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June 30, 2004
Where are the Women Speakers?
Just took a look at the conference program for next month's Global PR Blog Week 1.0 (which I found via David Weinberger).
Out of 27 speakers, there are three women. Now, I know it's hard to find women to speak at technical conferences. But other conference organizers are managing to do it. Kevin Werbach, for example, managed to have women make up 25% of the presenters at Supernova last week--14 out of 57 speakers. And since often the issue for women at conferences is travel constraints, you would think it would be easier to recruit women to participate in a virtual conference like this "Blog Week" event. (And I'm pretty sure that the PR industry isn't nearly as male-dominated as the tech industry...figures like these would seem to back me up on that.)
On a similar note, I've been relucant to listen to IT Conversations because of that same unrelentingly male roster. It's not that they don't have people on their site that I enjoy (who _doesn't_ enjoy listening to Doc?!), it's just that every time I go to their site and see all those male faces I feel like I've accidentally wandered into the wrong locker room.
Come on, guys. Please start looking beyond your circle of buddies, and make more of an effort to recruit diverse perspectives to your events. This isn't just altruism--your events are likely to be better as a result. You'll hear a wider range of voices, and you'll appeal to a broader audience.
*Update, 7/1/04*
Elizabeth Albrycht and Trevor Cook have left comments clarifying that Global PR Week is not by invitation only--and that they very much hope that female PR bloggers will participate.
Posted by Liz Lawley at 01:27 PM | Permalink
Comments
Liz- I have found that rather than waiting for the people in charge of inviting/selecting speakers figure it out, I send them lists of women who would be appropriate (technically, skill level, experience level etc) for their conference. I have also bee given permission to forward my invites on as well. This has helped. I am now one of 4 women speaking at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas when in the past it has been 1 or 2. The visibility is definitely on the rise in the .net community.
Posted by: Julie Lerman at Jun 30, 2004 1:43:13 PM
I took a look at Extreme Markup 2004, just for the heck of it. Of nine tutorial presenters, two are female. Of forty-five paper presenters, eight (give or take; I wasn't sure of gender in a couple of cases) are female.
Better, I think, but not ideal. Note that this conference is run by a pair of fantastic women, B. Tommie Usdin and Deborah LaPeyre. I can attest that they hunt for women to present -- Deborah tapped me!
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at Jun 30, 2004 2:24:27 PM
Actually, there seem to four female bloggers - BL Ochman, Trudy Schuett, Elizabeth Albrycht, and Alice Marshall. That takes it up to almost 15 percent, but still, it could be better.
Posted by: Rachel at Jun 30, 2004 3:03:35 PM
Hi, Liz. It's true that the current IT Conversations home page is male dominated, but perhaps that reflects the roster of speakers at events we've recently covered. When we broadcast and archive conferences we're at the mercy of their agenda, of course. You'll find some terrific women in the archives of my interviews and The Gillmor Gang including Esther Dyson (she's on the home page today), Mena Trott (also on the home page), Anne Thomas Manes, Mary Jo Foley (more than once), Ann Winblad, Elizabeth Spiers, Helen Greiner and Nancy Flynn.
...doug
Doug Kaye, Producer
IT Conversations
Posted by: Doug Kaye at Jun 30, 2004 7:49:33 PM
all this, but going double, for non-whites. women has fantastic representation in tech compared to, say, latinos or african americans... i can't believe it's because there aren't any out there.
Posted by: quinn at Jun 30, 2004 7:50:39 PM
I am participating in Global PR Blog Week, as mentioned above, and am, in fact, one of the administrators of the event. This Blog Week is not an invitation-only event. We have encouraged anyone, located anywhere in the world, who is a PR/marketing person and who wants to participate, to sign up at our wiki, The New PR. We would certainly love to have more women participate, and if there are any female PR bloggers reading this, please sign up!. In fact, overall, we need more female PR bloggers. I have been encouraging this since I started blogging in August 2003, when I realized I was one of the few. Some have joined on since then, but the blogrolls are still dominated by men. I have posted my theories about this as well. Run on over to my blog and do a search on women and you will see everything (vs. me putting links here).
