Today, on Twitter, I saw another woman, Allyson Kapin (who goes by @WomenWhoTech), get frustrated when she saw a list of “top” folks in social media that, once again, omitted all but one woman…. Soon after, a discussion ensued, and, within minutes, Kapin started a new “event” on Twitter…
— Denise Graveline on The Eloquent Woman, February 25
The idea behind #Women2Follow Wednesdays is straightforward: to recognize and promote women in the technology and social media field — and help people find each other. If you’re on Twitter, it’s easy to participate.
- Tweet a list of one or more women on Twitter you think people should follow, along with some info about why. Make sure to include the #women2follow hashtag!
- Watch others’ recommendations and find interesting people to follow
Like I said, easy. Here are my recommendations over the last three weeks.
An important point about this approach is that it potentially spreads the benefit around, rather than directing it primarily to the already-powerful. Looking at #women2follow via Twitter search, recommendations from people with a few hundred followers are just as visible as those from people with thousands. And thus far the women being recommended have only a few hundred or few thousand followers, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands for those topping the charts of Twitterholic’s ranking.
This matters a lot from a gender perspective. While women are 53% of the Twitter population, guys outnumber them by almost 3-to-1 on the top 100 rankings. As @maegancarberry points out, Twitter’s dynamics allow a bunch of “ordinary” users (with tens or hundreds of followers) to collaborate in ways that complement the “superusers”. The first few weeks of #women2follow is an excellent example.
Will it stay that way? #followfriday, a longer-running male-dominated version of this approach,* provides a glimpse of a possible future. According to TopFollowFriday’s statistics, there’s a bit of “the rich get richer” going on. @mashable (with 200,000+ followers) tops the list of recommendations. Eight of the top ten already have more than 10,000 followers. On the other hand there are plenty of “real people” in the top 100 as well, and I only spotted a handful of the Twitterholic top 100 on the TopFollowFriday list. So my guess is that #followfriday tends to distribute power rather than concentrating it (although it also strongly reinforces male dominance).
It’ll be interesting to see whether #women2follow has a similar patterns. At least in the US, predominantly-female groups collaborate more effectively than male-dominated groups — and thus farther are only a handful of guys participating in #women2follow. In any case, it’ll clearly empower women.
It’s a fascinating and empowering experiment. Please join in!
jon
PS: Here’s my tweet from a couple of weeks ago, using #p2 (the “progressives 2.0” hashtag) to indicate that these are women who are interested in progressive political issues and value diversity.
jon
* while theoretically #followfriday is gender-neutral, 90% of the top 10 and 75% of the top 30 recomendees are guys — at least according to TopFollowFriday.
jon | 14-Mar-09 at 11:38 am | Permalink
Micah Baldwin’s #FollowFriday: The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend is very interesting reading. He came up with the suggestion, Mykl Roventine suggested the hashtag #followfriday, and “a few friends (Chris Brogan, Erin Kotecki Vest, Aaron Brazell and Jim Kukral) helped spread the word”. So five of the six people involved at the beginning were guys.
He also makes the provocative claim that
Maybe. In terms of gender, though the top 25 on TopFollowFriday and TwitterGrader are both 75% male. Seems about the same to me …
By the way, Guy’s currently down to #3 on Twitter Grader, with Brooks Bayne of #tcot now at #1. #tcot’s top 25 is over 80% male. I’m sensing a trend.
Update, July 11: TwitterGrader was written by Dharmesh Shah, Chief Software Architect & Founder of Hubspot. Only one of Hubspot’s seven board members is a woman (Gail Collins of Constant Connect); their management team is all-male. Hmm.
jon | 14-Mar-09 at 7:16 pm | Permalink
I just helped somebody set up a new account, and after you sign in, the top four on the list of “suggested users to follow” was CNN, MC Hammer, Kevin Rose of digg, and one other guy. Hey how about that, 75% male!
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 12:53 am | Permalink
Twitter’s suggested users page is indeed 75% male. Who would have guessed?
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 11:48 am | Permalink
from Techmeme
Turns out that Twitter’s list of “suggested users” has gotten a lot of attention recently. Mark had the story a couple of weeks ago in the LA Times (go MSM!), with some initial statistics and quotes from Biz, Evan, and Leo. Leo, Robert (aka Scoble), Dave and others who aren’t on the list see it as a horrible thing. More recently, after Erick wrote in TechCrunch about Jason telling Dave how he’s offered Twitter $125,000/year for placement on the list, there was a spate of conversation.
