22 Responses to “FOWA: The Future Looks Mighty Male”

1. Bernie Goldbach:

   I’m asking Irish national radio stations to give FOWA some free air time in exchange to answering the questions you raise here.

   14.11.2008, 6:57 am
2. Joe Drumgoole:

   Sabrina,

   An 8-1 ratio probably is positive discrimination given the dearth of women in the IT sector. Much has been talked about the gender imbalance in the IT sector and most of it is utter bollocks.

   So if Martha gets added to the mix does that fix the problem? That makes it 8-2.

   If we shoe horn in 6 more women to make it 8-8 will all the gender imbalance problems get solved?

   I’m all up for solving the gender imbalance problem but faking the ratios at technical conferences is not the solution.

   Its a systemic fact of life that men outnumber women in IT by some enormous ratio (10-1? 100-1?). But there are choices being made on both sides of the fence to create this situation.

   The first question is, why are women choosing careers outside the IT sector?

   The second question is, can the sector do anything to eliminate any built in prejudice that is exacerbating the first issue?

   I don’t know the answer to that one, but I do know that is 20 years of interview technical candidates I’d say I’ve had the opportunity to interview no more than a dozen or so female candidates our of hundreds.

   14.11.2008, 10:34 am
3. elly parker:

   Looking at all those sample of female web designers on the one page made me suddenly realise something:

   The overlapping images, the layers used, the pretty little icons, all the “little touches” – female web design is the new scrapbooking!

   Don’t get me wrong, I’m not seeing this as negative, it just explains to me why female web designers create sites that I fall in love with – as they are both pretty AND functional!

   I’ve never seen a man scrapbook a decent page either – it’s almost like they don’t have the function to say “this, this and this will work really well together”. And while most of the pages shown (including your own, Sabrina) could almost be called “cluttered” due to the amount of elements included, it actually works very well.

   Most of the male web design I’ve seen is more about strong single elements…

   14.11.2008, 12:25 pm
4. Ann Donnelly:

   Maybe we are just too busy running our businesses to go out and speak at these things. The ratio is against us (especially when the speakers list is small) — and it would be good to encourage more young women into IT (seems all the ones I know are going into beauty therapy, true). Perhaps those of us in there need to make more of an effort as ‘role models’ to show that it is a great industry for women — and not just as part time web designers working from the kitchen table (no harm in that, it’s how I got started — ah, the days breastfeeding at the keyboard getting ready to launch a new site).

   I went to an IIA event last year and found that some of the men weren’t taking the women very seriously. I was totalled dismissed by one guy that I was thinking of doing business with — was it because I was a woman, have a fairly small (but developing) business, or because I am in West Cork. There’s prejudice from all angles.

   None of my sites can be accused of being cute. I admit I need better design help — perhaps one reason why Sabrina’s site caught my eye. A good designer is going to come up with the right design for the job, regardless of gender. Personally I find the hardware end of things difficult to deal with — is that because I am female — or because I am blonde?

   14.11.2008, 12:51 pm
5. Mairin Murray:

   Yes totally agree but not that surprising either. The lack of women speakers was more or less the same at the ‘Social Activism Online in Ireland’ event – I think ratio was even possibly worse. This is why I’m such a fan of Blogher as there’s a real need for us gals to be involved with organising more events with a diversity of speakers a core value.

   14.11.2008, 2:22 pm
6. Colm:

   It’s also slightly different to the problem with the lack of women in IT.

   FOWA is very startup focused, and the speakers tend to be entrepreneurs (in general). In my experience entrepreneurs seem to be a very male group of people (for a whole host of sociological and psychological reasons). So when you combine the two fields to get the best entrepreneurs in IT you’re going to get a lot of men.

   It’s not discrimination. Just FOWA trying to get the best in their field for the event. It’s a shame that so many of the best are men.

   Incidentally the best speaker from FOWA london was in my opinion Kathy Sierra. The video is on the events.carsonified site.

   14.11.2008, 2:25 pm
7. Jaime Hemmett:

   I didn’t hear about a call for papers for FOWA Dublin, so perhaps this is as you say more of a club/limited circle being invited to speak here.

