The Feminist Queries: Jon Pincus

by Jen Nedeau

categories: Interviews, Technology, The Feminist Queries

Published October 10, 2009 @ 04:58PM PT

For this Feminist Query, I have interviewed my first male subject (gasp!) - Jon Pincus. Jon has always impressed me with his awareness about feminist topics and how important it is to include women and people of color in his discussions about technology, social media, voters rights and many other initiatives. For those who don't know him, he is founder of Qworky, a Seattle-area startup aiming to revolutionize how people work together. His professional career includes research into computer science as a social science, investigating opportunities for "game changing strategies" in the web 2.0 space as General Manger for Strategy Development in Microsoft's Online Services Group, and founder and CTO of venture-funded software engineering startup Intrinsa, whose PREfix tool established the "static analysis" market category and was acquired by Microsoft in 1999. As an activist, he's helped organize Stop REAL ID Now! Get FISA Right, Twitter Vote Report, Voter Suppression Wiki, and #p2, and participated in and written about many other social network activism efforts. In 2010, he's chairing the 20th ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference.

You are the first male subject I have interviewed for the Feminist Queries. Do you call yourself a feminist and if so, why?

I'm honored! Yes I do (at least to the extent a guy can be a feminist), because I embrace the "radical" notion that women are people.

From your point of view, how can we get more men engaged in the women's rights movement?

This isn't something I'm particularly good at, alas, so I don't have any great answers here. One thing that seems like it's been working well is the work the women-in-technology field has been doing challenging conference organizers about lack of representation and sexist behavior -- in several cases this has led to men admitting that there's a problem and people working together to try to fix it.

With a professional background in technology, what is the most important reason to make sure more women and people of color are involved in building the future of information infrastructure online?

Who's building the future? Technology privileges the needs and reflects the biases of the people who design and implement it. The risk is that the shift to a mobile phone/web world embed existing dimensions of oppression into the tools that increasingly control information and influence.

One area this clearly happens already is with search. "Preferential linking" -- for example the tendency of men tend to link to men more than to women -- means that theoretically-neutral algorithms in practice are biased against women. Stuff like memeorandum and techmeme exaggerates the effects even further. Scary.

More positively though this also points to opportunities. In marketing-speak, there's a huge underserved market for software that's not biased towards the needs of white guys (and their stereotypes of what "everybody" wants); and there's a collective blindspot due to white male-dominated technology writers and VCs mean that The nascent field of "Gender HCI", which looks at gender differences in how people interact with software, has some real insights that can lead to developing products that are more useful for everybody. We're in the design stages at my startup Qworky, and it's really remarkable how many insights we get by keeping diversity constantly in mind -- and by seeking out diverse perspectives. I'd strongly encourage anybody in the technology space to do the same.

You've been very involved in several activism initiatives including Get FISA Right, Voter Suppression Wiki, and the #p2 Twitter hashtag. How have you ensured that those involved in these projects come from a diverse background?

It starts with deciding that diversity should be a priority, keeping it consistently in mind, and approaching it strategically. It's true at the personal level -- Shireen Mitchell points out that your online network should keep getting steadily more diverse -- and in terms of an activism initiative's goals and strategies. As Scott Page's book "The Difference" so clearly shows, diverse groups outperform; so it's worth doing the hard work to improve diversity.

Tracy Viselli and I started #p2 with the theory that Twitter would be a good place to engage with communities currently marginalized by the "progressive blogosphere": women, people of color, Millennials, etc. etc. We reached out to women and people of color from the beginning; tracked participation in early discussions; spent a lot of time in early meetings discussing different approaches to improving diversity; worked with AAUW and #fem2 on #fairpay activism; and confronted sexism when it broke out. There's still plenty of room for improvement, of course, but as a result of this it's a much more diverse group than it would be otherwise.

Tactically, it's important to encourage communication via Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (as well as email and blogs) as a good way to involve Millennials -- and since all these social network sites are 55%+ women, also helps with gender diversity. Get FISA Right has a chat in parallel with our organizing calls so that people don't have to spend the money to dial in (not everybody has unlimited minutes). We try to make it possible for people to participate in our actions via Twitter or Facebook so that folks who don't have computers can still get involved if they have a smartphone. And so on ...

While you and I are already converts on the use of social media for activist purposes, from your perspective, how can we leverage online platforms (blogs, Twitter, Facebook) to create real change on the ground?

Social network sites are where the next elections will be won (or lost). It's critical to experiment with strategies and tactics, learn from experience, and build on what works.

I think it's very important to analyze social network campaigns as well as participate in them. For example, #iranelection showed the value of Twazzup as a way of following what's happening on Twitter; when Get FISA Right kicked off our social network activism on the Patriot Act, we immediately asked Twazzup to set up a custom page and it makes a HUGE difference. act.ly is a new and potentially powerful tool; what campaigns are and aren't working? And so on.

There's a lot of room for improvement in the mechanics. Organizations should make it very easy for people to forward on their calls to action on social networks, and include viral aspects as well. Bloggers need to get in the habit of including a short summary of how to take action in informational posts as well. It should be possible to get a 'retweeting network' in place to amplify key messages, but right now it's not obvious how. How best to use hashtags? And so on.

And, we need to get better at learning how to use social media to get the word out and get people in the streets at short notice -- and then coordinate them. Step it Up, Voces Contra Las FARC, the Obama campaign, Join the Impact, and the Tea Parties all show it's possible. As we get more practice, it'll get steadily easier.

Finally, if you could ask women everywhere one question, what would it be?

What topics and speakers related to computers, freedom, and privacy haven't gotten enough attention?

I'm co-chairing the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2010 conference with Dorothy Glancy of Santa Clara University, and we're just about to send out the call for participation ... one of our goals this year is to get a more diverse range of perspectives. So if you've got suggestions, we're all ears!