For example Michael (aka “Mr. TechCrunch“) bragged about TechCrunch’s unique data and 200,000 new Twitter fans after Biz, Ev, and Jack put him on the list. Interestingly, although traffic on their web site surged at first TechCrunch failed to capitalize on the opportunity and it’s now mostly down to previous levels. Michael however concludes:
Well yeah, if that’s his attitude I can see why they don’t come back.
Dave similarly misses the good old days when it was him competing against Leo, Shaq, Scoble, Guy, and Jason. He thinks that Ana Marie Cox as a suggested user is a portent of the Twitter apocalypse and that Twitter is being evil by giving preferential treatment to its recommended list. Inconveniently for Dave, as Owen discusses Blogfather Accuses Twitter of Payola Scheme He Pioneered, back in 2003 Adam revealed that he had paid $10,000 for a spot on Dave’s influential-at-the-time recommended list. Oops.
Owen also has background on Dave’s hatred/fear of powerful women* and feud with Jason. Rogers well-titled post also covers Dave’s hypocrisy on the pay-to-play front, and as a special bonus calls Michael, Ryan, and MC Hammer “big-name twats”. It really is a lot like high school.
Paul’s article in The Industry Standard analyzes a portion of the list. All the people Paul classifies as “Internet tech celebrities” and “predictable champs” are guys: Jason, Kevin of digg, Pete of Mashable, Al Gore, Shaquille O’Neal, Gavin Newsome, and John McCain.** Women get their own category too: iJustine, Veronica Belmont, and Dooce are classified as “Pretty ladies of the Internet”. Paul repeats “pretty ladies” twice more in the relatively-short article. Funny that nobody caught that in the editing.
Elsewhere:
– Henry thinks Jason has saved Twitter, includes a photo of Twitter founder and chairman Jack, links to Erick’s article on Michael’s TechCrunch, and quotes Jason, Dave and Twitter investors Fred and Bisan.
– Steve argues unconvincingly that the New York Times doesn’t benefit from its position on the list and uses Cory’s terminology and discusses Robert, Leo, Jason, and Dave’s situation in terms of Twitter Whuffie.
– Amit is disappointed in Jason, who he used to admire; in a comment, Jason gives more info about his calculations.
– Cris quotes Henry, Frank, and Grant as well as Jason and Dave, and links to Henry and Erick.
– And Steven‘s post talks about a Friendfeed thread with “people like Robert, Mark, Daniel, and Todd engaging in a great discussion of why this is a bad idea. Jason even chimed in…”.
Is it just me or is there a pattern here? [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …]
jon
* Disappointingly, Owen doesn’t quote my summary of Dave’s reaction to MotrinMoms:
** personally I would have put Meghan McCain aka @McCainBloggette on the list, but maybe I don’t understand what appeals to Twitter’s user base as well as Biz, Ev, Jack, and Paul.
PunditMom | 15-Mar-09 at 12:20 pm | Permalink
Don’t worry. We can bide our time and will rule the world in the end! 😉
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 12:23 pm | Permalink
In a environment 53%-female, 75% of Twitter’s “suggested list” is male. 75% of the “people with most followers” are male. 75% of the top 25 followfridays recommendations are male. 75% of the top 25 TweetGrade ratings are male.
100% of the Twitter key people, who presumably benefit the most from all of this, are male.
This is unlikely to be sustainable. Either things change significantly in the Twitterverse, or some other ecosystem where the benefits are shared more fairly will emerge to displace it.
Guys hanging out in nearly-all-male environments where sexism is normalized aren’t likely to come up with the answer. I’m not just talking about the 13 examples above; companies like Digg and Facebook are similarly going to have a hard time here.
Sounds like opportunities to me.
And opportunities that that Twitter communities like #fem2, #woc, #SheGeeky — and broader networks like women-in-technology, women-in-media, and moms-who-blog — are uniquely positioned to capitalize on.
Cool!
Update, January 2010: As Jolie O’Dell reports on Read Write Web, The Twitter Suggested Users List Is Dead: Great News for Mainstream Users.