   There are plenty of great female web developers out there. The is obvioulsy a problem with women applying to speak at conferences, I know I feel I don’t know more than anyone else in the industry. I know I’m good at presenting ideas but why would I be picked over one of the other guys. Especially people who speak at events often and have a good name for themselves, or rather why would someone come to my talk when someone ‘famous’ could be up there. This is probably the problem as you say, if there’s 90% men speaking and sometimes a token woman or two at events it is a cycle that wont end.

   I wouldn’t mind speaking at an event where all women presented, open attendance, we could record it too, for practice and to have something on our speaker resumes when we have to fill in the ‘what other events have you been invited to or been accepted to speak at’ box.

   Jaime.

   14.11.2008, 2:46 pm
8. Mairin Murray:

   @Jamie Hemmet

   That’s a fantastic idea. I’m happy to help (un)organise. Would you consider Belfast or somewhere North of border as location?

   14.11.2008, 2:53 pm
9. Jaime Hemmett:

   @Mairin Murray

   Actually I have no plan. Maybe we can do it in all sorts of places, it could even be in videocast format. But the goal should be to make it a way of encouraging women to get out and speak about what they know, to teach others in the industry. As well as encouraging more women to submit papers, write about what they know and get out presenting topics at confs. Finally the goal would be to create more female role models and mentors for women that are just getting into the industry.

   I listened to a podcast from an unconference session at zendcon with phpwomen about Women in IT and it was suggested that public speaking is a problem that means the women that are in IT are not getting out and presenting.
   http://www.phpwomen.org/wordpress/2008/10/30/phpwomen-zendcon-unconference-women-in-it/

   I am still putting my thoughts together about the issues relating to women in IT. In my case the next hurdle I need to leap over is writing more technical posts and getting out and speaking on topics I know.

   Jaime.

   14.11.2008, 4:38 pm
10. Jessi:

    I’ve heard this debate at a girl geek dinner and I’m still unclear as to what you think the problem stems from.

    Do you think there needs to be more women in the IT sector?
    OR
    Are you trying to get more women to stand up and speak at events? (thinking there are enough women in IT but no one wants to/is allowed to talk)
    OR
    Do you think that men are keeping women from speaking at events because they are somehow inferior or less educated?

    I need to know where you think the problem is. As a women, and entrepreneur, I love speaking at any event that pertains to my expertise. If I were in the IT sector, and did more than just blog, I would want to speak as well.

    I don’t see loads of women at any events so that may be the problem. There JUST AREN’T that many women in the IT sector. Getting any of them to stand up and speak is, I think, fantastic. If you feel there really is some kind of discrimination going on then by all means call them out. But if this is just a way of trying to get more women in IT, you’re going about it all wrong. Don’t get insulting to men or the events to conjure up more female speakers.

    This “problem” starts at high school age where girls make their choice as to what they want to be when they grow up. If by then they aren’t interested in IT, most likely they wont go to college for it. They may go into it at a later date but that’s their CHOICE. I really don’t see the problem with the ratio as it stands. It just means women are able to pursue whatever they want.

    I pursued business management then holistic nutrition. In nutrition/natural health you’ll see the ratio is reversed. About 1 man for ever 50-100 women. The fact is women care more about their health then men. Does that mean I should get pissed off and try to bully men into natural health? No. I just put the good word out and let it resonate with whomever it does.

    Why is this such a problem for you?

    16.11.2008, 2:27 pm
11. heather:

    Sabrina, I had so many good conversations this weekend about this particular topic.

    At the Drupal event, we had 3 female event organizers- and sorry to say I don’t have the stats on the exact make up of the group yet. But we had many discussions with attendees about the remarkable make-up of the group- a gender balance, and range of ages.

    Not sure if the “Drupal” community is *intrinsically* different- though I think the answer may lie in the ‘free’ and ‘flexible’ nature of open source applications like Drupal which attract people working in Education and not-for-profits which would traditionally have a higher proportion of women.

    I just thought it was interesting, in the DrupalChix group we have a statistic which reads: “Only about 1.5% of the people involved in open source are women, leaving us terribly underrepresented. In the Drupal world, we’re up to a whopping 10%, which only gets us to awfully unrepresented.” – so it makes me wonder…

    Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking post!

    Those are some pointed questions I hope get answered.

