Girl and Woman are not adjectives. They are nouns. Those are the ground rules for this post. I do not spend a lot of time waxing feminist. And I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing that here. But there are a few things that I’ve encountered since my decision to go out on my own that have been causing me slightly absurd levels of self-doubt. So I thought I’d air those here, since that’s basically the tone and tenor of the blog this week.
Freelancer
Freelancer, in the estimation of some people I’ve spoken to, means “unemployed.” It suggests a condition that someone, well me, needs curing. This is not true. There are loads of people from the advertising industry and its adjacencies who have recently decided to eschew working for big agencies to do work they enjoy, find meaningful, or that simply earns them more revenue they get to keep. No, freelance is a business decision for some of us. I recognize that freelance is also a condition some people are thrust into unwillingly. But that is not the case for me, nor for most of the freelancers I know. They took a risk, leapt from the seeming safety of a corporation and the benefits and steady pay that those claim to offer, into the possibility of greater rewards for their own individual effort, and for the sole responsibility for their own individual failure.
So, headhunters, potential employers, clients, colleagues, when someone says they are a freelancer, do not leap to the conclusion that this is against the speaker’s will. It’s a growing trend, and one that I feel speaks more to the failings of big shops than to the failings of the person who is now a freelancer.
A Girl Nerd
I guess my main point here is that a nerd is a nerd. I don’t spend ages and ages playing WoW, but yes I know about the RealID controversy, 4chan, Chatroulette, Reddit v. Digg, cloud computing, hyperthreading, edge security, 3D television, augmented reality apps, QR code, the accelerometer and the gyroscope, and…
10 years ago, I was making javascript video games, figuring out how to script a website to autoscroll horizontally, testing OpenGL databases, rocking a webcam in the office, downloading The Matrix off of Hotline (yes, Virginia, there was P2P before Napster)… 15 years ago I’d already been online for 5 years, getting cheat codes off of forums on Prodigy and doing research for class papers on Compuserve. I could do basic HTML coding and was FTPing a student magazine to the web press for printing.
I grew up reading Isaac Asimov, Robert Asprin, Douglas Adams (and that was just in the As!). I can recite chapter and verse from Star Wars, watched classic TV based on comic book superheroes, have seen all the Star Trek movies, and saw Avatar in 3D on Christmas Day. Also, I loved Inception because of the plot, the CG and the score – which I realized was based on the motif from “Non, je ne regrette rien” during the movie.
I blog about robots and rockets and ray-guns; I read comic books on my iPad; I spend hours a day learning new hooks for WordPress; I drool over pixel resolution and bit rates; I like things that are shiney. My new company makes digital content, and tries really hard to be smart about it.
All this proves is that I am a nerd. Girl Nerd seems like an unnecessary designation. Clearly, nerdness is in its ascendency, so why does it still come as a shock that a late Gen Xer like myself would be one of the many nerds of my generation?
Now, at the same time, I notice the gender imbalance at events like DigitalDUMBO, tech meetups, and so on. My only solution is to suggest that all the Girl Nerds start showing up to those places, and start contributing to those groups. Which brings me to…
Woman Entrepreneur
Last night I went to DigitalDUMBO, as I have for the past five or six of these events. The theme for the event was a job fair, and I was hoping to meet someone who could code/develop an iPhone app. In other words, I was looking for someone to hire. But I was met with some hostility by one of the organizers because he assumed that I was a recruiter. Apparently recruiters are identifiable because they are well-dressed women; he told me he assumed that because I was ‘dressed up’. I was wearing a dress, and some low heels, yes, but I wasn’t the only woman dressed that way at the event. Something about the way I was dressed, and I suppose, that I dared to ask about name tags, suggested to this (in the end, seemingly very nice) guy that I was free riding on an event meant to – you know – connect small businesses with great digital talent. When I clarified that I was not a recruiter but an entrepreneur, he very graciously suggested that I come back to this DigitalDUMBO thing (his next assumption was that it was my first time there) next time. Finally, he gave me his card and said he’d be happy to connect me with a developer if I need help finding one.
It’d be easy to suggest that this is sexism, guys assuming women can only have roles women usually have. A woman at a digital meetup? Dressed well? Must be a recruiter. But he was not the first person I encountered who treated with me with some sexism last night. The first person was a woman. She made a point of introducing herself to all the men I was standing talking to before she introduced herself to me. She then made a point of asking them all what they do but did not ask me. Her body language was so clear that there was no mistaking it – obviously these guys were the people to meet at the networking event, that girl there must be nobody. She avoided eye contact with me, until she overheard me talking with a friend who is developing an app for time-shifted social viewing of online TV and video.
And here’s where it all comes full circle: The next woman I spoke to translated ‘entrepreneur’ as ‘freelance’, and ‘freelance’ as ‘unemployed’ and became my personal cheering section to go meet … well, to go meet the guy who thought I was a recruiter. Because maybe they’re hiring, and they do work sort of related to the business I told her I’d started. And wouldn’t I really just like to be taken care of?
My slightly pissed off internal optimist makes this sincere wish: maybe if we all stop making assumptions about gender, employment status and nerdness, we’ll get to be a lot better at networking, and therefore become far more successful. Wouldn’t that be nice?
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