June 9, 2011: I just signed up for a new account on Twitter. 15 of the 21 (71%) of people it suggests that I follow are guys. Some things never change …
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 12:30 pm | Permalink
@PunditMom: thanks for the reply — our posts crossed.
i couldn’t agree more. except that “bide our time” and “in the end” has connotations of it taking a while.
why wait?
Amber | 15-Mar-09 at 2:28 pm | Permalink
Hi there – I cannot begin to tell you — perhaps shaking you all would be the better move — cannot begin to convey how little this all means to most Twitter users. Really, it’s like high school, as you said — including the fact that the “less popular 98% of the kids really don’t give a shit about the dynamics among the other 2 percent. And, it’s about as important as high school in the real world. And yeah I get the implications of the economics of getting your name out on Twitter. But it’s my impression that Twitter not only is NOT the only way for people to develop more business and cred on the internet; it’s the least powerful way.
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
Jen Nedeau’s “We follow” needs top feminist Twitter users on change.org’s Women’s rights blog talks about the Twitter ranking site that Kevin has just set up. Jen (aka @HumanFolly) comments:
Indeed. 85%+ of the people on are guys, the exceptions being @brittneyspears, @sarabareilles, and @AlohaArleen. Kevin, Evan, Dave, TIm, and Robert, top the 85%+-male tech list; @CaliLews and @KrisColvin are the exceptions. The social media list is “only” 75% male.
Lidija Davis’ article on ReadWriteWeb gives more context about how Kevin yanked the “top diggers” directory from his own site a while ago, and concludes
Well, it might be that he’s trying to repeat his, Dave’s, Michael’s, Biz’, Evan’s, Jack’s Mark and the other Facebook founders, and the FriendFeed guys’ trick of gaining disproportionate influence for himself and his guy friends by setting up a system with ground rules that favors guys. Of course it’s hard to know for sure but @wefollow’s current follower/following stats give a hint of Kevin’s notions of reciprocity:
Following 0, followed by 4789. Just the kind of behavior you’d expect from a site called “we follow”.
As Lidija highlights:
As well as reinforcing gender biases, this kind of dynamic also reinforces race, class, and all the other existing dimensions of oppression. And don’t even get me started on intersectionality. How many women of color are there on any of these lists? How much do you think any of these predominantly-straight, predominantly-white, predominantly-upper-class techie-elitist guys have prioritized intersectional concerns?
Jen suggests infiltrating. As I commented
and i still think that. However I didn’t mean it as to imply that we shouldn’t try to infiltrate and leverage and detourne and otherwise use @wefollow to our advantage. It’s a fine time to combine analysis with action …
jon
PS: Amusingly enough, the bottom of Lidaja’s article helpfully links to ReadWriteWeb’s “team” on Twitter. It’s 75%+ male.
PPS: Updated 3/16 to add the screenshot
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 4:04 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the response, Amber, and my apologies for the lengthy intervening comment. I’m something of a monologuist at times …
Agreed: most Twitter users couldn’t care less about any of this. However I think as more people start to understand these dynamics, they’ll care about being in a system where they’re being exploited. Understanding the “rich get richer” and “guys don’t link” patterns is valuable for seeing who supposedly-neutral technologies play out — and developing tools to participate on a less-unfair footing.
And I also agree that Twitter’s far from the only way to get your name or company or message out there online. There’s been a lot written about similar patterns elsewhere – the #p2 wiki has some links. Twitter’s at an interesting point right now in that the power structure is potentially in flux at exactly the same time the service is at the tipping point. So at least for me it’s a good use of time to think about stuff like this.
jon
jon | 15-Mar-09 at 11:51 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile, Ben‘s got a sycophantic post up about Kevin’s new project on Pete’s web site:
Elsewhere, Peter notes that “the chance that we mere mortals will end up anywhere near the front of a common tag listing (#web, for instance) is pretty slim.” Other than that though, the guys all seem to love their new 75%-male-environment.
Danny thinks it’s “a great start”, and Wayne chimes in with “a good start”. Steve‘s “digging it” and Harrison points to “the unique advantage of Kevin’s star power”. Andrew thinks it’s a “cool idea”, Dan thinks it’s the “perfect app for Twitter”, Arnold thinks it’s a “great branding” and “pretty clever”, and Jayvee describes the results so far as “epic”.
What a surprise.
In case you were wondering, none of them mentioned any women. None of them used the term “rich get richer” either.