BTW: I am also a female in the tech PR industry. Now, the blogrolls are mainly tech PR people, and in my experience, it is one of the few sectors of PR where there are men in numbers. Other sectors are very female dominated. This has been true since I was in college, at least, when my PR classes were 27 women and 2 men.
I hope many of you will comment on the posts throughout the week of July 12 - 15. We will be discussing a variety issues related not only to blogging, but communications in general, and the conversations should be lively. You can find the program at the wiki (linked above). I'd like to see this be much broader than PR people talking to each other. Please come challenge us on our assumptions! For one, I am previewing some of my content on my blog about community building, power, opening the black box of communications, etc., -- building on, in part, the philosophy of Bruno Latour and science studies. I'd love to get some academic viewpoints and pointers to other sources as I develop these arguments.
Posted by: Elizabeth Albrycht at Jul 1, 2004 3:55:40 AM
Hi liz. As Elizabeth Albrycht has explained above, PR Blog Week is very specifically not invitation only. Designed to be that way. The sad fact is that there seem to be very few PR bloggers compared to the size of the profession globally. And even fewer women PR bloggers compared to the industry. This lack of PR bloggers is one of the reasons I thought it would be a good idea to hold an online event. I particularly wanted it to be 'open' because I have long been critical of the 'invitation-only' traditional conferences. When I decided to promote this idea, I emailed every PR blogger I could find, just to get the ball rolling. So if anyone is responsible for the 'invitations' its me. My email list reflected the online reality in PR, I'm afraid. Some people who weren't on my initial list have stuck up their hand, but not many I have to say.
I think this idea of an 'open-source' conference is still quite novel and I've had a number of people seek my permission to participate - no matter that we keep saying they don't have to. Yet one reason for putting the program on a wiki was to get around this 'invitation-permission' constraint. I believe blogging is ideal for this 'democratic' approach. If one of the presenters is boring you don't even have to sit through it. So I expect that the whole thing will end up being a lot more 'customer-driven' than the usual conferences. This flexibility means we don't have to select speakers at all - let anyone who wants to have a go, do it.
In fact, we would love to see more participants, people don't even have to be strictly-speaking PR practioners or teachers. If anyone looks at the program on the conference site or the wiki and thinks they have stuff they want to say on these topics, they can just add their name to the list. Its that easy.
In fact, it would be great to have someone volunteer to contribute on women in PR or even women in PR conferences.
Thanks for your interest in our venture - I hope you and your friends and readers will participate from 12-16 July (sorry couldn't resist a plug) at http://www.globalprblogweek.com
Posted by: Trevor Cook at Jul 1, 2004 6:18:07 AM
It's certainly not unusual to see women under-represented at technology conferences. I suppose it has stopped fazing me after 18 years in tech; a female student that went to the Blogging and Social Software panel at the Churchill Club recently was shocked that among the 10 people on stage only one was female.
Doing my part to add to the female representation, I'll be blogging from my vacation in Ireland (fool) on Corporate Blogging Day at Global PR Week - most likely (still musing) on the topic of establishing thought leadership via blogs.
Posted by: Evelyn Rodriguez at Jul 2, 2004 1:21:45 AM
We're holding a symposium on writing and the internet in England in 10 days' time and I'm ashamed to say that it ended up with a preponderance of male speakers, despite the fact that the Artistic Director is a woman (me) and that we work with many women. By the time we realised how skewed the balance had become it was too late to do anything about it.
We will be featuring a curated online gallery of work by women http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/gallery2004.cfm but the whole experience has made me determined to organise a women-only meeting in the next year or so. There was a time when I was reluctant to do this because I idealistically believed that we could make cyberspace genderfree but it ain't happening girls is it? So, ok, I will organise something in the UK for women-only and see what happens. Can anyone point me to any examples of previous women-only art and technology conferences?
In the meantime, here's another topic to discuss - age. The technology world seems to think that nobody over 35 is worth listening to, and in the UK we are also under a lot of pressure to target younger audiences. But I'll be 53 two weeks today and I've got a lot to offer - not least the synthesis of experience of a life moving from offline to online.
Does one have to be not just male, but also under 35, to be worth listening to?
