I’ve been fascinated by the emergence of Etsy (http://www.etsy.com), an online marketplace for handmade goods. I’ve made my own clothes and jewelry for years, given hand-made gifts and even tried my hand at selling, so of course I was intrigued. Among the popular features are the forums, chats and virtual labs that are part of the Etsy Community. Several sites like We Love Etsy (http://etsylove.ning.com/), a social networking site for Etsy fans, have sprung up in it’s wake.
The website launched in mid-2005 and has recently gotten a lot of attention, having made it’s millionth sale in June 2007. NYT and the Wall Street Journal had both featured Etsy in the past few months. What caught my eye was the gender breakdown: about 90% of the 800,000 sellers on Etsy are women. Ironically, the owners are all men and in the NYT article, Rob Kamin says, describing the early days, “We were the only guys around”.
I probably wouldn’t have noticed that detail if I hadn’t recently seen startup.com and if my dear fiance had not sat me down to watch Revolution OS. (I understood why he was so impressed I used Firefox). Both movies are about industries, software engineering and tech entrepreneurship, in which the workers are predominantly male and there are huge sums of money changing hands.
DIY and Open Source have one thing in common: the idea that individuals can have a collective positive impact. DIYers by combating excessive consumerism and open source by combating predatory vendor practices. Both movements rely on the determined self-sufficiency of their members.
So what’s up with the gender bias and division of labor? Making and selling handcrafted items is labor-intensive work. Despite the fact that there are success stories of artists doing well (the NYT story highlights Emily Martin among others), I wonder if the average Etsy seller makes minimum wage for the hours she works. You could probably say the same thing about eBay, but sellers there also sell big-ticket items and the average profit-per-hour of work can be higher.
Granted, the small scale of the endeavor is what attracts people to it and the DIY culture is a predominantly female one. I admire the self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship of Etsy sellers. But it makes me profoundly uneasy to see that women, who have traditionally made less than men anyway, make up such a big part of the Etsy user-base.
Etsy is described as a resurgence of handmade consumer goods. One explanation of it is that it’s a reaction to the fact that many more of us are “knowledge workers” and when we come home, we revel in the tactile pleasures of crafting. But again, why is it women who are doing the tactile-ing? What do male “knowledge workers” do in their free time? I know they do more than play video games.
Another factor that may draw women to DIY entrepreneurship is how many are mompreneurs, mothers looking for flexibility in their working lives. The forces at play in that work-family balance offer an unsatisfying answer; but trying to untangle those forces, societal, social, economic and otherwise is a topic for another blog post.
One last contrast with the Open Source movement: OP engineers (mostly men) are often self-taught, but they’re also overwhelmingly male. There’s an interesting two-part article (The Hidden Engineering Gap and A Modest Proposal) that asks why there aren’t more self-taught female engineers. In part two of the article, the author, Joyce Park (infamously canned by Friendster for blogging) mentions that if women were introduced to computer programming through social software, more women might stay with the field. It’s hard not to think of the popularity of the social aspects of Etsy. Maybe there’ll be cross-over.
