The beginning of this thread is here, in which Seattle PI reporter John Cook paints a rather flippant, vacuous portrait of the amazing Tara Hunt, who felt quoted out of context and had this to say about it. Liz Lawley also weighed in on the trend of how women in tech tend to be represented in a biased way by media large and small.

Now, many, many folks came back with the assertion that Cook's post was not intentionally sexist, was ignorant more than malicious, yadda yadda — and I believe that's likely true. But you know what? I'm really sick of that excuse. We don't live in the 30's anymore, or the 50's, and sexism these days is rarely an event or something with clear boundaries one can point to with assurance and say "that's f*&^ed up, that's malicious." We've come a long way, and that's fantastic. But it's precisely all of this "unintentional" and "ignorant not malicious" speech, spin, and vibe that is what most of sexism looks like today — and it makes it that much more difficult to pin down. And it only serves to make this discussion more slippery and less productive when folks come back with the "not intentional" disclaimer. OK — we get it — it wasn't intentional, but yet — what are you going to do about it? Too often "not intentional" is an excuse of absolution, and a waiver to avoid any further self-examination on one's own and one's colleagues' gender biases. It's not good enough. As a white person I feel the same instinct towards deflecting perceived guilt if I'm called out about a comment that offended someone of another race — and it took me a long time to figure out that that's not very useful. It's neither useful to me nor to the person(s) I've offended. It's not about blame, it's about taking responsibility for examining one's biases and unpacking the package we're all laden down with. We all have this baggage, and we all carry the shame when it's periodically revealed to be trailing along behind us. We can either all choose to work together to unpack that baggage and support each other therein, or we can choose to keep making excuses.

Some of this is difficult to say because I don't intend for it to be a bitchfest about this particular incident — John Cook spoke with Tara directly to clear the air, updated his post, etc. Great. I'm just frustrated about the pattern in which women are represented, take issue with it, and then face a long line of others jumping in to make excuses instead of addressing the very real and pressing issue of gender bias and representation in the tech industry (and everywhere else, for that matter). For some reason it always seems more important to discredit any particular instance that women bring up, rather than recognize the big picture problem we need to somehow address collectively. It's very difficult to find that space in which to talk, when every instance is met with a chorus of "but…".

I'm tagging this post webjustice2.0, which is an idea of Marshall Kirkpatrick's that I need to blog about next…