Anyone else have any comments about age? Perhaps we could have a new thread?
best
sue
Posted by: Sue Thomas at Jul 2, 2004 1:07:10 PM
Sue,
Your comment on age is very interesting. I think you'll find that the folks participating in Global PR Week are primarily mid-30s and above (including me!). That is because we are all rather senior, experienced practioners of the art of PR/marcom. We are also all tremendously interested in learning how to use new technology to do our jobs. In fact, some of us, myself included, think technology is utterly transforming our profession. That is one of the drivers behind this event, tied to the worry that the vast majority of our peers really don't understand this transformation at all.
Then, I read a hack job like this one (http://www.strategy-business.com/enewsarticle/enews063004) in a strategy business magazine (here's why I think it is badly done: http://plattsburg.west-third.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=342), and the age issue begins to loom! Clearly there is a disconnect here between us 35 and older people pushing the adoption of technology vs. the claim that those over 25 (30? its unclear in this article) are "digital immigrants" - with the implication that "we'll never get it and we should let the young "digital natives" lead the way." In my industry, at least, most people that age don't have the experience to lead the way yet. And they certainly don't have that valuable "synthesis of experience" that is required to convince our clients to adopt new technologies!
I think that the theory that those of us who did not grow up immersed in always-on technology are going to relate to it differently makes some sense, but it should not be used as a weapon against those over 25/30/35...etc. That doesn't mean that I discount the younger generation -- I think we have a lot to learn from them -- but I fear the mass media will set up their usual warfare between the two, and real discussion will get lost.
I think this is a very important politically and socially charged issue, and I'd love to see it discussed more here.
Posted by: Elizabeth Albrycht at Jul 3, 2004 5:57:14 AM
Good to know I'm not the only one who has noticed this! I attended the HITS (Humans - Interaction - Technology - Strategy) conference last fall, co-sponsored by the ACM-SIGCHI. Out of 18 speakers, four were women. I wasn't entirely surprised, given that I am a female Ph.D. student at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It is not unusual for me to be one of a total of two or three women in the classroom, depending on the course I'm taking.
The HITS conference, however, had a structure that made the absence of women particularly noticeable, which made me wonder if I'd missed the same phenomenon at other conferences. At HITS, all of the presentations were given in one large room, and speakers followed one another. It was a great format in that it allowed for all participants to see all presentations, which can be a struggle at larger conferences. But, after seeing nearly a solid day's worth of male presenters, one right after another, it was impossible not to notice the absence of women. I too found myself asking, "Where are the women speakers?"
I've since tottered back and forth between thinking about the reasons behind seeing few women speakers at conferences (usually, anyway), and then focusing less on the reasons and figuring out how we can get more women to apply for and ultimately speak at conferences. For the sake of brevity, but not to incite flames, then, here is a sampling of those teeter-totter thoughts...
First, I am not certain that the solution is for more men to invite more women to speak. Women in technology have a responsibility (a responsibility that I believe all academics, professionals, researchers, etc. have) to put their work out in the world, and to share it. If their work is new, interesting, and contributes fresh ideas, they ought to present it, without waiting for an invitation from male colleagues to do so. But that probably sounds defensive, and isn't really a point I'm trying to make, I suppose.
Part of this discussion, I think, necessarily circles back to the plain fact that, for whatever complex, varied, and politically- and socially-charged reasons, there are still many fewer women than men in technology and in business, and even fewer women at the higher levels of either field. I believe that we need to--in fairness--acknowledge the fact that, many times, there are just fewer women speakers to choose from. The pool is comparably small to begin with. If women are (and these are NOT real numbers) only 10% of a particular field, I don't think that having 80% female speakers at a conference for the same field is necessarily representative or fair (not that anyone here suggested such a thing, but I'm just mentioning it).
I was admittedly a bit puzzled by a piece of the original post which stated, "And since often the issue for women at conferences is travel constraints". I'm not sure why women in particular have travel constraints. Did this comment actually refer to specific types of women (i.e., those with family obligations like children or elderly parents)? Or did it perhaps intend to imply that, since there are fewer women in technological fields, the few who do speak at conferences have to travel more often and thus may have more constraints? It's a reach, I know, but I'm trying to get a better grasp of the comment. Any clarification is sincerely appreciated, and it sounds like a potentially interesting and challenging dimension to things.
