Convergence

I woke up early-ish this morning to meet the boyfriend at church, but on further inspection decided it was silly to go as he was going to be running around like a crazy person and able to sit with me, and seeing as I'm not to keen on his church anyway I decided to stay home. (Don't fret, I'm off to my church later) Anyway, this being up early and not having anywhere to go for a few hours left me sometime to poke around and read some blogs.

Recently, I ran across the Emerging Women blog. This blog was born following a gathering in Indianapolis called Emergent Women's Re-Gathering. I was sort of surprised that such a blog and event existed or even needed to exist. I never imagined Emergent would have the same problems we face in Computer Science. But, reading this post caused a strange deja vu experience for me.

At the Emergent Women'’s Re-Gathering, I listened to story after story of rejection, exclusion, abuse, dismissal, and pinch-her-cheeks-"isn't-it-cute-when-girls-try-to-think?" experiences.

That sounds exactly like something I would hear at Grace Hopper Conference for Women in Computing.

It's strange to think that a group of accepting, forward thinking Christians would have this sort of problem. In Computer Science, we are quick to chalk it up to problems with "the kind of guy that likes CS unfortunatelytly, we all know this is unfair, but its an easy scape goat. In reality, CS is an "old boys club" for mostly historical reason that cause girls not to even consider it as a career path. Is pastoring an "old boys club"? I don't really know. But what is causing the emergent community (those involved in conversation) to go down this same route? I speculate that the problem is in the conversation style. I hear many women complain about their voice not being heard in meeting with advisors and colleagues, or that they are always interrupted, or that they aren't given credit for ideas because someone else hears them and repeats it, etc. Is this happening at emergent gatherings, or is it just as Sarah Notton's post suggests, women are being shut out because they are care takers are simply can't be attend events? I'm always a little wary of "the mommy track" because it singles out a specific group of people as being worthy of "special consideration." Sometimes its needed to get the ball rolling, but its definitely not the solution to all the problems of women in communities dominiated by men (and excitable men at that ;-) )

Well, that was a little train of thought, but I think I said everything I needed to.