Organising Inclusive Conferences

Google doc with the names of over 150 women in IT -- current and potential speakers and conference presenters. Hopefully, the list will grow; you are invited to add to or amend the list to keep it current.

I have been advised by people I trust that it's not a good idea to talk about how you got serious female representation at your conference until after it's over. However the shameful RubyConf "binders full of men" debacle and the Neanderthal level of discussion around it has wound me up enough to write this account somewhat prematurely.

For every bad male speaker (sorry), there's two good female ones who didn't consider submitting a talk. tl;dr: we copied Courtney Stanton's approach verbatim. It is good and it works. When we set out to organise JSConf EU 2012, we were wondering what we can do to attract more diverse group of attendees and speakers than we did the previous years.

Reuters Dear Men, Have you noticed that a lot of the time it just seems like, gosh, there are a lot of dudes speaking at this conference? Perhaps you've been on a panel and you've looked around and seen man after man after man.

Guest blogger Courtney Stanton explains how she organized a game developer conference with 50% women speakers. Stanton is a project manager for a video game company in Boston, and long-time feminist scourge of the computer game industry. Her work has been featured on GF several times. Follow her on Twitter at @q0rt.

So, you’re trying to think of people to invite to your conference, and all the ones who come to mind are male. Well, there was one woman but she said she was too busy. You’ve read (perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere) about the harms this can do in terms of implicit bias and stereotype threat. So you’d like to avoid an all-male conference. How might you do this?

Talented technical women most certainly do exist, and in volume. If you don’t have any on your team, you’re just not trying.

I hope to live in a future where people who already have the interest to pursue CS or programming don't self-select themselves out of the field. I want those people to experience what I was privileged enough to have gotten in college and beyond – unimpeded opportunities to develop expertise in something that they find beautiful, practical, and fulfilling.

Many business conferences are notable not only for the prominent people on stage, but also for those who are missing. For instance, at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week, fewer than 18% of the speakers are women... We can and should do better. Starting with your next event.

Due to the attention So you want to put on a diverse, inclusive conference received, I held a series of google hangouts with other conference organizers to talk about what they've been doing to increase diversity and where they need help. These round-table discussions provided valuable information and ideas that would work well at any conference.

We have a long way to go before the numbers of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups represent the same percentage of people in tech as they do in the general population. The biggest drivers for creating that balance are employers, conferences, and educators. We are ambassadors and should represent everything we want to see in our communities.

Last week, STEM Women launched our YouTube Channel. We'll be hosting a fortnightly Hangout on Air series that is live streamed every second Sunday.

Citation: Martin JL (2014) Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance. PLoS Comput Biol 10(11): e1003903. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003903 Editor: Philip E. Bourne, National Institutes of Health, United States of America Published: November 20, 2014 Copyright: © 2014 Jennifer L Martin.

CBS This Morning co-anchor Gayle King. Photo: Jon Reid The slow-motion car crash that was Salesforce's "Women in Innovation" panel over the weekend at its annual Dreamforce conference proved for the umpteenth time that these kind of stunts are under-developed PR exercises that more often than not demonstrate the complete apathy the business sector has towards creating a level playing field.

This week, DG CONNECT, the digital department of the European Commission, decided that trying our hardest to ensure proper female representation is no longer enough.So here is what we will do:1. we will always include at least two women speakers at events which we organise2.