How to discover more great women?

I’m not following a lot of people on Twitter. Up until 3 months ago, I was following something like 40 people. Out of those, maybe 5 identify as women. I’m kinda stuck in a situation where I don’t get to discover great women. I follow men for 90%. Those men follow men. They talk about men and, oh miracle, sometimes, like once a year, about a woman. Twitter is a lens I look at the world through and I feel like it’s always the same people speaking.

In December, I decided to actively seek for more awesome women to follow on Twitter. I thought I had to do the initial effort of following more women and get to a point where my feed is balanced in a way that I hear equally about great women and great men.

Here’s the strategy I’ve used:

• I looked at the women I follow. Found out they follow a lot of women I’ve never heard of.
• Started following those whose descriptions/tweets seemed interesting.
• Reached a point where I follow about as many women as men, with a total of 100 people.
• With this whole new feed, I started hearing about more people than before. That’s great!
• I now sometimes unfollow some of the women I initially artificially added to my feed to replace them with people I’m more interested in.
• Those are not only men anymore! That worked out well!

I now have a way more diverse Twitter feed which points me at more interesting news and projects and which makes me discover more diverse people of every gender.

Wanna try? It takes maybe an hour and will have a huge impact! Why not start by following those five awesome women: @agnes_crepet, @b0rk, @karesti, @linsun_unc and @lizrice?