David McCreath

Web Conferences and Women: Still Out of Whack

February 23, 2007

Hey, it’s time to start marking your calendar for the year’s conferences. Once again it’s been pointed out that the conferences’ speakers lists look like fraternity roll calls. Jason Kottke published some actual numbers. It’s enlightening. (Since Jason doesn’t usually open comments on his site, head over to http://kottkekomments.com, where Ben Brown of Consumating set up a handy way to talk about Jason’s posts.)

Mike at Mule Design posted about it as well (disclosure: Mule is my current employer) , and Ryan Carson responded in the comments, apparently with an e-mail that he originally sent to Jason, which it turns out is nearly identical to an e-mail that he sent to Jen Bekman, who maintains an amazing list of women available for speaking.

Micki Krimmel picked it up, too, and in interesting point came up in the comments. Lane Becker (a founder at Adaptive Path, now with Ruby Red Labs Satisfaction) commented that the calling out the conference organizers is a place to start, but that we need to do more to balance the gender disparity in the technology realm in general. And I think he’s right, to a large degree. It’s easy for me to forget about that sometimes because I’m lucky enough to work with four incredibly talented, intelligent women at Mule.

This morning Eric Meyer, one of our industry’s best and brightest, and one of the organizers of An Event Apart, addressed some of these issues on his personal site, basically saying his primary concern as an organizer is finding the best speakers for his event’s topics, and a secondary concern is not repeating speakers from one event to the next, and that he’s not going to consider race, color, creed or gender when he’s looking at potential speakers. It’s good to see Eric be so open about it, and I understand his reasoning, but at the same time, it’s kind of disappointing.

Because the issue is most emphatically not “There aren’t enough women CSS gurus.” The issue is that the conferences and workshops in our industry are sorely lacking in women speakers.

Eric and Ryan both say that they support diverse speaker panels, but there aren’t enough women speakers out there that can sell tickets and fill chairs; the speakers whose names are well-known are all men.

Then, Eric and Ryan here’s a chance to step up and make a difference. Use your names and high-profile sites to promote those women. Ask them to contribute. Help them build their names.

The web business skews heavily toward males, but it is not a boy’s club. Our ranks are filled with women, and they contribute insights and perspective that the boys don’t have. Let’s figure out how to get that perspective in front of more people.

In the meantime point some fingers and keep asking why there aren’t women speakers at the conferences you’re attending.

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