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!

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.