I’m not sure whether laughter or tears would be the more appropriate reaction. Maybe both.

Clearly, you’re not going to believe that we did what we did for other than selfish reasons, nor that what we did might possibly have been a net positive. I’m sorry for that, but there’s also little I can do about it, so I guess we’ll just have to leave things there.

Had the survey results been distributed with more of a caveat, I would understand. But they really weren’t. I’m seeing back-patting and congratulations and another notch in the ol’ web design kudos belt. Relevant and useful? As a self-promotion tool for the people who created it, surely. And a smart one, too, hats off to you for that. Relevant and useful to the rest of us? I strongly disagree.

Personally, I found it more troublesome that nobody really knew the lay of the land, or even the size of the land. Now we have something to go on, and given the number of people who responded, I believe it is likely a roughly accurate picture of the field. As in, it may not be in perfect focus, but it’s not so blurry as to be indecipherable. I feel that what was created was a big first step toward getting a handle on what the community really looks like. I think that’s important.

There are 2 things that are bugging me much more than the data in the compilation:
- Surveys are, by nature, not particularly reliable data. Many research groups do not even consider them to be valid research tools any more. So to have a number of very well-known web designers/developers/experts create and distribute an admittedly flawed survey seems… dare I say it… somewhat irresponsible. Lots of hard work and beautifully presented? Absolutely. Relevant? I question that.

- If we can all agree that surveys are flawed and this one was no different, and that creating one that can possibly gather any relevant information requires a statistician/survey professional, shouldn’t we leave this to the them? I’m not sure why an ‘official’ survey of this nature has not been attempted in the past. Perhaps a reflection on the lack respect in our industry (just make the logo bigger!). But given that it will be undoubtedly passed along to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons… I find it troublesome that it will be read by some as ‘the lay of the land.’ Particularly impressionable younger women who decide not to get into the field because of what they’ll be reading. Or a manager who doesn’t think he needs to give that graphic designer a raise…

Don’t get me wrong. I fully recognize and appreciate the work that went into it to begin with… I just question what was actually created.

Show me a histogram of just women by age and separately men by age. Without that, you can’t validly draw from this chart a statistical conclusion about what women are doing in the field of web development.

Maybe it would help to run the survey by steps and promoting it from country to country with an appropriate translation in the language of the country. Then collect the results by country.

For example, in Japan or France, the English only question will be a definitive no no.

Also it was very interesting to read where people get the information Web versus Mailing-list. More news in a near future on that.

Btw Eric, will you be at the W3C TPAC 2007? You are more than welcome, you should contact Janet Daly if not yet done.

At SXSWi this year, I was surprised by the number of women there. But most of them were in marketing, content creation, or bloggers. Few were coders, or designers. The ones that were, at least anecdotally, were centered around mobile devices.

Maybe what we’re seeing is that with the emergence of these second and third generation job titles (e.g. information architect) that women who are interested in the web are gravitating towards those positions and away from the traditional design/development titles. Or maybe women are drawn more towards building and running websites more traditionally — through traditional jobs like marketing or writing/editing — because of perceived biases in the design/development world.

I think it’s troubling that 22%+ of all female respondents they they’ve been adversely affected by gender bias. And I’m wondering if that bias is driving women towards web-related jobs where there is less perceived bias.

We must start addressing gender, racial, and regional bias in the coming years. We must.