Comments on: Dealing with equality, invisibility

By: Peter Zaballos

Peter Zaballos — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:59:32 +0000

And how much water is lost in these “features” due to evaporation? But this larger issue of needing to bury the water supply to shield it from a systemic pollution problem is alarming indeed. Thanks for sharing this Matt.

PS…as a northern california native, this whole anecdote provokes the “they’re stealing our water” reaction in me. Some things you just never grow out of!

By: Peter Zaballos

Peter Zaballos — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:55:50 +0000

You raise a good point, Sally, about this being up to the individual. Where I felt my responsibility lay was calling out what I will call discrimination, to help raise awareness for the men on the board (and the woman’s superior), which can stray awfully close to the line of “saving” the woman involved. She’s responsible for her own actions, and I’m not responsible to taking care of her. But by not speaking out, I do feel like I let her down, because I missed an opportunity to improve the environment as a whole, for all those people in the room. She still has to deal with her work situation, on her own. Thank you for your comment!

By: Peter Zaballos

Peter Zaballos — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:51:28 +0000

Thanks Jenny,you bring up a good point, raising visibility only puts in the position of being better able to deal with the fundamental cause, but it’s not the solution itself. It seems like discrimination in general has these properties, that only through awareness and protest do you earn the opportunity to address the root cause. Thanks for your participation in the conversation!

By: Jenny Samppala

Jenny Samppala — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:11:52 +0000

Pete, I’m glad you tackled this topic. It’s complex and can be messy. When we try to re-balance something, we usually end up with unintended consequences because we’re only dealing with the problems we can see- pay, titles, number of women vs. men, etc. Rarely, though, does tackling the visible problem fix the underlying issue. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig (or whatever that saying is.)

I won’t propose an answer to the problem because I don’t really know what it is. I do know that to have a true balance to the point where a problem isn’t recognizable because it doesn’t exist is a matter of time, cultural changes, shifts in leadership…deeper things. Not surface issues.

Simply being louder or more inconvenient is a start- people need to be jarred a bit to see an issue. Women in tech also need to be encouraged by their peers and leaders, leaders need to be prodded by their employees and cultures need to support women.

There’s so much more to say on this topic! I hope you follow up with more posts.

By: Matthew Trifiro (CEO, 1000 Markets)

Matthew Trifiro (CEO, 1000 Markets) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:53:21 +0000

I am going to skirt the main topic of equality and comment on the water quality angle.

When I lived in Los Angeles I did a lot of volunteer work on park creation and, in the process, got to see inside one of the largest landowners in the County — the LA Dept of Water and Power — and, in the process, got a mini education in water — water rights, water quality, water storage.

I could regale you with many interesting tales, but the one that is most apropos given the Charles Duhigg interview is the story of LA’s open-air reservoirs.

Ever since the days of Mulholland, when LA discovered a natural downward slope from Mono Lake to the base of the Tehachapi, LA has been the major importer of its own water. Once this water is in the LA basin, it is stored in massive reservoirs like this one in the Hollywood Hills (photo: http://la.curbed.com/uploads/2008-06-hollywood_res.jpg).

The amazing thing is that these open air reservoirs are mostly there for show, they have been quietly replaced by massive (and I mean massive) underground storage tanks. The LA DWP recognized early on it had a problem with water quality. The water is fine when it firs arrives, clean from the source (eastern sierra’s, mostly). But once it sits in an open air reservoir, there is a gigantic pollution deposition problem. Yes, you heard that right, the pollution in LA air is so high that reservoir surface deposition is a big problem (runoff issues contribute, but air pollution is the big one).

The community went nuts when LA DWP said they were going to bury their water feature. So the open air reservoirs remain — for aesthetic reasons, mostly — and the potable water is stored in 40-110 million gallon underground tanks, some of the largest in the world.

This anecdote doesn’t really address the idea that we should all filter at the source, but it does provide some scale to the problem.

By: Sally Mcdonald

Sally Mcdonald — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:42:21 +0000

well, I’ve never really experienced someone not listening to me becasue I was a woman. Of course I happen to have a big mouth. I’m also not in the tech arena so maybe that’s different. That said, I don’t know that it’s the woman’s responsibility to be necessarily louder and less convenient, though. Nor do I think it was your responsiblity to “save” this particular woman from her inability to handle herself. IMHO each individual has to handle things for him/herself in a way that works for the situation and for their reality. Bias is there whether we can see it or not. It comes in all forms and the remedies likewise have to be in many forms.