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October 06, 2005
speakerwatch: web 2.0 redux
Last July, I wrote my first "speakerwatch" post, in response to the preliminary web 2.0 conference--which listed 3 women out of 43 speakers.
Here we are, over a year later, and web 2.0 is in its second incarnation, riding high on the new tech bubble. It's a lot bigger this year--107 speakers listed.
How many women?
Seven.
So, I guess I should be grateful that they've more than doubled the number of women speaking, right?
Plus ça change...
h: web 2.0
Posted by Liz Lawley at 12:07 AM in SpeakerWatch | Permalink
Comments
Actually, 8. I was added at the last moment. :)
Posted by: Caterina at Oct 6, 2005 12:36:33 AM
So the question is, will tech conferences that make the effort to include more women on the speaker list benefit relative to those that don't? If people don't use this as a criterion for attenance, there's no reason for conference organizers to care.
Supernova has consistently had close to or over 20% of the speaker list being women. That's still a pretty poor percentage, I admit, but it's much better than most tech conferences. Caterina even made a joke this year about a panel in which Evan Williams was the only man.
I try to include more women as speakers because it's the right thing to do, for several reasons. I'll keep doing so. And Supernova is a successful show. However, I've yet to see any indication that more people attend because the speaker list isn't all-male. Until that happens, I'm afraid that complaining (justifiably!) about events with few female speakers will have limited impact.
Posted by: Kevin Werbach at Oct 6, 2005 1:11:27 AM
Kevin, it is wonderful to see you including more (and more) women at Supernova. I want to tell you that people are actually using this as an attendance criteria. I certainly am. Not simply because I want to support conferences where women are equally represented but mostly because when women are included they point to views and experiences that we would otherwise not hear about. It is nice to look at things from different perspectives. It is however disheartening to see so few women as speakers out there. I still believe that it is because organizers out there are still not aware of the many wonderful women out there doing great tech work.
Posted by: Leila Boujnane at Oct 13, 2005 8:04:35 PM
Considering Mary Meeker was probably the best presenter at Web 2.0, I hope they get more women. Oh, and the girls on the high school panel were great, too -- and definitely a breath of fresh air.
(Though that begs another question... why is everyone who speaks at these conferences between the ages of 25 and 45???)
Posted by: peterme at Oct 14, 2005 1:57:55 AM
