The 'No Women Speakers' Meme Is Awake Again

[from Twitter.com/maryhodder]

retweet of @anon: The no-women-at-conferences sausage fest is become a trope! Agree!

@jerrymichalski prob is, most men ask 4 conf participants this way, & get, you guessed it, men only. u won't get women if u do it this way

maryhodder about 1 hour ago from twhirl in reply to jerrymichalski

@MaryHodder please explain why I won't get women to participate if I ask by tweeting. I thought it was an interesting experiment.

jerrymichalski 43 minutes ago from TwitterFox in reply to MaryHodder

@MaryHodder I tweeted a request for guests, 4 guys answered, I put them on. kaliya emailed me and she's on now. just participate! about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox in reply to MaryHodder

Apparently Jerry Michalski has fallen afoul of the no-women-speakers trap. I don't even know what conference or event is involved, but one scenario is like this:

1. Organizer tries to contact some group of interesting speakers. Being half smart, he (it's a guy in this scenario) tries to contact a bunch of women, to get something like parity.
2. Most of the most qualified women either don't respond (Mary Hodder says she lost the message from Jerry in a Twhirl folder), or respond negatively (too busy, children, pressures of work, etc. My sense is (d'uh) that the pressures of child rearing fall inequitably on women in our culture.)
3. Time passes, and the organizer reaches out to more women or returns to the original group. Comes up short despite trying really hard. Invariably, some women begin to comment that a/ the conference materials suggest that not many women are involved, and b/ why the hell is that? The fact that the organizer has tried to reach out to women is irrelevant (in one case, I had to ask Mary Hodder to talk to an irate woman suggesting that I was sexist, and clarify that I had in fact reached out to women fromthe outset and that I had taken their input into account).
4. Sometimes, the tiny little brushfire breaks out into a conflagation, and burns down the house. (One year, I was cursed by Jeneane Sessums, who later 'unfucked' me, which was the nicest compliment anyone ever paid me.)

Anyway, I know nothing of the specifics in this case. I just saw the tweets run by. But I bet its the scenario above, which I know has happened dozens of times. Don't get me wrong, there is another, sister scenario, where the organizer could give a shit, and just invites a lot of guys without thinking about it. The problem is that the results can end up looking alike, despite everything.

Comments

[Liz Henry]

Y'all might try widening your definition of qualified. Since the same guys keep speaking at the same conferences y'all just get more and more qualified while the women get less so.

I've been around in this whole conference circuit for a while. I've met you. We know all the same conferencey social media people in common. I was there in the whole "Fuck/Unfuck" scenario and thought it quite interesting and I believe commented on it. I've spoken at conferences and been quite successful at it. I work in tech, and have for years. I've been blogging since 2002 and on Usenet since the 80s. I'm no hacker and yet I have more of a technical/geek/programming background than half the Internet marketing types who do the circuit. Has anyone other than SXSW and Recent Changes Camp reached out to me? Nope.

More to the point, and focusing off myself a bit, I know dozens if not hundreds of "qualified" conference speakers who are women - However, the only people asking me for my excellent advice on great conference speakers are the people from BlogHer.

So, while I see your point and definitely hear you about the child care and responsibilities and lack of money (and often, independent/contractor status that mean no one's going to pay for your female conference speaker's trip) I do question whether you're looking hard enough or asking the right questions. Or, providing the right support.

In the case of SXSWi, I thought part of that support was in being willing to talk back and forth with prospective speakers in a more sustained conversation.

I also believe what I said at Bloggercon a few years ago to be true: If you are inviting women to come speak at your conference and you don't have a good gender balance in the past, then invite women in a posse. This holds true for racial or non-US-centric diversity as well. And it requires more work than just thinking of the few top women you can think of without breaking a sweat. Find them, and branch out a bit to who they link to, and see if you can hop into a different community, and then invite everyone there. If you invite a few women who have strong ties with each other then you will tap into a community and get outside your bubble. And it will look more attractive, and less like a hostile situation where a person might feel outnumbered, differently qualified, tokenized, and in a spot where they will have to "represent" for a whole category of person.

[Liz Henry]

I'd like to add that people and companies do pay "diversity consultants" and rightly so. Because it is also fairly annoying to be asked to do all the work to bring one's Representative People in to be the token diversity as I'm sure Mary and Kaliya are asked fairly frequently. It is work, and if you're not willing to sit around surfing outside your own community (who you consider to be "more qualified" because of the fame echo chamber effect) or to do something as simple as looking at a list of female authors of good technical books, then it might be good to consider paying someone to do it.

[Stowe Boyd]

Liz -

I believe that the answer is getting a diverse group involved as early as possible. In the case of the conference I ran at Harvard a few years ago, that still was problematic. A conference with *no* history, starting with all initial invitations to women aside from a male colleague at Harvard, still lead to serious difficulties when the majority of women that I asked turned me down.

I agree that it is worth working hard at, to get it right, and your recommendation about reaching out to a collective of women is more or less what emerged in that experience.

I will definitely reach out to you when I next try to pull some social tools conference together. Maybe we should start planning one?