I'm involved in a number of women-centric IT discussion groups. About twice a year the topic of conferences comes up. Namely why do so few women (proportionately) attend/present? It's a good question.
I've organised a couple of conferences and tried really hard to encourage more women to get involved. On the whole I wasn't notably successful. So I've done some thinking and offer the following as some reasons why technical women aren't attending technical conferences.
1. Time
By and large women are still responsible for running their households. This means that in order to attend a conference she has to make alternate arrangements for
whereas a man can usually just expect those things to happen. This is even harder when the conference isn't local.
For any person who doesn't spend their free time programming, or playing with operating systems etc the thought of spending vacation time on attending a conference may appall. While this applies equally to men as women, men who aren't running a household typically have more real free time than women who are and thus might view a conference as a nice change rather than even more work.
It's therefore a common response in our discussions that these women don't attend conferences because they have more important/relaxing/useful things to do with their holidays. In some cases this may involve visiting and caring for sick or elderly relatives, a task overwhelmingly assumed to be the responsibility of women.
2. Socialisation
For some reason I never understood, it was unthinkable for most of the girls at school to walk across the playground on her own in order to go to the toilet or get something from her bag etc. Likewise, when it came to subject selection (even for the last 2 years of high school) most girls chose subjects based on who else was doing them.
I have a suspicion that conferences might be similar. Since none of my friends are going to the conference, why would I? Who would I talk to? What if I got lonely? This is not to say that technical women aren't capable of acting independently, otherwise we wouldn't be in the field of IT. However, women appear to be taught that it's not cool (for women) to go things alone and pressure from friends and family often helps to reinforce this. Who else (that you know) is going to the conference? Who will you talk to you if you get bored? Aren't you afraid you'll be lonely?
Men don't have this problem. They can be certain that there will be lots of other men at the conference and with the way that men make friends it's very unlikely that there won't be anyone to talk to.
Women cannot be certain that there will be any other women at the conference. Further, women typically make friends differently than men (preferring one-on-one or small group conversations). This can lead to them feeling awkward and lonely even while appearing to join in a friendly (large group) conversation.
3. Unawareness
It's not just conferences which are underpopulated by women. It's user groups, trade magazine subscribers, online forums. Women all around the world are working in IT and not getting involved. Maybe they don't want to be "geeks" or they'd rather spend their free time doing more interesting things. However this means that it's very hard, as a conference organiser, to get women to hear about conferences. You can't attend a conference you don't hear about.
The other part of this one is that lots of people, women included, aren't aware that they are the target audience of a certain conference. They feel that they're not good enough, that they wouldn't understand enough, or that the topics aren't interesting enough. This leads to people who would otherwise get a lot out of the conference, not attending. :(
Thoughts
Of course the above are all generalisations. There are many technical men who don't go to conferences and there are obviously some technical women who do. Not all women run a household and some who do are willing to let things slide for a week if necessary. Some women find it easy to start up discussions with complete strangers and join any group while some men find it impossible.
However, special cases aside, the above reasons form some serious problems for the conference organiser. Fortunately some of these have solutions.
Many women say that they'd love to attend conferences if their employer was willing to pay for at least some of the attendance cost and/or allow them to attend on company time. Conferences are often pitched at attendees with promises to improve their skills. This is true, but perhaps more conferences need to offer a separate line of advertising to employers about how employee attendance at the conference will help them.
Fears of going alone to the conference can be allayed a little by stressing the social aspects of the conference in the advertising literature. If there are catered meals mention this and that this is a great chance to meet people. Throw in a talk, session, panel discussion, BOF or other event covering how to network. Advertise it.
Provide abstracts of talks as early as possible. This allows prospective attendees to realise that the talk with the exciting title of Starting again is actually of interest to them as it covers how to start a business, or perhaps how to refactor code...
The unawareness issue is a big one. It's not enough to just tell someone that a conference is happening, you have to make them interested. I get conference spam in my email every day and I really don't know how they heard of me. I'm not interested in any of them.
To make someone interested you have to get them to realise that the conference does apply to them. This is more easily done if there are relevant user groups you can invite rather than individuals. It's also good if you can get these people so fired up about the conference that they invite all of their workmates, friends and family. The best way to do that is to be an active part or supporter of the user group to begin with.
These are some reasons women have for not attending conferences. I'm sure there are further individual reasons too such as bad experiences, highly specialised fields and consistant bad timing.
