A (Not So) Short History of the Growth of the GA Tally App

Back in 2014 when GenderAvenger was still an idea and not yet a web community, I met my friend Eli Pariser, founder of Upworthy, author of The Filter Bubble, and much more, for coffee and to brainstorm. His advice: find a way to use conference hashtags as part of the communication about gender balance. I tucked it away in my “really good idea” file.

Two months later while on an Angel Island hike with Matt Stempeck, who now lives in Berlin and is an extraordinary innovator committed to engagement in the field of civic tech, the conversation turned to hashtags, and Matt described what ultimately became the GA Tally app. Matt recruited Nate Matias, who had an impressive history of developing data science for gender equality while at MIT and is now a professor at Cornell. Then, I recruited Yonatan Kogan, who I met when he was a student leader and I was a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and now works his digital magic from South Carolina. Somehow Matt, Nate, and Yonatan found time around their full-time jobs to create the first version of the GA Tally. I am forever grateful to these three men.

Matt Stempeck, Nate Matias, and Yonatan Kogan

At its inception, the GA Tally was binary. Count the men; count the women. If there were 40% women on a panel, list, or stage, the organization made it into the GA Hall of Fame, and, if there were 30% or below, the organization landed in the GA Hall of Shame.

In 2015, as we began featuring the GA Tally in our newsletters, we asked a professional technologist to smooth out the edges, fix broken code, and ensure its stability. The design remained simple with a star, a smiley face, and a frown to designate the positive or negative nature of the gender balance percentages.

As recognition of GA’s work grew along with the community, we worked to improve the design and to make our stance even more clear. In 2017, the Halls of Fame and Shame were retired, and we replaced them with the GA Stamps of Approval and redesigned the GA Tally.

The redesigned GA Tally still calculated a binary women/men gender representation, but now we had a new weather theme, and the star, smiley face, and frown became “the present and future are bright”, “cloudy with a chance of patriarchy”, and “a thunderstorm of inequality”.

An enhanced design and new language were great, but the GA Team wanted more, because we were diverse with women of color and non-binary individuals, but the GA Tally didn’t have room to represent them as important demographics.

By mid-2018, that changed. With the guidance of Alexis McGill Johnson and her colleagues at The Perception Institute and the glorious badgering of our web designer, Elan Morgan, we revised the GA Tally to include women of color and non-binary individuals.  During that time, one of the original tally creators, Yonatan Kogan, connected us to Cathy Deng, who had created a bit of an internet sensation, Are Men Talking Too Much. It turned out that GA was Cathy’s inspiration. Shortly thereafter, Time Who’s Talking became a brand new feature of the GA Tally to measure voices in the public dialog.

Like so many organizations, 2020 proved to be a challenge for GA. Our community was absorbed with the pandemic and its effect on their families and friends. There were no in-person panels at the regularly scheduled conferences to be counted. Folks were just learning how to use Zoom and what its etiquette was. Issues of race were finally rising to the forefront and potentially getting their due.

It was a time for reflection and action. We realized that while not enough progress had been made, enough had occurred to build upon and figure out how to accelerate our goals. We looked back and realized that the responses to the GA community’s exposure of bad gender representation had moved from defensiveness and derision to acknowledgement and action.

We decided to declare May 2021 as GenderAvenger Month to celebrate that success and to raise our criteria for recognition of strong gender balance in the public dialog. This week, we announced our new standards for earning GA Stamps of Approval, our awards for better gender representation.

And this week, we are also introducing a new change to the Time Who’s Talking feature that measures women’s voices in the GA Tally. When you keep track of who is talking and how much in a meeting, on a Zoom call, or, in the future when in-person conferences are common again, on a stage, the GA Tally will now calculate the number of minutes men, white women, and women of color speak respectively, instead of the original split between men and women. 

Join us during the rest of May, GenderAvenger Month, and help monitor who’s talking to ensure women and women of color are heard in the public dialog.