Who do I follow and who follows me?

I’ve become a big fan of Stephanie Hurlburt on Twitter. She’s one of those bright lights among the murk and ugliness that Twitter can be. Almost always posting positive things, using her position in the tech industry to help others and particularly newcomers and women.

Oddly enough I discovered her because of a retweet where she was saying basically that coders should stand up to employment contracts that want to own your work. I mentioned that not everyone was in the position to just say no to a job. In other words I have found a Twitter user who I respect and look forward to hearing from because I disagreed with something she said. Her response was thoughtful and polite, and backed her position well.

Anyway, the point of this little article is a link that Stephanie posted last night Proporti.onl This interesting little tool uses an algorithm looking at the people you follow on Twitter and those that follow you and attempts to discern their gender, then gives you a report on the distribution of nonbinary, women and men.

I ran the tool and got the following results.

At first I was a bit dismayed, and that is why I’m writing this. I am the father of 3 daughters and 2 step daughters. I consider myself to be a progressive thinker, mostly left leaning. I have instilled in my children since day one that they are people first, and their gender has no relation to their abilities. I stand up for women’s rights regularly, and I never dismiss something because of the gender of who put it forward.

But these numbers, oh these numbers. Three quarters of who I follow are men! Two thirds of those who follow me are men! I have to do better!

The responses to Stephanie’s Tweet were similar, those with numbers like mine were regularly saying they had to do better, those with more balanced numbers were proud, some said they’d actually checked before and tried to work to balance those numbers. Even the opening description of the tool ends with:

I want you to be able to do this, too. Estimate the distribution of those you follow and see if there’s room to improve!

I found this interesting once I thought about it a bit. Why do we feel this way? Why are my numbers so skewed, am I a bad person?

Let me break down my follows for you.

• I am a hockey fan, primarily the Toronto Maple Leafs and Canadian national teams (Men’s and Women’s). So there are quite a few players and writers that I follow, and hockey still being predominantly a male sport it’s not surprising a lot of those are men.
• I follow friends and family, so this one is pretty balanced.
• I follow some local politics, and in this case those are predominantly male as well.
• I follow tech people. This one is probably still skewed male too, but I think mostly because I follow people who’s tools I’ve used, tutorials or articles I’ve read, etc.

Then I started thinking about my behaviour. Do I ever actually look at the gender of who I am about to click follow on? Nope. Have I ever dismissed a follower because they were nonbinary (for the record I know for a fact the 1 in that category is off) or female? Nope again. I’ve followed a few extra women through Stephanie’s tweets because she has a lot of followers and actively asks them for input. One in particular recently she asked female followers to put forward their technical blogs (actual technical blogs, not blogs about being a woman in tech) and some of them were great!

The thing I wonder after realizing that I’m not actually doing anything wrong, is why have we gotten to the point where we’re ashamed that our numbers aren’t more balanced, even when your interests are somewhat the reason for that imbalance?

I feel we should be working towards balance in all things. I want women’s hockey to be taken as seriously as men’s. I want women tech people to be just as prominent as men in the same field. But the simple fact is we aren’t there yet. Go to YouTube and search “javascript tutorial” Let me know how far down the list the first tutorial by a woman is, if you can even find one.

What we should be doing is continuing to support balance, supporting the women and nonbinary people that are putting themselves out there and doing good work, and helping the world notice them.

But should we be ashamed because our interests might skew our followers or who we follow to one gender or the other? I’m not so sure we should. I’m actually more pleased that who follows me is a little more balanced even given my interests. That says more about the content and comments I am putting out there than who I follow.

Anyway, this is longer than I wanted, I just wanted to know your opinions on this. Am I way off base? Should I actively be trying to balance who I follow? Or should I just continue to follow those I notice and enjoy regardless of their gender?