    16.11.2008, 11:08 pm
12. heather:

    Oh! I wanted to add the link to a post on g.d.o. with more thoughts about this:
    http://groups.drupal.org/node/16802

    16.11.2008, 11:09 pm
13. prisca:

    Hi,
    interesting post – and though I agree that it would be nice to see more female speakers – I do not think organising all female events is the way to go….
    and surely the quality of the speakers at any event is much more important than their gender / age / background / (add other differences here)…?

    I do agree that at times we have to fight our battles in a typically predominantly male environment – but going on and on about discrimination does not help the matter, in my opinion. I think that this issue cannot be seen as another game of numbers and statistics – and if we want to see more female speakers – more of us need to keep producing high quality work, blog about it, etc… and raise our profile – in the same way our male counterparts do.
    The women currently involved in events and actively speaking are proof of that – and are surely not on the speakers lists due to their gender but their expertise.

    17.11.2008, 5:01 pm
14. Mairin Murray:

    I think building awareness of the lack of women speakers is the first and massively powerful step. The creative solutions can then follow. It doesn’t follow that anyone wants to start an old fashioned gender war with the dreaded D (iscrimination) word. The issues and factors etc are complex but how we solve then can be fun and involve everyone.

    18.11.2008, 1:20 pm
15. James Whatley:

    Hey Sabrina,

    I think it’s worth pointing out that the three women at FOM this year were part of a single panel called ’6×6′ that gave 6 bloggers, 6mins each to give their POV on the Mobile Industry.

    I was fortunate enough to be on the panel and it was noted at the time that it was great to see a 50/50 split at that time.

    I guess my point is – it was crap to see such a low female speaker list, however it was great to see that the blogger panel was presented evenly.

    I’m sure Helen, Vero or Jemima could articulate it better..

    23.11.2008, 10:16 pm
16. Sabrina Dent:

    Do you think there need to be more women in the IT sector?

    Well, that would be nice, but would require a revamping of our entire education system and gender socialisation ethos that isn’t going to happen by March, so that is not the point I’m making in this post. What I’m saying is that I’d like to see a little more of the women who are already in the IT sector speaking at events like FOWA and FOWD.

    Are you trying to get more women to stand up and speak at events? (thinking there are enough women in IT but no one wants to/is allowed to talk)

    Again, that would be nice but is not really relevant to FOWA/FOWD. The speaker lists as they stood when announced represented people who were invited by Carson Systems. What I’m trying to do is kick them into inviting more women speakers to their events.

    It’s actually not as hard as you seem to think. ETech, the emerging technology conference lovingly referred to as The Boys Club, has managed a 2:9 female to male speaker ratio this year. SXSW has been making a concious diversity effort since 2005, and with the single exception of the Sarah Lacy trainwreck, I don’t think anyone thinks that their strong female speaker list has diminished this A-List powerhouse conference. Predictably, the effort to have more women speakers has also netted them more women attendees.

    Do you think that men are keeping women from speaking at events because they are somehow inferior or less educated?

    No, I simply think Carson Systems has not made the effort of some of their conference organising compatriots to recruit enough women speakers. I couldn’t begin to speculate as to why. It’s a pretty simple and straightforward complaint, but it’s particularly irksome because it also isn’t a new complaint, either. Mike Montiero lodged it in 2007, and Jason Kottke lodged it in 2008. So, you know, I’m hardly hanging out on the left-wing feminist fringe by raising this issue.

    In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that Louise from Carsonified sent me a very nice email on the 20th asking if I had suggestions for FOWD London, and while I was busy putting together that list between jobs (and thus had not yet replied to her), yesterday sent me a further invitation to speak myself.

    I am planning to publish my preliminary suggestion list later today and get some feedback before sending it on so that poor FOWD needn’t resort to having me.

    24.11.2008, 8:53 am
17. Jamie Lawrence:

    Look, the one and only thing of concern to the conference organiser should be that the best and most interesting *people* get to speak. Men, women, or bunny rabbits. Who cares? Just so long as it’s interesting to the audience. Everyone needs to stand (only) on their merit

    24.11.2008, 11:07 am
18. Simon McGarr:

    “Everyone needs to stand on their merit. Only the best speakers should get invited”

    That looks like a neutral, unarguable position. But the context in which it is advanced makes it an argument in favour of the status quo. Here’s how I read it;

    Women! Stop moaning that we haven’t made a special effort to put you on our speaking panels/ boards of directors/ governments etc. We are gender-blind seekers of quality. You have merely failed collectively as a gender to be good enough.

