With Arianna Huffington Boss Of Michael Arrington, More Women In Tech?

One ironic development in the wake of AOL's purchase of The Huffington Post for $315 Million, is that, with Arianna Huffington now content editor for all of AOL's acquisitions, including TechCrunch, this question must be asked "Will we see more Tech Crunch content on Women In Tech?"

I put that in caps because last year the lack of representation of women in tech fields, and at TechCrunch events, morphed from a complaint to a full-blown TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco panel that can only be described as horrible. For all practical purposes it degenerated into a near-cage match between Rachel Sklar and Sarah Lacy, the moderator.

Meanwhile, Michael Arrington stayed out of sight from the panel, an interesting development for a man who was so out in front in hitting back against Rachel's criticisms of TechCrunch and women. (Which it really boiled down to far more than "women in tech.")

 Last year, Michael wrote:

Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.

We won’t put women on stage just because they’re women – that’s not fair to the audience who’ve paid thousands of dollars each to be there. But we do spend an extraordinary amount of time finding those qualified women and asking them to speak.

And you know what? A lot of the time they say no. Because they are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

Now that Arianna Huffington's basically overseeing TechCrunch, Michael has no excuse that he can't draw the best names from the vast pool of women in tech. He can just call her for help. The question is, will he?

The overall attitude expressed by male TechCrunch readers in Erick Shonfeld's blog post from February 7th is that it's not just about "Women, Power, and Local" as Eric's title was strangely named, but about their overall bitterness toward Arianna, as expressed in some of the comments - well a lot of them.

As one commenter put it:

Are you guys taking issue with being UNDER a woman now?

With that, maybe TechCrunch could stand more content from women to draw female readers.  There's no reason it has to be male-dominated, anyway.

Stay tuned.