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"  Recently, nine women banded together to combat sexism in the tech industry in a way that&amp;#039;s got everyone talking. In the past week, CBS News, Business Insider, and The Washington Post all reported on their effort,aboutfeminism.me, which both airs grievances with being a woman working in tech today, as well as offers solutions for how to make things better in the future. The site&amp;#039;s articulate, smartly designed (simple and raw, like you&amp;#039;ve stumbled on someone&amp;#039;s LiveJournal), and above all, mobilizing. Because not only do the women (who work at BuzzFeed, Kickstarter, and Adobe, among others) speak their minds, they also attach their names and Twitter accounts to the project, too. At the bottom of their posts, they&amp;#039;ve bravely listed their full names along with hyperlinks to their social media sites:   Photo: aboutfeminism.me  So while the women&amp;#039;s complaints about being females in the tech industry are certainly memorable\u2014&amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve experienced a staggering earnings gap in our field,&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;We get asked if we&amp;#039;re the event planner or executive assistant on a regular basis,&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;We get asked about our relationships at interviews, and we each have tales of being groped at public events,&amp;quot;\u2014it&amp;#039;s this willingness to put their faces and names out there, too, that&amp;#039;s really galvanizing. It means the conversation doesn&amp;#039;t stop on aboutfeminism.me. Instead, it&amp;#039;s started a Twitter discourse:    I&amp;#039;m not surprised by the lack of diversity in tech, but I applaud the women who wrote this letter about it http://t.co/z7pv6hNnca #AMTonight \u2014 Caissa Casarez (@cmcasarez) May 30, 2014    Yet that&amp;#039;s just part of why their transparency about their identities matters. By putting themselves out there and actively engaging in the conversations that follow, these women can also become role models for the next generation of females wanting to break into the tech industry. Obviously, anonymous manifesto writers wouldn&amp;#039;t be able to accomplish that, and as an op-ed in yesterday&amp;#039;s The New York Times noted, there probably couldn&amp;#039;t be a better time for it. &amp;quot;The presence of female role models,&amp;quot; Nitasha Tiku wrote, &amp;quot;can be hard to come by when you&amp;#039;re one of the only girls in your computer science class,&amp;quot; but it&amp;#039;s often an important motivator to get young women to stay on a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) path. Beyond Yahoo&amp;#039;s Marissa Mayer and Facebook&amp;#039;s Sheryl Sandberg, we could certainly use more women willing to make themselves visible and bring the issues women face in the tech world to the attention of the mainstream. So bravo, feminist manifesto writers. You&amp;#039;re obviously skilled at all things technology, but with these writing and marketing skills, you might just have all the tricks you need up your sleeve to really affect some change. And with all the things that have happened in the tech world lately\u2014the launch of that wildly sexist Codebabes website, the GitHub sexual harassment controversy, those somewhat misogynistic emails written by Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel\u2014you&amp;#039;re offering some much-needed hope and light in the darkness. Related: Why We Need Women Who Code Related: Meet the Woman Leading the Tech LadyMafia "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/tech/a14468/women-tech-feminist-manifesto/>