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.