I’ve also been trying to muster up the guts to write about the sexism measured in Twitter follower stats: mholzschlag 28k / zeldman 357k; karenmcgrane 43k / beep 91k; stubbornella 36k / snookca 53k; standardista 9k / meyerweb 106k; fantasai 2k / tabatkins 4k… on and on.

I never looked at it like that... makes it seem pretty systemic

It’s a vicious circle. We can’t get verified, because we don’t have enough followers. We aren’t on Wikipedia, because we don’t seem to matter. People don’t give us credit because they see these men getting all the attention first. And we aren’t on Wikipedia. We aren’t verified.

Oh yes, and men getting attention for stuff they have pestered us for information about while they worked on it.

That’s the one that most bothers me. Not only are they reframing my stuff, not crediting me, but using my time to help them do so!

Over and over again. For nearly 20 years, and the people who do this don’t realise how much they are benefiting from the status quo.

Need to make sure as an industry we highlight the people who aren’t shouting “look at me!” and just doing the work quietly.

As a whole, I absolutely agree with you. There are lots of people behind the scenes, of all walks of life. This is more of a nostalgia project, so the overlap with "quiet" isn't super important here. Still very interesting to read the responses.

I think the frustration you are hearing is that many of these ladies were not quiet, but their ideas only really took off when championed/renamed/appropriated by a man. And then history erases and they never existed.