying to help with tasks that are not in their job description at the expense of tasks that are. Any women that truly understood technology were laid off last year when the online department was consolidated.
Women used to install and troubleshoot computers in the IT department of The Des Moines Register. And women were prominent in the Register's online efforts. But that was a year ago and I don't know who is left in those offices now.
ReplyDeleteWe're around 50-50.
ReplyDeleteThe women in our online department are significantly more useful, imaginative and worthwhile than their male counterparts.
We have a woman in IT. But as far as online goes, that's a closed society.
ReplyDelete(See, if you let someone else learn - or have a good idea, or use the training they sought on their own - YOU become less valuable. Right? Right.)
In Wilmington, IT is very much a male-only enclave, but the online/multimedia side has some very sharp female web producers, video editors and shooters working for it.
ReplyDelete