Why do you/don't you attend conferences?
{grin}
You probably know it anyway, but this document should be required-reading for all men: HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.
WRT your first point, time: I share all household and kids work with my partner very equal. When going to a conference, I have to handle all the things mentioned in your bulleted list. Most of the time it involves sending the kids to grandparents et.al.
I'm working half-time (and I never worked full-time since I started working 8 years ago). Not only to have more time for open-source, reading, doing-nothing etc, but primarly to look after the kids (wich is getting less stressfull every year (they're now 9 and 5 years old)). We could probably earn much more money if I worked full hours, but what for? I'm much rather living happily together with my family than beeing rich (and never see my family).
The point is: The low number of women in tech jobs (or in any high-paying, high-status fields) is not their fault. It's the fault of men who do not want to share their power and take their responsibilty.
And yes, I'm a feminist.
Re: Women and conferences
jarich on 2005-03-31T00:14:59
Yes I definately know about that document. I'm one of the anonymous contributors.:)
First, I'll get the obligatory statement that I find Randal's boothbabes and booty calls to tiajuana at oscon to be a contributing factor as well as hold responsible the silent majority of those too spineless to say anything about it. Go chew on that somewhere randal.
Aside from the pages of ranting I could write about my 15 or more years in largely male dominated fields, I'm really fucking tired of guys asking where all the women are. Even Larry succumbed to the same pointless whinge at YAPC one year. It used to be a good question, but fifteen YEARS of hearing the same damn question and yet there are now even fewer women. You'd think there would be some enlightenment, some improvement, some "Eureka!" moment, but...no. I've stuck with it through all the poop and fart jokes, every "N0W0m3n" router password and countless other things but, frankly, I'm not sure anymore why I stayed. It's the little things that count.
Maybe guys should stop asking the dumb obvious question and start asking the harder ones, the ones that make people uncomfortable and difficult to brush off like this one. Considering how a large majority of perl children seem to be girls, I look forward to seeing the enlightenment that comes with having their children experience all the joys of being female.
Re:i'd hate to disappoint Randal
jarich on 2005-03-31T00:53:20
In this particular case, it's the women asking this dumb, obvious question. And we're asking it of ourselves. Enough of us go to conferences to wish there were more of us there.
We ask the harder questions too. Like how can we stand up for ourselves/each other against dumb racist, sexist or other unpleasant jokes and comments without exposing ourselves and each other to further ridicule? Like how we can encourage better behaviour all round?
The men are presumably getting better. A few years ago the various reasons for not attending conferences were more along the lines of "even if I could go, why would I want to be the one person everyone hits on?" Now it's more a case of "I'm not so worried about being one of the few women amongst a sea of men but I can't go because [reasons similar to those I covered in my post]".
My personal experience doesn't cover a time span long enough to really compare, but it seems to me that the men are getting better, although managers may not be
:(. With respect to the conferences I went to last year, I encountered no lewd jokes and felt no discrimination because of my gender. These were both in Australia though, at conferences without booth babes. I expect to avoid attending conferences where I could reasonably anticipate anything of the kind. Sex and sexuality should have no place at a technical conference. Re:i'd hate to disappoint Randal
hfb on 2005-03-31T05:34:53
Oops, didn't know you were a woman. Even so, a dumb question unless you get beyond that single dumb question. Think of it like a diversity training course at the office....mostly pointless but somehow makes people feel better thinking that they're doing something instead of helping perpetuate the status quo. I don't know that the guys are getting better, perhaps just better and staying silent and looking the other way. There is no risk in asking why there aren't more women around since it's easy to simply shrug or even try to make up reasons that aren't very threatening. Some might even hire a token women but, in the end, not much if anything actually changes. It's a problem that goes well past IT and deep into the heart of our culture and it starts at birth. Even the camera-specific mailing lists I'm on are all male and, on the rare occasion that a woman does post, they behave all too much like a perl mailing list.
Also, conferences aren't really a good indicator of change since it's not the workplace and they generally cover a short span of time. It's a big party and sex/sexuality certainly is a part of it as it is in every aspect of daily life, whether or not we acknowledge it.
There was an ethnographer I met last year who is being funded by the EU to study the 2% of women in OS which, while it likely won't change anything, at least it's an attempt to do more than simply bleat with the crowd looking for the lost women of IT.
Change will come more quickly when guys realise the cunt the boys in the office are joking about are their daughters. I hope I live long enough to see that happen.