Launching “Ask The President†on Twitter (DRAFT) « Liminal states | 16-Mar-09 at 9:58 pm | Permalink
[…] (Twitter by contrast is 53% female). I’ve been exploring this topic in #women2follow: collaborative empowerment on Twitter. […]
jon | 17-Mar-09 at 9:36 pm | Permalink
Steve thinks Twitter’s peaking and it’s time to look for the next big thing. Why?
Also Twitter is disorganized the 140 character limit makes it hard to have long conversations.
Steve’s recommendations for how Twitter should adapt start with “keeping its core users intact”, i.e., prioritizing guys like him, Robert, and Dave who get personal attention in the back of cabs from Twitter founders like Evan and prefer an environment where they’re surrounded by geeks and adulation.
Of course when Twitter did that they had a tiny audience, and now they’ve got a lot more, and more diverse, users. So Steve’s post certainly gives the impression that he sees non-geeks and newcomers as less valuable. Classic techie elitism. Hmm, just like Michael! Am I noticing another trend here?
And what a surprise: everybody Steve mentions or links to in this post (Evan, Dave, Evan, Robert, Jeff, Daniel, Erick, Narendra, Seth, and himself) is a guy. In the comments, Nicola, Allison, Zoe, Erica, and Tiffany have interesting things to say. Steve doesn’t respond to them. Neither do any of the other guys.
* sic. no women are actually mentioned in this article.
Update, July 2011: in a discussion on Google+, Steve analogies investing time in social media to being a financial analyst, and says he’s putting in a “sell” call on Twitter. This time for sure!
Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists - The Seminal :: Independent Media and Politics | 22-Mar-09 at 1:07 pm | Permalink
[…] and blogging. It’s got great viral propagation mechanisms like hashtags, Follow Friday and Women2follow Wednesdays, and the Monday night Journalist/PR chat. In fact, right now Twitter’s quite possibly the […]
jon | 26-Apr-09 at 7:34 am | Permalink
Queerty’s The Gay Revolution Will Be Twittered has four guys and no women in its top 10. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great resource, but where are people like Pam Spaulding?
By contrast, the list in Michael Crawford’s Same Sex Sunday on Twitter on Bilerico does include Pam, along with Jessica Hoffman, Yasmin Nair, Kate Kendall, and Dana Rudolph (aka @mombian). Much better (although still over 60% male).
More positively, in my Cognitive evolution and revolution talk at #polc09, I highlighted #women2follow and #samesexsunday as examples of Twitter hashtags enable collaboration by marginalized groups. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Michael was in the audience!
jon | 26-Apr-09 at 7:39 am | Permalink
Brian Wallace’s list of 24 daily Twitter memes on Mashable left out #women2follow. After @dontgetcaught, @digitalsista, and @WomenWhoTech and others started calling attention to this on the new #diversityfail hashtag, Mashable reacted quickly and added it. Kudos to Mashable for the quick response … and to Twitterers for helping create a #diversitywin!
About that collaborative empowerment …
🙂
Update, May 11: more on #diversityfail/#diversitywin here and here.
jon | 11-May-09 at 1:33 pm | Permalink
The news that Twitter’s going to be introducing some kind of reputation-based ranking to its search, highlights the importance of these kinds of asymmetries. A couple of suggestions I’ve heard involve taking into account the number of followers a person has and the number of times a link gets retweeted. With 75%+ male-dominance on the most-followed list, most-retweeted list, and retweetability index, the end result is likely to be systematically marginalize women’s perspectives.
A good example of this is @markosm’s retweets this morning: Jesse twice, Mark, Sam 3 times, Dan, William, David (aka Kagro_X) 3 times, Henry, Roland 3 times, Jay twice, Oliver, Jim, ThinkProgress, Greg, Anthony … hmm, notice a pattern? 20 posts. No women.
