Getting Women to Speak at Your Conference is Hard. So?

Ok, so you love tech, or some aspect of it, and you decide to throw a conference to gather like-minded tech-lovers and people who want to learn from them. Maybe you want to make money from your event, maybe not--whatever. Maybe you’re doing this on your own, or maybe you’re working with an organization—again, whatever. You secure a space, you invite people to speak, you throw open registration. It feels good.

And then people start to point out that nearly all of your speakers are men. Or perhaps 100% of your speakers are men. Even if your event has a focus on women, somebody might mention that nearly all of your speakers are white. 

Now, you don't want to appear sexist or racist (bonus points if you don’t want to be sexist or racist). So you take a look at how you arrived at your speaker roster, and you realize that no women applied to speak, and you can't think of a single black programmer or CEO to invite. Thank god--it's not really your fault that white guys are over-represented on your program! You pretty much had no choice!

I’ve employed that tempting, crappy logic myself, and I’ve got a secret to share: Getting women and other under-represented groups to speak at your tech event is hard. Now here's something to think about: So?

You didn't get into tech because you hate solving problems. Indeed, having a "hard problem" to solve is considered an enticement in job descriptions for engineers, designers and tech businesspeople.

Which is where this conference thing gets interesting. Rather than throw up your hands and say it’s the nature of the business, you can embrace this challenge. You can read about what other people have done in this realm, and you can apply your considerable problem-solving skills to come up with new solutions that will benefit us all.

Of course, you can try to ignore the problem. You cannot, however, claim to have tried but failed ("the call for speakers was open, but no women applied") or pretend that the issue is intractable ("there aren't any black programmers or CEOs") and expect everyone to accept that. Think about it like test-driven development. When your test of the login form fails, you don’t delete the test. You fix the code.

For test-driven conference development, consider these three tests necessary as you create your program: 1) Are the speakers good communicators? 2) Are they going to cover topics relevant to your audience? 3) Do they reflect your community—beyond the people you know personally—or even have the potential to enhance your community? Either all of your tests pass or you find, debug, and fix the failing ones; you don't want women who give lousy presentations.

Here are some bugs you’re likely to encounter:

• When you brainstorm speakers, you don’t come up with any women or people of color who are knowledgeable about your topics.
• You want prominent people on the stage, and you can’t think of any women or people of color who are big names. Except maybe Sheryl Sandberg, and you don’t know how to reach her anyway.
• You have a call for proposals or a call for speakers, and very few or no women or people of color apply.
• Your call for proposals allows folks to suggest panels, and none of the suggested panelists are women or people of color.
• You invite some women, and they all say no.
• You get some women and people of color on the program, and then they all cancel.
• The bigger your event, the harder it will be to acheive any sort of parity.

By now you’re probably wondering why, given all these bugs, you should care whether you appear sexist or racist. I've talked about that before; many others have done it better. What I'm really interested in today is new approaches that you--because you're smart and resourceful and creative--will come up with for solving these problems. 

So this isn’t a post about how you tackle the issue or even why you should; this is a post challenging you to try. I will readily acknowledge that your initial approaches will likely be imperfect and slow and socially uncomfortable. That's why this is a hard problem. I’m excited to hear your solutions.

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A few notes on comments:

1) I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness. 

2)  Remember, this is not a post about why speaker diversity is important. That’s not a debate we’re entertaining today, so save those comments for another time (or for 4chan or whatever).

Comments

[Lucretia]

Number one fix: ask people to be on your speaker recruiting team who are not white males. It's amazing how much that can change the picture.

Some events manage to solve this bug - meaning others can too.

[Klayon]

I'm a founder of @MinneWebCon in the Twin Cities, and from day one we never had a problem getting female speakers. Two reasons, I suspect: we've always had women on our planning committee, and the web community has many women who, in our experience, are just as eager to present as men.

In fact, I'm especially proud that 50% of MinneWebCon's keynote speakers have been women! And while the planning committee can take credit for this, I still don't think it had to work hard to achieve it. There's plenty of well-known web experts who are women. (just check our keynote list on our web site)

As for racial diversity? Yes, that is indeed more tricky. For whatever reason, the web and tech community is predominantly white. We've been somewhat successful in making MinneWebCon more diverse than just from a gender angle, but I admit that additional strategies are needed for this. Strategies that help affirm that the barriers to entry in tech are remarkably low: no matter what background you have, or financial status, anyone can dig into the web starting at a public library where the computers are free. And WordPress is free. And numerous SDKs and frameworks are free. It's all there, waiting to be crafted into new products and services.

