It’s one thing to read about the sort of harsh reactions women get while editing that
discourages them from continuing.
It’s a second thing to experience it yourself.
Late last week I was browsing Slate when I read their reprint
(
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/06/11/lolly_wolly_doodle_brandi_te…)
of this month’s Inc. magazine cover story, about a company called Lolly Wolly Doodle, a
children’s clothing company started by Brandi Temple a woman in North Carolina with no
real prior business experience, who had by her own admission never wanted to be anything
more than a trophy wife when she was younger. She apparently figured out how to sell on
Facebook, something major retailers have failed to do, and she’s now the CEO of a
rapidly-growing company that’s gotten some serious venture-capital funding, doing over
half of its $10 million+ annual business on FB and by their own lights the largest
retailer on that site.
I checked to see if we had an article on this company. We didn’t, so I started one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolly_Wolly_Doodle, complete with an infobox with the
company logo and a free image of one of its dresses I found on Flickr. I reflected as I
did so that the reason that this company had gotten all the media coverage it had in the
tech and business press yet remained off our radar said entirely too much about our gender
gap ... if we had just a few more probably regular editors who also are avid Pinterest
users, I bet, we’d have had at least a stub a long time ago.
But, that was all water under the bridge. Or so I thought.
I nominated it for DYK on Friday. Late today, I get these responses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know_nomination…
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know_nomination…
They were enough to ruin the good mood I was in following the USA’s World Cup win over
Ghana and our neighbor coming over to invite my wife and I to her daughter’s graduation
party. I have real trouble believing that Eppstein even read it (“whole paragraphs” are
sourced to the company’s own history on its webpage? Huh? That it’s not neutral and too
promotional? Everything it is sourced and attributed. And that dismissive conclusion about
“story-telling mode about the struggles of the founders to find their way in the world”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think a similarly-written story about a business set up by
men would get this level of criticism.
Sorry if anyone was bothered by this, but I had to vent. I will be going into greater
detail about why this review was so off base when I request that someone else review it
instead (something I have very rarely done with all the DYKs I’ve nominated).
Daniel Case