There seems to be more concern than usual lately about the ratio of men to women in various arenas. Zeldman is blogging about its reality in web design leadership, and then Church Marketing Sucks (coincidentally, I assume) started down the same path.

The broad trends that have been measured are:

What does this mean? I asked Mr. Web Diva. Ever the pragmatist, he said, there must not be many church webmasters.

But does it matter? My first reaction was, in truth, so what? But then my blood started to boil as I reflected on the possibilities that (1) women might want to be in web design or IT and are being held back, and (2) church doesn’t meet men’s needs.

I don’t know about the second possibility (though I remember that in Zen there were significantly more men than women). For the first, in my experience there is an ugly truth that the pundits seem to be tiptoeing around. That’s misogyny. In many of the IT worlds I’ve inhabited, it’s alive and well. Maybe it’s just an anomaly, but I doubt it, given what other women tell me. More likely, it’s hard to measure or I’ve just missed that part of the measurements.

Of course, it’s not omnipresent. I think, for example, of my church’s “Nerd Herd.” It’s six men and me, and I don’t detect the tiniest smidgen of sexism. But what woman or girl in her right mind, having heard the snide remarks that are so common among IT staff, would want to make a career of this? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the strongest argument for Web production being in Communications or Marketing and not in IT.

But back to the pragmatic: if Mr. Web Diva is right, it’s bad news for churches. The writing is on the wall: churches need good websites. That means we need good webmasters. Who cares what their gender is? What I care about is that we are all happy and fulfilled.