All it requires is initiative and the desire to build something new.

[sir jorge]

It's a matter of changing perspective, so maybe getting more women involved in the recruiting process would be easier.

[Sarah Milstein]

Thanks for the comments, folks. No question, having women and people of color on your program committee or advisory board helps. In my experience, it's not a cure-all, however. You need additional, structural and systematic pieces in place (not to mention an unwavering commitment to debugging this problem).

@Klayon. It's great that your event has had a lot of women speakers. In terms of race, I'll note that you've shifted the conversation from what conference organizers can do to what potential speakers can do--and you've suggested it's a matter of initiative on the potential speakers' part. In this post, I'm interested in the organizer side of it. A common bug is that women and other under-represented groups often don't act like white men w/r/t conference speaking. They don't apply as often to speak, and they're less prominent in the public eye generally. So whether they have the technical chops or not, if your system relies on a call for speakers or on knowing potential speakers or on knowing of potential speakers, you're not going to find those speakers unless you change the way you look--or unless they change the way they behave, which is not a factor you can control.

I would add that suggesting initiative is all it takes grossly discounts context. And context is something you can alter.

[Amanda Costello]

More @MinneWebCon feedback here! I'm the conference director (taking over from @Klayon), a woman, and super proud of what we've accomplished so far in our speaker rates, though our committee is always looking to be more inclusive and represent the diversity of all kinds in the tech community.

As a woman, I feel more inclined to look at tech conferences that I hear other women advocate for personally. If another woman can tell me about a positive experience they had speaking at or attending a conference, that will move the conference up in my mind as something to consider. I've also been warned away from certain groups or events because they weren't friendly towards women; I'd rather know ahead of time before walking into some kind of den of glares or people who doubt my ability because I'm a woman. Happily, these instances have been few and far between for me; the majority of the men I've worked with in the local tech field have been accepting, professional, and great guys, who also want to see more women presenting at and attending tech events.

As a conference organizer with an interest in attracting diversity, I try to get out in the community as much as I can to spread the word about MinneWebCon, especially to other groups of women (as I am a woman that participates in those groups). The Twin Cities have a chapter of Girls in Tech that runs an annual She's Geeky conference, which MWC sponsors, and I've attended and talked with other women about the conference and presenting in general. I think that organizers, male or female, need to reach out to communities that they want to hear more from, and be present in sponsoring and supporting under-represented groups in the field. If there are groups that I can't participate in directly (say, if there was a group for just African-American programmers, and, being white, I wouldn't be a part of that), that sponsorship time or money is a great way for conferences or organizers to say to those groups, "What you're doing is fantastic, you're valuable to our community, and we want to help out."

All of this involves unpacking and understanding privilege, both my own and that of others, and working with that in mind.

[Sarah Milstein]

Thanks for adding to the conversation, Amanda, and for bringing up privilege. It's so much part of the dynamics here, but, by nature, among the hardest parts to identify and address.

Sponsorships are idea I don't hear too often. I'd love to know: when you do them, what kinds of things do you ask for in return, other than a banner, to raise awareness of your event and your interest in new speakers?

[Amanda Costello]

I've often tried to pair our sponsorships with a physical presence, either by myself or other committee members, so we can follow up with people and talk more about the conference at the actual event. In the past, this has worked where the event leader will give the sponsor shout out and then point out to the crowd who I am, so people can track me down later on if they want to talk.

We've also had take-aways, like little postcards advertising the conference, and our keynotes (if we're getting close to conference time and have announced them). These are either good to have on the reg table for an event for people to pick up, or for swag bags.

We'll also do reciprocal trades of social media or email shout outs; people who follow MinneWebCon locally might want to know about other events, so we can point them there.

[Sarah Milstein]

Thanks so much for the specifics, Amanda. Totally useful and interesting.

[Lisa Lee]

Perhaps try the direct approach? (A little woo-ing never hurts...) The Executive Women's Forum (EWF) has the top leaders in info security, privacy, and risk management and has hundreds of members. They include some of the most sought-after and highly-rated speakers on both technology and leadership. And, they are all women.

[Poornima Vijayashanker]

Hey Sarah!

I LOVE speaking at conferences :) Check out my speaker page http://femgineer.com/speaking-engagements/ and let me know if you'd be interested in having me help you out.

Have a lovely day :)

Kindly,
Poornima