even the men are starting to notice

Via Anil, I just saw Jeff Veen's post on "What do these pictures have in common?" Be sure to click on the "See what you've won!" button. Like the first commenter (the lovely and talented Heather Champ), I wish he'd write the whole rant.

And please don't post any comments about how there aren't any women to invite; that's part of what our sidebar's for. If you ask, you'll get recommendations. (Look what happened when I posted about the Microsoft event.) Clearly, the people making the invitations see what they want to see--and they don't see the women. We're becoming increasingly invisible.

What's most depressing is that in every other profession in which women have been in a minority, percentages have been gradually climbing--including technical fields like engineering. Only in computing-related professions have the numbers been dropping.

Let's assume, for a moment, that the dropping number of women at tech conferences is an accurate reflection of the numbers in the field (it's not nearly as low 'in the wild' as it is at conferences, but play along with me). And let's assume, too, that there's no reason why women would want to work in this field--after all, they can do so much better as teachers or nurses, right? Even if all that were true, is that the kind of world that men in computing want to work in? One in which they almost never see a female face? Where they have to filter all their impressions of what half their potential market through second-hand knowledge?

We all have a responsibility to change this if we want it to change. Women have to be more visible as role models, which sometimes means sacrificing--I spend a good bit out-of-pocket to attend conferences and use a lot of what would otherwise be leisure time to stay visible through blogging. But the men running the conferences need to make significantly more of an effort to look outside of their traditional circle of friends. It's not good enough to say "but I invited a couple of women, and they couldn't make it." And it's not good enough to say "well, nobody asked." Work a little harder, guys. If the first three women you ask can't make it, ask them to recommend other women that they know and respect. Work your network. Make some calls. Be willing to help out a bit with travel when you can (this is often a deal breaker for women whose employers won't support travel). Or resign yourself to a locker-room ghetto that's impoverished both intellectually and socially by its lack of diversity.