I spent part of my lunch break at Disrupt today reading a recent post by Michael Arrington titled Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men. This post was written as a response to Rachel Sklar‘s statement about TechCrunch playing a part in perpetrating the under-representation of women in the tech industry:
“Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time TechCrunch is planning a TechCrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it”

This got me thinking that I agree with Michael Arrington on many of the points he’s made in his post:
• It’s hard to find women who are willing to speak at conferences
• It would be unfair to the conference-goers to put women on panels just because they are women
• Tech media wants to cover women entrepreneurs
• At the end of the day, there really is no clear answer to why women are so under-represented in the industry
I obviously, also, understand and appreciate Rachel Sklar’s points and criticisms of the tech space and truly commend her for doing what many of us don’t do and that’s actually speaking out and gaining awareness for this issue.
Personally I cannot comment on whether we can blame men, the industry itself or the fact that women are just “too nurturing” to play the game [as mentioned in the TechCrunch post],  due to the fact that I honestly don’t have a clue on what causes this issue or how to stop the cycle from continuing.
What I DO know is that as a woman entrepreneur it feels comforting walking into a tech conference such as TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 and seeing women represented on the agenda as well as seeing this much media buzz about us ladies.
Since I cannot seem to come up with with a list of insightful and witty explanations in regards to the situation at hand, I would like to honor just a few of the women that represented at Disrupt 2010. Gender aside, these women are some of the best in the industry today.
Marissa Mayer- currently the VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa is one of the most well-known female public figures in Silicon Valley and her status as such has been very well deserved.
Not only does she have multiple degrees including a degree from Stanford (where she now also teaches introductory programming classes winning her awards such as the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award), she was the first female engineers hired by Google and one of their first twenty employees.
Follow her on twitter @marissamayer
Check out Marissa talking about Google at Disrupt today here.
Elaine Wherry- Co-Founder of Meebo
Elaine is another Stanford alumni and is currently responsible for product development at Meebo.
Check out her blog here to get her thoughts on life, UX research, marshmallow making and the like.
Even though she is not very active on twitter you can follow her @pudding25
Lauren Leto- Founder of Bnter and Co-Founder of Texts From Last Night
Lauren was attending Law School when she co-founded Texts From Last Night with Ben Bator and dropped out once the site went viral. She has most recently founded Bnter and has raised funds from some of the valley’s hottest investors including SV Angel.
Check out her blog here.
Follow her on Twitter @laurenleto
I would also like to give major props to Venture Beat for heavily promoting the women of Disrupt on their homepage today-as well as TechCrunch for trying to coordinate a women’s panel (even if it did go a little haywire). Thanks for taking the right steps to make the tech scene friendly to us ladies, y’all.