Why “.51″?
Let me take a moment to write a more personal response to a question folks have asked me a lot this past week.
When I first started building this site, I must admit that the name “.51″ came to me without my really thinking about it. It made perfect sense: there are all kinds of figures (possibly true, possibly not) that say 51% of the world’s population is female. I think I even “read somewhere” (which is code for “might be BS, but I don’t think so”) that 51% of the folks using/accessing the internet are women. Seems like in a lot of ways, women are more than half of the sample group.
Except when it comes to geekery.
Folks have asked me what the title of this site means, and I don’t have a simple answer. I could say that it’s my way of trying to get our numbers up in the various geek communities and of getting our voices heard but in a different way from the socio-economic-political discussion that many women address on their sites. On the other hand, I could say it’s just a name, but it’s not.
So for all the people who have asked me, “Why ‘.51′?”, I say this: we, as women, make up half the world, and some of us are geeks. Here’s a corner of the world where our geekery is not just understood, it’s the order of the day.
Hope that answers the question. (And let me know if it doesn’t.) Thanks, again, for reading.
[Editor’s note: mildly edited for continuity after original post.]
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