    Eoghan McCabe recently advanced the position that any form of discrimination was wrong. The logical result of this position would be speakers decided by lottery. Once you’ve decided you want to be a little bit more discriminating than that the only issue is what criteria you’ll use. I would say that hearing from people who (a) don’t have prostates and therefore (b) are slightly more representative of half the possible users of your gimcrack in the world would be a valuable set of viewpoints to seek out.

    25.11.2008, 10:29 am
19. Jon Gos:

    I’m inclined to agree with Jamie, Jessie and Prisca. Sure, there’s a lack of sexual diversity, there’s also a lack of racial and ethnic diversity. But that shouldn’t become the focus of a conference that’s about Web Apps. As a conference, I’m attending to hear successful people talk regardless of both factors. If you happen to be a woman or minority the information being shared can benefit you just the same, no matter the source.

    If you really feel marginalized, show your disapproval by not attending; or alternatively go and be so proactive that they can’t help but think of including women next time. My personal belief is that to ‘change’ things we don’t like, we’ve gotta be proactive. More action, less complaining.

    01.12.2008, 8:50 am
20. Sabrina Dent:

    Jon, you’re rather missing the point here. As I said in the original post about a million arguments ago, were this merely confined to FOWA, I could absolutely accept that it is far more difficult to find women, because they are in such a minority.

    When you get to FOWD, however, this is simply, point blank, not true. Ergo, the dismal lack of women at FO events indicates a larger problem, either with their invitation pool or with their invitation criteria, because I simply do not accept that there isn’t a pool of leading web designers who own vaginas. That’s nonsense. As has also been noted, this very issue has been pointed out to them for the previous two years of events as well. The fact that people in general are unhappy about the gender weighting of their speakers is not news to anybody.

    01.12.2008, 10:33 am
21. Laura Czajkowski:

    Hi, I really found this post to be very interesting. I’ve ran a few events now in the past and always struggled to find female speakers, I went one year so far as to fly two in from the states (skycon.skynet.ie).

    While I do agree you can’t just have females for the sake of it, or as one male organiser at an event I was helping out said the token female (*mutters*) It seems that many females here in Ireland don’t talk at many of the events, now one has to ask oneself is this because they are not being active enough out there to be noticed, or not volunteering enough.

    At present, I’m running a barcamp in Dublin in March. It’s focused on Open Source as this is the area I work in and am I am interested in. There aren’t that many females in this area either but the females that are do get out there and talk at them.

    I am however setting up a third stream for women/Girl Geeks who may have no interest in OSS, which is fine I’m not going to convert you :) but I thought seeing as I have the venue and space and location, that anyone who wants to come along, and talk on their area, something the do, a project they are working on, something they love and want to explain to others, then they now can.

    It would give folks a chance to hear about something they normally wouldn’t and a chance to meet one another and make some connections.

    http://www.ossbarcamp.com/girl-geek-day/

    01.12.2008, 10:30 pm
22. Jo Andrews:

    As the Events Manager for FOWA, can i just say that we never set out to make our speaker lineups male dominated. I myself would love to see more women speaking at our events but as we all know the web app industry is very male dominated, more so than web design which is reflected in the number of women speakers in both of these events (FOWD has 3 women whereas FOWA has 1).

    When it comes to inviting speakers to the events we get together to come up with a dream list of speakers which include a number of women. When it comes to FOWA, i admit we do struggle because of the reason stated above and do not want to put women in the line up just for the sake of it as this would not benefit anyone.

    We want to create events that are full of inspirational speakers who have contributed greatly to the industry, are confident on stage and willing to share their knowledge and expertise. This will continue to be our aim in the future but we will also try harder and take more time to find and convince more women speakers to be a part of the events.

    Thankyou Sabrina for your suggestions and for agreeing to speak at FOWD in April.

    Please post anymore suggestions for women we can consider for future events, thanks!

    16.12.2008, 11:37 am