Thanks to the folks who responded to my recent post concerning the gap between the theme and goals of the Free Culture Research Workshop (e.g., democratization), and the significant under-representation of female scholars (one in ten) in the Organizational and Academic committees of the Free Culture Research Workshop, 2009. Various people asked some good hard questions to which I have responded, briefly, here. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5486

What's the Story? Suely argues that: " counting the number of females involved in academic endeavours is insulting" and further suggests that "this way of thinking" (focusing on gender) is "sad". As it turns out, we have, here, a case study in ³not thinking² -- Free Culture organizer, Giorgos Cheliotis responds that in fact, vis a vis gender, very much in line with Suely's recommendation, "we just didn't think about that".

Since in the case of the Free Culture Research Workshop organization, what we got when thinking about gender was foreclosed, is an inclusion rate for women of 10%, perhaps the most clear implication for those of us who are committed to a version of a ³free culture² that is inclusive and that directly contends with persistent inequalities, is that we need to keep counting, and we need to keep thinking about practices that produce equality and practices that reproduce inequality. A recent blog entry by Henry Jenkins, in conversation with Dayna Cunningham, about race and networked publics, does a good job of highlighting some of the complexities attendant to these issues -- http://henryjenkins.org/2009/03/can_african-americans_find_the_3.html Eve Sedgwick -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick ‹ maybe better than anyone else, wrote so eloquently about what she called, ³the epistemological privilege of unknowing². And for me, that¹s what I take from this kind of scenario. To not count ­ To not know ­ To just not think about it -- these are active practices of unknowing that constitute power and privilege and that perpetuate inequality.

So What Can be Done? In the nineties, when more academics <than at present> were working on equity and technology projects with an explicitly interventionist praxis, my research team interviewed Sandy Stone, and her words are ringing in my ears thinking about these issues more than a decade later and under very different conditions -- http://sandystone.com/ Sandy Stone ended up a very sophisticated analysis of the difficulties of gender/technology issues by saying that "I, we, are making it up as we go along" and then said that nonetheless, "And when the guns start being fired, I promise to keep sending postcards from the front". I took two things from that moment - First - We have to act even when we aren't sure what to do, or as Courtney Cazden put it much more eloquently, we need to invoke a developmental model that puts "performance before competence" -- http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521558239 And secondly, working on equity issues in technoculture will continue to be unpopular, not a career-maker, and all too frequently re-framed as evidence of a personal shortcoming, weakness or basically, ³Just Being Difficult² - there will be backlash... And if you want a recent example of backlash in the face of a public discussion of the problems of sexism and misogyny in the Free Culture community vis a vis Richard Stallman's keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit ‹ read the responses to a staid attempt by a conference participant simply to raise the issues at all --- http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2009/07/13/backlash-feminism-considered-harmful/#com ments

So yes, to be engaged in social change vis a vis media is extraordinarily complex. Counting is not a solution, nor is it a practice that is neutral or unproblematic. As academics, we have a very solid foundation of at least fifty years of rigorous scholarship to draw on that pertains to the various divides within techno-culture ‹ how to think about difference/s and what are the kinds of institutional and organizational tactics and strategies to intervene in relation to inequalities. And so it is likewise heartening to learn that several of the scholars involved in the Free Culture Workshop, most notably, Gabriella Coleman and Elizabeth Stark, have tackled the problem of the under-representation of women directly, and systemically.

³I am not sure whether Mary truly believes that we actively discriminated against female scholars² Giorgos Cheliotis It¹s likely also important to state the obvious, which is that I do not, of course, imagine that something as complex and persistent as gender inequalities and technoculture reproduced within a single setting, as in the Free Culture Research Workshop, is the by-product of something like ³active discrimination² or bad faith, or any individual failing. Equity problems are, of course, longstanding and persistent and will simply reproduce themselves across any setting without, and in many cases, in spite of, diligent and well meaning attempts to produce a ³free culture² that contests bias and inequalities. All of our universities provide endless evidence of the persistence of inequality despite manifest good intentions.

Could you have just contacted the organizers about this privately? Why go public? Well as a matter of fact, I did contact the organizers about this, and got no reply. And so I then contacted the only other person on the Workshop website, to get the numbers data which then framed my email to the list. And I sent this email to the AoIR list because it is my firm belief (and it is a belief), that in the ongoing struggle to ³Free Culture² that networked publics and public deliberation matter ‹ literally, ethically, and in every other sense of the notion of ³mattering². Inequality is not, for me, a private issue. And the AoIR community bills itself as ³a member-based support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research.² That¹s, ³critical and scholarly² and not, ³critical or scholarly² -- http://aoir.org/?page_id=2 ‹ So it seems quite appropriate to occasionally do something on the list in addition to ³Read my recent paper on X² or ³Please send me a bibliography on Y².

