BlogHer: Chromosome X

Despite the amazing growth of the blogosphere, most of the voices you read are men's.

BlogHer, the first convention of women bloggers, will change that in ever-widening ripples of influence and effect.

Jory des Jardin, one of the founding mothers of Bloghercon, has a series of four pieces at FutureTense, also cross-posted on her blog Paus entitled  Chromosome X , that's quite good for setting the context.

Part One examines her own experience of working with women - good and bad.  She quotes Tom Peters who says that a woman's model of leadership must prevail if business is to prevail

Women practice improvisation better than men.

Women are more self-determined and more trust sensitive than men.


Women appreciate and depend upon their intuition more than men do.


Women focus naturally on empowerment, rather than on hierarchical “power”.


Women understand and develop relationships with greater facility than men.

Part Two examines why women are different from men and that results in quite different management skills.

My point is that it’s natural for men to want to dominate, and for women to relate and collaborate. ...Let’s not rate any quality as better or worse than the other. Both inherent natures are valuable in the workplace, but with a more networked and global model of doing business becoming the norm, women's inherent skills, ones we’ve often relegated to off-hours endeavors, are the skills required to make things happen.

Part Three uses the BlogHer conference, set up in only four months, record time, as a real life example of some of those skills in action.

It occurred to me: Such a strongly collaborative model as the Do-ocracy was the only way we would be able to pull this thing off.
In my final installment I’ll report more on the experiment and dare to ask the question, is this really a feminine based model, or just a good model of leadership that I like to call feminine?

With humility, Jory concludes

The skills that we have used here have been, yes, detail work—lots of planning. But in larger part we networked, corralled, spread the word, and removed our desire to control the outcome. We simply steered the conference where it seemed to be going, then helped it culminate into action.

This model has provided a huge amount of freedom for me to move. Having full and open discourse and complete trust in the people I work with, a number of my personality glitches—some of my less attractive aspects—fall to the wayside. For instance, I take things far less personally....

To that point, I include this from Evelyn Rodriguez:
“The blogosphere represents the first medium to integrate both the masculine and feminine: a truly androgynous mindset. And integration isn’t a combinatory function but a fusion. More a soup than a salad.”

Perhaps, it is more like Elisa says—good leadership is not enforcing male or female qualities so much as it is about blending them both into androgynous good management, more soup than salad.

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, Bloghercon