There are a lot of other guys out there besides Kos who rarely retweet women; it’s very analogous to the “guys don’t link” and “guys don’t follow” patterns. It’ll be interesting to see whether Twitter take this dynamic into account in its algorithms. As Mary Hodder says in Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch,
Indeed. And it’d be good to make sure that plenty of women are involved — and other marginalized groups, because there are probably similar dynamics in other dimensions of oppression.
jon
jon | 09-Jul-09 at 10:45 pm | Permalink
In early a Harvard study came out with the catchy headline New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets:
The authors of the study, Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, describe the results as “stunning”:
Well yeah, it could be that men produce more compelling content. Then again, the “stunning” results may also be due to the way the recommendation systems systematically favor guys over women by a 3-to-1 ratio — and related to the general “Guys don’t link/Guys don’t follow” phenomenon. I wonder why the two male authors of the study didn’t take those factors into consideration?
jon
jon | 09-Jul-09 at 11:03 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile, women have noticeably more present in TopFollowFriday, with KimSherrell, BuzzEdition, sharonhayes and Oprah in the top 10. There are five more women in the top 25, so it’s down to “only” 64% male.
jon | 14-Jul-09 at 12:13 pm | Permalink
FollowFormation makes it easy to follow the top 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 Twitterers on any given topic. It’s the first of a series of tools from Aer Marketing who describes it as “a tool for novice Twitter users (we call them “chirpers”) to get started with following the top people in their categories of interest. You can call it Twitter’s suggested users feature on steroids.”
Indeed. It’s classic “rich get richer”; as Jennifer Van Grove’s Mashable article notes
On The Black Tech Report, Jayson Flint says the story looks like a paid ad to him. Jennifer clarifies that Mashable doesn’t have any relationship with Followformation. Still, if you think about it, Mashable’s exactly the kind of site that benefits the most from this kind of stuff.
Jennifer’s skeptical that this will add a lot of value to the overcrowded tweet streams of early adopters, and some of the commenters are even more skeptical. In the comments, Christine Perkett mentions that what she really wants is a service that can ‘help us identify “best” by more meaningful values.’ Yeah really.
Still, if it catches, on Followerformation should be very effective at inflating the follower counts of the overwhelmingly-male and overwhelmingly-white “top” lists. And isn’t that really what it’s all about?
Not.
jon
PS: An interesting side note: while Aer’s Who we are page has a couple of women in important roles (including Chief Strategist), the Aer Team that’s acknowledged on the FollowFormation about page is all-male. What’s with that? Did the guys do this without involvement from the women? Or just not bother to thank ’em?
jon | 03-Sep-09 at 10:18 am | Permalink
A TechFlash article pointed me to the top Twitterer rankings from CrowdEye, a new real-time search company started by Ken Moss (who was GM of Microsoft’s search team back when I was doing web strategy there). Their top 30 is 11 women, 19 men = roughly 35-40% women. Twitterholic and TopFollowFriday’s top 30s are also up to about 35-40% male, although TwitterGrader and Twitters’ suggested users are still only about 30% male. Oh well. Still, definite progress!
jon | 03-Sep-09 at 10:34 am | Permalink
In another thread, I looked at the numbers for TweetProgress.us, a directory of progressives on Twitter. 40% of the members with most followers are women. This is much higher than #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), whose “30 most followers” list is 20% women, or WeFollow’s politics list which has only one woman (@nansen) in the top 30.
Another Interesting data point is that WeFollow’s politics list WeFollow’s “most followers for #p2 list” is about 25% women. We’re getting a consistent 40-45% range for #p2 via other measurements, so this seems to me a good indication of WeFollow’s marginalization of women … gee, what a surprise. Still, it’s a lot higher than the overall politics number; which may imply that progressive women are somewhat more likely to use @wefollow than other political women.
jon | 29-May-10 at 9:37 am | Permalink
Here’s Mashable’s excerpt of Information Architects’ fascinating diagram of the 140 most influential people on Twitter:
Jack, Ev, Biz, Om, Robert, Jascon, Pete, Chris, Kevin, Dave, Scott … hey wait a second I’m noticing a pattern here.
In the full diagram, Veronica Belmont, host of Tekzilla, shows up, and Marissa Mayer of Google is there if you look hard enough. Other than that all the women I saw are from the entertainment field: Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, Natalie Mu, Yoko Ono….
Of course “most influential” is pretty subjective. IA discusses how they pieced this together from a variety of sources, including asking their readers. And on their profile, they helpfully share their influences:
Hey wait a second. I’m noticing a pattern here.
Liminal states :: Still a Ways to Go: the Suggested Users’ List (part 7 of Diversity and Google+) | 04-Sep-11 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
[…] the time a social network starts to explode can be incredibly valuable. Back in 2009, Jason offered $250,000 for a spot on the Twitter suggested users list. And on Google+? In Google just gave me thousands of dollars, maybe more, Marshall Kirkpatrick […]