That gender imbalance in technology leadership is even more striking when you start looking at the small subset of knowledgeable, experienced leaders who also do public speaking. There’s just a very small pool of female candidates.

When I ran tech conferences, my organization actively sought women and other minorities as much as time and resources allowed. Still, the net-net was generally one or two additional women and/or minority speakers in our lineup—still not representative of our attendee population, and perhaps not even noticeable. In fact, our failure probably appeared worse than it was, because we drew a disproportionately female attendance in relation to our total member base.

I dunno… Maybe women aren’t as ego-driven to speak. Maybe they’d rather focus on their core professional responsibilities than be distracted by speaking engagements. Maybe their employers implicitly, culturally, or explicitly discourage them from speaking. Or maybe women jut prefer to lead from within the audience through commentary and questions, rather than leading through presentation. I’ve seen evidence of all of these factors. Whatever the reason, though, it amounts to a supply-side problem even for diversity-minded organizers.

Bottom line: Pushing the issue from the demand side won’t work: the business costs of finding those needles in the haystack are too high. If we want more women presenters at tech events—and I agree it would be beneficial—we need more (and more qualified) women to promote themselves as speakers.

“a preference for a combination of interesting and novel topic and demonstrable onstage chops. Then maybe you can “positively discriminate.””

That’s a close approximation of our strategy – working backwards from content we think is relevant and interesting to our audience, then identifying possible presenters. The criteria we use for that include

1. real domain experience and expertise
2. the ability to hold an audience

these two are threshold requirements

After this come various objective and subjective criteria – which includes diversity

it is very doable – but as mentioned previously, requires quite a bit more work than simply going with the most obvious candidates.

So if I were running a conference and I had to practise American-style affirmative action, what data do I really have at my ready disposal?

This is distinct from what people here are calling “outreach.”

Now, I would state a preference for a combination of interesting and novel topic and demonstrable onstage chops. Then maybe you can “positively discriminate.”

I’ve shared the experience of showing up at an event, workshop, conference, etc. and finding myself the only female on the panel/at the front. It obviously doesn’t help, either, that I’m usually the or one of the youngest, too.

It’s been my experience, though, that when those situations happen, the audience becomes pretty aware of it and that awareness manifests in questions, conversations, and topics that mean I have no time or very little time to actually talk my work, thoughts, ideas, NetSquared or anything else – other than how did I get into this line of work? How is it being a woman in technology? What other women in tech do I know that I could connect people to? And so forth.

I’m always happy to answer those questions, but I *was* asked to speak on something other than my gender + sector. I could probably make a pretty great slide deck about it; but I’m usually more confident with my standard nptech stuff

So, that is all to say that, I think people are ready for this conversation and are just still at the stage where it’s, “say what you see,” and not move into action. I feel like with groups such as Women Who Tech and the corresponding annual telesummit, The Next Woman, and so forth that there are ways of connecting with women in the field if you are a conference organizer or a “white man” among many.

Guess I don’t have any answers, but, am happy the conversation can move to a higher platform. Thanks!

Two, to Brian’s point about how to act to help the situation, I have specific advice. Extend your reading awareness to women and people of color who are talking about tech and making great tools. If your feeds are 90% white men, your information landscape is seriously flawed. Extend your network in a serious way. If you are aware of a conference, and are writing up your own proposal to speak at it, then think through the people you know and go tell some women and people of color – *whose work and thoughts and capabilities you now may actually be aware of* – about the call for proposals, what you know about the conference, who will be there whose work would be relevant, offer to read through their draft proposal or talk over IM with them about the conference. In short offer real community, not tokenization.

It is partly the informal register that this needs to happen. Go to that conference but bring more people with you. You can’t do that if you don’t even know they’re there. I just recently heard someone refer to a black woman writing web apps in a particular city as a “unicorn” as if she were impossibly rare and my head exploded because I had *just* been to a conference with about 100 black women web and social media folks from that very city. I am not blaming only individual ignorance here. It is a systemic and pervasive problem too. But, when I go speak at conferences it is often because someone did specific outreach to pull me into a network – beyond sending a single call for proposals email to a women-only mailing list. So I’m trying to recommend what worked for me.

Point three is to recommend more of a collective approach. Go look at what organizations have come to be that are women or people or color. Go look at the speaker list for Blogging While Brown just for example. And invite several people, talk to that event’s organizers, offer some sponsorship, offer a partnership or joint event. SXSWi has done this very well with success, as many people have pointed out.

It’s not actually that hard to find a vaguely representative group of speakers if you are already immersed in a broad community. And the Internet makes it pretty easy to find and join such communities. (Start with Women Who Tech, Blog Her, She’s Geeky, and so on – and that’s just for women. There are similar affinity groups of people of color and other folks you don’t hear from enough. We’re not hiding!)

Oh and if I have to add myself to yet another list of women tech speakers…

In my career, I have been been privileged to work with some of the best and brightest talents who are thoughtful, articulate, intelligent and from diverse backgrounds. Its time the public face of our industry reflected who we really are.

For anyone interested there is a list of female speakers here: http://danimalik.com/speakers/

Thanks Chris for bringing this topic up.

http://thenextwomen.com/2008/06/23/search-for-female-internet-heroes/

We started the concept of female internet heroes and compiled a list of women founding, investing or leading in the internet indusry, just to make women more visible, for their own benefit and the benefit of the community. More women speakers will attract more women in the audience.
Positive discrimination, whether it is on the board of companies or as judge in a panel, or as a speaker on conferences, will bring about more quantity of women, buying tickets in the audience, submitting their startups for a competition, and according to many studies, also more quality, as diverse teams are more innovative than all male or all female teams.

Personally, I am involved in a lot of initiatives, like the jury of the Dutch Accenture Innovation Awards, and the UK Board of Astia.org and our own The NextWomen events to stimulate female led companies to go ahead, come forward, present your self, pitch your company, and get funding.
Leadership issues of women themselves play a big role in why women do not submit speaker proposals, ask to be in the jury and wait to get properly funded etc. So we profile them, push them and show that the are plenty of women in the internet industry worth inviting.