Kottke on Gender Diversity At Conferences

Kottke is pulling down the pants of the tech conference organizers on this subject; one that they just hope will go away without them doing anything.

[from Gender diversity at web conferences (kottke.org)] [...] t seems to me that either the above concerns [gender diversity] are not getting through to conference organizers or that gender diversity doesn't matter as much to conference organizers as they publicly say it does. The Future of Web Apps folks seem to have a particularly tin ear when it comes to this issue. For their second conference, they doubled the size of the speaker roster and added only one woman to the bill despite the complaints from last time.

Gack. I am working with the CMP folks on Enterprise 2.0, and so far I have asked one person, a woman, if she could participate, and I was turned down.

Others have made the case that many of the most interesting woman for tech conference speaking roles have a higher turn-down rate than their male counterparts. I wonder if that is just an urban legend. Nonetheless, I am going to continue to dig into this issue, since it seems to never go away.

And, since I am unsatisfied with the answers Ryan Carson provided to Kottke, I am pulling the Future of Online Advertising ad from this blog. I looked, and at the moment only 2 of 14 speakers are women: just shy of 15%. I think that 15% should be the minimal acceptable level, a C- in this shitty, shitty world.

tags: gender+diversity, conferences, kottke, future+of+web+apps, ryan+kottke, its+different+for+boys

Comments

[Daniel R]

Stowe,

There are plenty of diversity issues at tech/marketing conference. Kottke has pointed out gender, Jeremiah Owyang on Asians etc, Chris Messina on too many white guys...and for me it's - where are the African-Americans? Or Hispanics (CA is not only very high-tech, it is also 1/3 hispanic)

One should also check out Tantek's post regarding the diversity discussions that many are having.

One type of diversity that matters for me is diversity of thought, maybe a speaker who speaks against the choir: "why social media is overblown", "corporate blogging works for a few, a gimmick for most" etc.

I think as a policy, every conference should have one major, intelligent, articulate gadfly who stands against the whatever du jour disruptive/break-through/revolutionary idea.