Medium Has A Gender Bias Problem. Hiding Followers Won’t Fix It.
Show me a woman with a 6-figure following
You ever get sick of the same old crap that never ends?
I mean, of course we do. That’s why we have #feminism and #blacklivesmatter and #metoo. It’s why we have divorce.
Sometimes, the people causing the problem know it.
Know what’s worse? When people perpetuating a problem aren’t even aware of it. They just keep doing that thing — blissfully oblivious.
But here. Let me show you, k?
Then we talk.
Note: I’m using Medium as an example, but I’m not talking about Medium. It’s just a good example of the internet as a whole. K? Make sense?
Here’s the top 50 writers on Medium.
- Gary Vee — 303K followers
- Tim O’Reilly — 257K followers
- Benjamin Hardy — 247K
- Bernie Sanders — 219K
- Ev Williams — 213K
- Jason Fried — 213K
- Mark Andreessen — 207K
- Julie Zhuo — 205K (V.P. at FB)
- Biz Stone — 204K
- Hillary Clinton — 202K (*that* woman)
- Larry Kim — 201K
- Thomas Oppong — 195K
- Darius Foroux — 174K
- M.G. Siegler — 168K
- James Altucher — 167K
- Umair Haque — 159K
- Chris Dixon — 150K
- Sarah Cooper — 149K (comedian)
- Dave Pell — 143K
- Nir Eyal — 141K
- Wil Wheaton — 137K
- DHH — 131K
- Kevin Rose — 128K
- Anil Dash — 123K
- Seth Godin — 122K
- Mark Suster — 115,543
- Steven Levy — 111,870
- Eric Elliott — 103,205
- Jeff Goins — 99,224
- Tobias van Schneider — 98,657
- Dave McClure — 93,934
- Reid Hoffman — 91,329
- Steve Blank — 90,583
- John Rampton — 89,502
- Hunter Walk — 89,197
- Mike Monteiro — 88,863
- Ben Horowitz — 87,472
- Chris Sacca — 87,103
- Addy Osmani — 85,629
- Kris Gage — 85,125
- Robert Scoble — 84,959
- Paul Ford — 84,005
- Eric Ries — 80,787
- Niklas Goeke — 78,802
- Brianna Wiest — 78,127
- Jeffrey Zeldman — 74,965
- Preethi Kasireddy — 71,655 (Left Medium)
- Brad Feld — 70,957
- Om Malik — 70,922
- Brian Chesky — 68,636
Notice the predominance of men?
There are 28 writers with a 6-figure following. 3 are women. — One is a V.P at Facebook — One lived in the White House for 8 years and ran for president — One is a comedian and celebrity
There are 6 women in the top 50. — V.P at Facebook. — Hillary Clinton — A comedian/celebrity — Kris Gage — Brianna Wiest — An app developer that left Medium
After the top 50, you have to keep scrolling a while. Jessica Semaan and Jessica Wildfire show up at #65 and #66, with around 53K followers.
Houston, we have a problem.
Men are not just better writers…
We all know that. Even men would tell you that. No one thinks your plumbing affects the quality of your writing. It’s not about that.
It’s just that — 100 years after women went to jail and were force fed and hung from their cells for asking to vote — the world still prefers male opinions.
Some of us have daughters…
We’re trying. Trying so damn hard to teach our girls that they can do anything they want. The world is their oyster, too. We tell them women invented central heat and solar heat and Kevlar and DNA and went to the moon.
Trying to teach them they have an equal place in the world.
But we’re lying to them. Because they don’t. They do not have an equal shot in the world. Not yet. And that’s a fact.
6% of CEOS are women. 23% of congress are women. 20% of tech jobs are held by women.
Credentials change nothing…
I read a post the other day talking about the “professional” men among the top writers. CEOs and PhDs and teachers and psychologists and such.
Yeah? Women hold all those titles, too. Doesn’t get them into the top here. We still hand the lead to a man.
Please. Show me a woman with a six figure following here.
We don’t even see our own preference…
We see it right now, on Medium. Literally. In follower counts. But in the world as a whole? You don’t see it unless you’re looking.
Soon we won’t see it on Medium, either. As the beta rolls you, you might have noticed that follower counts are going away.
Here’s a screencap in case you’re not sure what I mean… You’ll notice there’s no follower counts on the new profiles.
Hiding follower counts isn’t going to solve the problem.
It’s just going to shove the truth into the hidden corners where no one sees it unless they’re looking. Like the rest of the world does. Make it invisible. Just like when women work twice as hard to get half the credit.
This is what male privilege means.
It isn’t about hating men. I don’t hate men. Most people who believe in equality don’t hate men. We just hate that both men and women tend to poke up their ears and whiskers when a man is doing the talking.
And those very same men — the ones to ride to the top on the back of male privilege — they write posts telling the world you just need to work harder. Want it more. Bust your chops. Wake up earlier. That’s what “they” did.
They have no clue. Truly, no clue.
I challenge any of them to create a new profile as a woman.
Know what they’d experience? People who clap but don’t follow. People who challenge their words at every turn. People who call them stupid and uninformed.
64% of women get harassed for their writing. 11% of men. Did you know that? I wrote about it
You can find it on my profile, if you’re interested It’s a sobering read.
Here’s how we got here, and how we fix it…
In 1967, scientists did a bizarre experiment. They put 5 monkeys in a cage. At the top of the cage was a bunch of bananas. Under the bananas, a ladder.
A monkey spied the bananas and started to climb the ladder. The scientists sprayed the monkey with a stream of cold water and then sprayed the other monkeys, too. The monkey scrambled to get off the ladder.
They all sat on the floor, cold wet and confused. But soon, those bananas looked awfully good, so another monkey started climbing.
Again, the experimenters sprayed the climbing monkey, and all the others. The monkey scrambled down and they sat there cold and wet.
When the third monkey tried to climb the ladder, the other 4 pulled him off the ladder and beat the snot out of him.
That’s when it got weird.
The scientists removed one monkey and put in a new monkey that had never been sprayed. Spotting the bananas, the new monkey started climbing the ladder. The other monkeys pulled him down and beat him.
By the end of the experiment, none of the original monkeys were left and yet, despite that none of the monkeys had been sprayed, they had all learned never to try and go for the bananas.
This is how cultural behavior is learned.
None of us today lived through the era when women were possessions, no different than a dog or a house. None of us experienced women being disallowed an education or disallowed to earn money.
But still, we know a woman’s place.
Even more so, we know that men are the ones we should listen to. All the monkeys have been changed, but we still know who to listen to.
That, my friends, is patriarchy.
We can never change what we can not even see.
So I ask you only this. Pay attention. To your behaviors. Your choices. Your preferences. Even here. But not just here. Everywhere.
According to Pew Research, 82% of Americans believe in equality. Even those who do not like or use the word feminism. But belief and action are not always the same. First comes seeing. Too many of us don’t.
“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.” ― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics
