June 6, 2005

Rant: Are CSS style galleries and awards sites good-old-boys clubs?

This post was spurred by the news that John Oxton has been added as a weekly judge for the Web Standards Awards. Congrats John! You deserve it, and this not personal. I clicked over to the WSA to check out who the other judges were. They’ve got an impressive international list of folks. One out of 11 is female. Thanks for representing us, Maki. I then went over to StyleGala to have a look at what designs are hot these days. I noticed, along the way, that ten out of ten news contributers are male, as well as five out of six site reviewers. Cheers, Lea, thanks for doing all the work for us girls! CSS Beauty is run by a man, as is the CSS Vault. I guess it should really be no surprise to me that the web is seemingly so male oriented, as Malarkey puts it. At least the CSS/Web Standards community. I mean, whether a site award-worthy or gallery-worthy in this community is being determined almost exclusively by men. This is not sour grapes, as I have never submitted any of my work to these sites and don’t presume to think that it belongs there. What I do not believe, however, is that there are not more that two women who deserve to be in the group of 29 people who are judging standards-based design. Malarkey, I’m linking to you again because:

  1. I’m determined to get you to answer at least one in ten of my communications to you, you lazy busy… ; )
  2. As a contributer to both the WSA and StyleGala who I’m reasonably sure appreciates the design talents of women, maybe you can enlighten me as to how this came about. Does this bother anyone else?

Update: Those of you coming from John Oxton’s site, welcome, and you can find my reaction to his post and the resulting comments here.


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