Finally, the above comment of "all this, but going double, for non-whites" also caught my interest. This is an entirely anecdotal observation (again, no numbers) but, out of the few women in my graduate program, only two are Caucasian. The rest of the women are (from higher to lower numbers of representation in the program) Indian, Chinese, Pakistani, Korean, and African-American. I realize the post above referred even more specifically to Latinos and African-Americans, but my experience (again, just mine) has been that, where there are women in technology, many and usually most of them are non-white.
I'd love to read more on the discussion of age. I haven't gathered my thoughts on the matter, but, at conferences I've attended, I've noticed that female speakers have been either about 30, or over 60, with very few women between. Has anyone else observed this?
Also, as a fairly young person (under 30), I can say in reply to Elizabeth that I do NOT yet feel comfortable "leading the way" for clients, and sincerely wish that I encountered more older women at conferences, especially speakers. This is admittedly for selfish reasons - I want to learn from their experience and hear their stories! I was so happy to read that a lot of the folks participating in Global PR Week are primarily mid-30s and above. Now if I can only see the same for women at SIGGRAPH in August!
Posted by: Steph at Jul 8, 2004 12:00:38 AM
Good stuff here. Found you through Evelyn Rodriguez at http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com. Lucky me! As to the discussion on women at tech conferences, and also the age issue, from a baby boomers perspective (I think I'm too young to be a baby boomer, but my birth certificate says otherwise...sigh), I'm finding a lack of information coming my way. I write a tech column for a magazine out of Seattle, WA, and I work on websites (content writing, marketing, edoc, white papers, print on demand), but I must not be in the know because I would gladly explore the option of speaking at one of these conferences, meeting young people who aren't afraid of anyone over 30 (the way we were when we were kids) and generally, just being in an atmosphere with folks who speak the same language I do. Not many women to relate to-- especially my age --in the tech field around here. I like Steph's post. He makes some great points about gender and race, saying it's often a matter of perspective. In fact, all of the comments are valid, valuable, and insightful. Good group of techies. Way to go, bloggers!
Posted by: Yvonne DiVita at Jul 8, 2004 5:27:56 PM
I agree that finding places to speak is a rather labor-intensive business. You can visit places like www.tsnn.com and do a search on shows related to your interest, then you have to go to the show site, search for calls for speakers, etc. etc. Pretty boring. I have started using both Feedster and Pubsub to deliver rss feeds to my newsreader on the topic of "call for speakers" and "call for papers" but it only catches a fraction of them right now (these services search mainly the blogosphere). You can run email delivery agents from Yahoo and Google, but they only search the news sections, and calls for speakers generally don't find their way there.
I have a suggestion: Why not start a wiki here at misbehaving that we can list shows, speaking opps, contacts, etc.? That way, when one of us runs across something we can post it.
One of my goals over the next year is to speak at a conference about community building, communications/PR and blogging. But I have the same problem as Yvonne -- how the heck do you find them when you aren't on the automatic-invite list or already in the organizers' network of usual suspects?
Posted by: Elizabeth Albrycht at Jul 9, 2004 3:54:53 AM
I wish I had found this forum a few months ago! I too am over 30, a Journalist and PR professional. I also attended an Internet summit earlier this year and out of 12 speakers, only one was a woman.
I thought it would be ideal to have a women's global network where we can promote and support each other (as well as promoting speaker services), so I set out to create a site to do that.
I interviewed some magnificent businesswomen, including Jenny Craig, who spoke about how she created her weight management centre, with the intention of creating a membership site.
There's been a distinct lack of support for the membership model, so now I am creating a second site just to sell the interviews (www.magnificentbusinesswomen.com)
Meantime, I have been invited to speak at a women's conference in Canada in November and am actively seeking to join the speaker's circuit.(Travel is not an issue for me as I have to travel from Australia anyway).
I would also love your feedback about setting up a women's global network.
Posted by: Helen Bassett at Aug 9, 2004 2:27:59 AM
Would ask the same question of where are all the Black, Asian and Latino speakers. I believe the government is responsible...
Posted by: Sarah at Nov 14, 2004 11:26:08 AM
