Elisa Camahort said on November 30, 2005 at 08:25 PM

Well, reviewing their speaker list I note only ~8 women speakers out of 57 (give or take people with gender-neutral names I may be missing.) Sorry, I just don’t pay to be on the receiving end of such a homogenous perspective anymore. I believe they could have done better.

Debbie Weil said on December 1, 2005 at 09:41 AM

Elisa,

I’m with you on that. It’s something that drives me crazy too. I’ll give WOMMA ceo Andy Sernovitz a nudge about it.

Elisa Camahort said on December 1, 2005 at 10:36 AM

Good Thanks! And over on my blog we’ve been discussing whether we need to start giving event SPONSORS the nudge too…turning up the heat, so to speak:
http://workerbeesblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/letters-we-get-lettersmostly.html

Andy Sernovitz said on December 2, 2005 at 11:52 AM

Debbie—

I’ve been following this thread, and frankly, think it’s unfair.

We are extremely objective in our speaker selection process.

We invite our member companies to speak, as is our responsibility. They choose who they send, we don’t.

Where we have control, we look for women speakers.

But, it’s hard. How many women have written books on word of mouth?  We invited the only one we know of.

In the end, we choose speakers on speaking skill, not race or gender.

Andy

Elisa Camahort said on December 4, 2005 at 03:10 PM

Well, I follow the worlds of blogging and PR, and you have a big gender gap in those sessions too, and there are tons of women who could have been part of those sessions, including published authors. It’s hard, but it’s your job as the programming planner.

I am not speaking as a disgruntled speaker, I am speaking as someone looking over the program as a prospective attendee considering whether to spend hundreds of dollars just on a conference fee.

It’s anything but unfair for me to say as a prospective attendee that I won’t spend my money here and to say why. It’s my opinion and my decision.

But the bottom line is: do what you think is right for your conference. Either more women will start to be like me and become uninterested in conferences that are so homogenous, or they won’t. And either this will be of concern to your organization or it won’t. But I’m certainly not the only person publicly talking about this issue:
http://www.lipsticking.com/2005/12/jane_concludes_.html

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