Keating wrote:ERV wrote:Several organizers I have spoken to, including female organizers, have had problems finding female speakers. They *have* a list of names, and they dont accept. I dont know that anyone has investigated why.
That was Paula Kirby's opinion too:
Paula Kirby wrote:My background is in business. I have lost count of the number of times I have been present at meetings when the women said nothing and left it all to the men. I’ve been guilty of it myself, many a time. Was it because the men weren’t willing to listen to the women? I don’t think it was. Did the men dismiss our comments if we made them? No, they didn’t. Did they try to stop us making them? No, they didn’t do that either. Were the women lacking in ideas? No, of course not. We just didn’t speak up. Crucially, many of us didn’t speak up, even when openly invited to do so.
Similarly, I spent 7 of the last 10 years organizing events for business people: conferences, seminars, workshops, that kind of thing. Over and over again, I tried – how I tried! – to find women speakers. Over and over again, other delegates, both male and female, would tell me they’d like to hear from more women speakers. So the desire was there on the part of the audience to listen to what women had to say, and it was there on the part of the organizers too. And we didn’t just invite: we encouraged, we offered support, we offered coaching, we changed the format of events to make them feel less daunting: we went out of our way, event after event after event, to encourage women to take a more prominent part. And almost always to no avail. There were two or three who were already happy to do it anyway and didn’t need our encouragement. Another finally agreed to do it after her initial panic at the very idea and, despite being very nervous on the day, afterwards said it was the best thing she’d ever done. But otherwise, it was all for nothing. Try as we might, try as I might, most women we approached simply refused to even consider it, saying “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly.â€
So I have to ask: Who was holding those women back? They weren’t just being given equal access to prominence as speakers – they were being positively encouraged in ways that male speakers were not. But ultimately, there was something in their own heads that was stopping them. It wasn’t that men didn’t want to listen to them, it wasn’t that they weren’t being given the opportunities, it wasn’t that they weren’t respected, it wasn’t that no one thought they had stories worth telling and valuable contributions to make. They just didn’t feel confident enough to do it – even when offered coaching to help them prepare.
That would reflect my experience trying to get women to speak. As a caveat, I also have the issue of trying to find sysadmins in medium-to-large companies who are women, AND managing either Macs or iOS devices. So admittedly, my available pool of people PERIOD is small.
But, when I can find a woman, in many, many cases, there is a lot of encouragement and arm-twisting needed to get them to speak. Guys, you practically have to tranquilize in comparison, and this is in a population that are not always the most gregarious group of people. I find the reasons given are variants of:
1) I've never spoken in public before (this one is common across genders)
2) No one would want to hear me talk, (I cannot remember ever hearing a guy say this)
3) There has to be someone better than me for this, (sometimes from men, but not often)
I leave off scheduling issues, those are based on external things that aren't pertinent.
Another issue can be, at least in my field, that *finding* women is really difficult. In the programming field, there are a number of groups set up by and for women, which make it really easy to reach out to them and ask for speakers. In the sysadmin field, not so much. (A lot of this has to do with programming being more of a field that has a formal education track, (CompSci and its variants), whereas sysadmining is very much still an apprenticeship field. Even the "IT" fields in universities are more of "web / database programming" than actual network admin stuff. The best security school is SANS, which is almost entirely online.
But even setting aside non-gender-specific issues, I'll agree with Paula that getting women to speak is harder than doing the same for men. Much harder.
