At the end of last year, I published a blog entry called “A Failed Goal“, in which I talked about how much of my writing had dealt with gender issues, and how I wanted to increase that percentage. The year’s rolled around, and now it’s time to take stock again.
Last year, I ran 2 gender-tagged posts out of a total of 24, for an 8.33% gender rate. (Unless you counted the final post, which would make 3/25 for 12%, but I said that wasn’t really legit.) This year, I dropped my output to only 13 posts total (not including this one). But 3 of them were tagged as gender-related, which makes for a whopping 23% gender rate.
I’m not too happy with how little I posted and blogged this year. (There was a four-month hiatus in the middle of the year, as I was busy getting married.) In some ways, I really think the low number of total posts contributed more to my high gender percentage than anything else. But it’s something.
One other odd note: That “A Failed Goal” post got tagged “gender”, because there was a bunch of stuff in the middle about what it’s like to wade through all the misogynist muck that’s necessary for backing up various statements about sexism in FOSS, startups, and tech. But this post? This one doesn’t really get the tag, because it doesn’t actually tackle gender issues at all, even in that minor way. This one is just me navel-gazing — or, more charitably, doing a retrospective for purposes of analysis and tracking.
(And if I hadn’t established the schema of not counting the retrospective posts in the percentage, this one would bring my total to 3 out of 14 posts, not 13, for a percentage of 21.42%. Still well above my 10% target. Maybe I’ll shoot for a 15% target next year?)