Kind regards, Mary -- Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Professor and Director, Network of Centers and Institutes in Education (NCIE) & Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry (CCFI), Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia CCFI: Innovation Works Here http://ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/ Twitter @CritInternet From: Giorgos Cheliotis <gcheliotis.lists@gmail.com> Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:25:22 -0400 To: <suely@unisinos.br>, <suely@unisinos.br> Cc: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Free Culture <FAIL > Research Workshop 2009 Thank you Suely for the comment, although I understand you were addressing more your female colleagues and not me. They may agree or not with you, but in case I came across as too defensive in my earlier posts let me say that I felt I needed to defend the integrity of the event and the people behind it. I am not sure whether Mary truly believes that we actively discriminated against female scholars, but I think her post clearly left that suspicion lingering in the air, which is reason enough for me to want to set the record straight. To use your own words, there was no gender consideration involved, not inclusive, nor exclusive. Whether conference organizers should adopt an affirmative action policy on this I do not know, but I can say in all honesty that we just didn't think about that. On Jul 17, 2009, at 4:46 PM, <suely@unisinos.br> <suely@unisinos.br> wrote: Colleagues: I don't know any of the people who manifested about this so far, thus I feel very confortable to call the attention of my fellow females to who is making gender differentiations here. In my opinion, counting the number of females involved in academic endeavours is insulting regardless of the intention being inclusive or exclusive. If the organizers were anachronistic (to avoid stronger words) enough to take gender into consideration, sad for them. Let's not reinforce this way of thinking by reproducing it. Suely Giorgos Cheliotis <gcheliotis.lists@gmail.com> 17/07/09 16:55 >>> I am one of the organizers of the workshop and in fact started it all last year in Sapporo, so I am also largely responsible for the composition of the committee although the opinions of many more people factored in as well. I find that the gender issue is interesting and is perhaps symptomatic of certain fields of academic endeavor and also present in some practices of what we may broadly call 'free culture'. I know more male DJ's and remixers than female, and there is more evidence of that nature that is mostly anecdotal, so I cannot make any definitive statements here. I'd like to write a paper about it though, so I'm slowly collecting relevant data. I think there are some salient issues with respect to the participation of women in what we call 'free culture'. If anyone has relevant data points, especially published work, please do share. But now going from these general thoughts to insinuations of discriminatory behavior on our part is taking it too far. I am surprised I have to say by the approach of Mary Bryson who may have good intentions at heart but who chooses to publicly criticize our efforts and even publicly label them as FreeCultureFail (sic), instead of communicating her discontent directly to the organizers first and trying to understand who we are and how we do what we do. Indeed Mary, "maybe there is a story here, or not", but I think it would have been better if you had done some more research on this matter before hinting at any possible discrimination on our part. Even your hasty and incorrect calculation of 4 in 40 shows that your email to the list was probably written without much forethought. I would have been happy to discuss any issues with you personally, but you never sought any such discussion.

From my part I can just say that we tried to include the people who seemed the most relevant and had to also contend with the fact that some replied to our invitations to join the program committee and some did not. Gender was never a factor in the composition of the committee. It was purely on academic merit, having shown strong interest in participation in the past, having a relevant and recent track record of published work, and, to a much smaller extent, a matter of serendipity and familiarity with the persons involved. I do not keep a catalogue of everyone in the world doing relevant research and it may be that I know more male researchers in the field than female. To that end what Gabriella and Elizabeth are doing will be a constructive contribution that I applaud. Personally I will still use academic merit and motivation/commitment as my main factors whenever anyone asks me about who should be on a program committee, but I can at least check the names on my mind against such a list to try and control for any bias that I may have and be unaware of. For what it's worth, we had actually one woman declining our invitation due to other commitments, while another one was invited and didn't reply.

Best, Giorgos On Jul 17, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Gabriella Coleman wrote: Mary, Thanks for pointing this out! A number of us, including the "X woman" (Elizabeth Stark of the Yale ISP) on the committee, have been debating and discussing this problem as it concerns this conference but more important, how it also pertains to the wider field of digital media, especially when it comes to tech and law. For instance, here are some other examples of similarly problematic conferences when it comes to gender balance: http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/citi/ugc3 http://www.hiit.fi/nccc/speakers.html And there are unfortunately many many more examples. Elizabeth and I have recently started to compile a list of women leaders in law, technology, and internet research to highlight their presence. We will soon circulate the list to get more names and eventually publish on website as a resource for conference organizers or those working on edited collections. Hopefully Elizabeth will also jump in as she has also thought quite a bit about this issue. I have found this problem to be pretty pervasive and have been personally frustrated as well as academically intrigued. Any thoughts about the skewed conference representation? Gabriella Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:17:29 -1000 From: mary.bryson@ubc.ca <mailto:mary.bryson@ubc.ca> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org <mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: [Air-L] Free Culture <FAIL > Research Workshop 2009 Take a look at the lack of inclusion of women (FreeCultureFail) on the Organizing and Academic Program Committees for this event. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5486 There are 12 people on the former and 28 people on the latter. According to the person from the Free Culture Research Workshop group that I contacted: "Based on my count, there are 4 women in all on both Committees, with <Person X> serving on both the organizing and academic committees. The other 3 women serve in the academic committee..." 4 women out of 40 people. One woman on the Organizing Committee. That's some kind of "free culture". Free Culture Fail, as far as I can tell. Maybe there is a story here. Or not. Mary -- Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Professor and Director, Network of Centers and Institutes in Education (NCIE) & Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry (CCFI), Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia CCFI: Innovation Works Here http://ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/ -----Original Message----- **************************************************** Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor Department of Media, Culture, & Communication New York University 239 Greene St, 7th floor NY NY 10003 212-992-7696 http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman _______________________________________________