Last week, I posted about, Sketching in Hardware 1, a conference I organized. Now, I'd like to comment on an issue that has come up at other tech conferences and which came up again at sketching - the disproportionate demographics. Specifically, the disproportionate ratio of men to women who attend conferences, relative to the proportion of people working in the field.
During the planning of this conference, I talked to a number of people about how to attract more women to technology conferences. My goal was to create as gender-balanced an invitation list as I could manage. I sought input from a broad range of folks (thank you Molly,Anne, Liz, Julian,Rael, Judith and everyone else I've consulted with). The conference focus was to bring together developers of toolkits for rapid prototyping of physical/ubiquitous computing devices, or heavy users of such toolkits. With that as the primary gating criteria, I tried to invite a broad range of people, especially women, across a range of career trajectories (i.e. I didn't want to stick with established professors and professional engineers, but PhD students, researchers, artists, educators and designers, managers). I spent several months collecting lists, using Google and working my social network (i.e. asking folks to tell me who they thought was interesting). [BTW, if you you fit this criteria and you weren't invited, I apologize and please contact me.]
I want to share what I feel is an interesting and frustrating statistic: the ratio of men attending to those invited was about 1 in 3, yet for women it was 1 in 19. Here is a graph illustrating the invitation process:
You can see that although proportionally more women replied to my invitation (80% of women invited replied, as compared to 68% of men), the proportion who said they would attend was much lower, and the proportion who could actually attend was even lower. Basically, only one of the 30 women I invited who wasn't somehow involved in the planning was able to attend the event. I don't really understand why. It's of course tied into the mesh of social factors that cause a gender disparity in technology, and the numbers aren't statistically significant if you take the population of technology workers as a whole, but it's still frustrating. I'm not sure what I could have done (or could do) differently, and I appreciate your suggestions or thoughts on the topic. What is going on that's causing proportionally so many fewer women to attend conferences, relative to men? I don't know.
Hi Mike,
Kudos for making an effort to get more women involved! It must be really disappointing that it didn't work out.
It's interesting that proportionally more women than men replied to the invite, but only one of them agreed to attend. That would suggest that something turned them off at that point.
If you want help figuring out what it was, you're welcome to contact me at the email address above. I'd be happy to take a look at some of your correspondance and see whether anything stands out.
Or, if you wanted to go one better, you could follow up with the women you contacted and ask why they didn't attend.
Keep up the good work, and best of luck for next year!
Sara
PS: I found your site via misbehaving.net.
I just posted all of the comments that were left here over the last month. I apologize: the spam filter on Movable Type was overzealous and marked all comments as spam for more than a month.
Re: all of the comments about child care: next year I will investigate the options and make sure the conference is as friendly to parents as I can make it.
I love conferences, but I've been unusual in having no children in the house. This year, we've got custody of our Godson, and wow, the impact on my ability to attend professional events is dramatic. Men have kids, too, of course, but I think there are a lot more men than women who feel able to and comfortable with leaving their spouse alone with the kids for multiple days.
That's outside your control, unfortunately... the best that can be done is to try for regional, daylong conferences that don't require travel away from family. Even the evening meetings of local groups have become a problem. Leaving my spouse to handle homework time, dinnertime, story time, and bedtime alone is a big decision. I appreciate business-day events; then again, I have an employer who's very enlightened about letting me attend those. If I didn't, I wouldn't make it anywhere anymore.
In my case, the gender-asymmetry doesn't really apply... my spouse has stopped travelling, too. This kid is four handfuls, and neither of us dares leave the other alone.
One thing to note in the social factors is the parent issue. It's definitely harder to get mothers to go to conferences which is why Blogher did the childcare thing. Most of my female friends who are mothers limit conferences to 1-2 a year max. And even then, it's uber hard. I know that friends who are fathers will limit but i know no fathers who limit even close to the degree in which the mothers limit.
Another thing that i've noticed with women and conferences is that women tend to have lower travel budgets and less flex time. Of course, not surprisingly, the top women are also invited to far more conferences in far more fields meaning that they turn down quite a few more number wise.
I had exactly the same experience this summer with a book I'm editing for O'Reilly. 60% of the 70 men invited to contribute agreed to do so, but only one of the 12 women I contacted.
I had had that same thought -- you might have assumed that more women would've found the topic interesting. But you know that already of me... had you invited me, I would have come.
I gave some thought to what you wrote here, and then wrote about women and conferences at Girlwonder.
Did your plans accomodate/provide child care? Life is real.
Hey,
it sounds like it was interesting. Can't tell you why you got less females than males (perhaps the word "hardware" in the title, hehe). Ummm... you could have invited me and you would have had one more female attendee, if that helps.
- S
HI, sorry if you are frustrated but thanks for trying! Talking form my personal point of view some facilities (or hinting at) that allow me to go with my year and a half daughter down there would make it more attractive. Society (and personal feelings) still expect the mother to be near the child for as long as possible.
You and I have talked about this at length. Rather than doing so here, I mulled on this a while at Girlwonder.
This was almost exactly my experience in planning Design Engaged in 2004 and 2005. The first time, we had about 10% women (2 out of 24 people). I can't remember how many women I invited, but I think I'd assumed I could invite about 50-50 men and women and end up with 50-50 attendance; totally wrong.
In 2005, I made a much stronger effort to get gender parity, and invited about twice as many women as men, and ended up with a better ratio, but not 50-50.
I also don't have any answers for why that was. For the most part, women whom I invited, but who didn't attend either had schedule conflicts (just like some male invitees who couldn't make it) or simply didn't respond to my emails, even in some cases to follow-up emails. I'm pretty sure that only one or two men whom I asked just ignored the invitation altogether.