A too-long-for-Twitter thought.

Tech conferences often don’t have many, if any, female speakers. This is an ‘issue’ whether we like it or not.

Why? Because inevitably someone will make a fuss. Usually the feminist sitting in the third row who lovingly flies the ‘female geek’ flag everywhere she goes. (Look, I think we’ve all been through that phase. It’s the pride-in-being-a-minority transition from realising-I’m-different to not-caring). The last thing an event organiser wants is to be The One Who Discriminated Against Women, Oh Look, There Aren’t Any Speaking At His* Conference.

So how do we ‘fix’ this?

Option 1. Go out of your way to find and invite female speakers, offering them bribes and extras to come along, paying for their flights when you don’t pay for male speakers, etc.
Option 1a. …stopping when you have a token female to keep the feminists happy.

Option 2. Make a reasonable attempt to make female speakers aware of the event by circulating the CFP among female tech networks as well as the usual channels, and hope some come forward.
Option 2a. …With an emphasis on the fact you would like female speakers at the event.
Option 2b. …With the CFP committee evaluating talk proposals without knowledge of the proposer’s gender.

Option 3. Hire a few models, put them in Thinkgeek t-shirts, and hope nobody notices.

Option 2 may lead to an unbalanced awareness of the event among various channels, but (to me at least) it’s the obvious winner. As I was pointing out re: some startup events going on around this time of year, if people don’t know about it, they won’t come. The ‘usual channels’ may end up being very male-dominated, just due to the skew in your tech field of choice; this conversation started around a Ruby event, and I honestly do not know a single female Ruby developer. If Option 2 results in no female proposals, so be it. There may be no proposals from Welsh people, but who’s complaining about that?

I’d also recommend against 2a (positive discrimination can of worms) or, if 2a is invoked for higher publicity/circulation among female networks (“we don’t have any women speaking so far, and it’s a disgrace!”), you really want to invoke 2b as well. Nobody wants to be put somewhere just because they’re an X. (And hey, being Welsh hasn’t got me on a single stage so far; who do I complain to?)

So there you go. Women at conferences? Don’t break your back. Awareness and open arms, and less of the “we need women, you get a free pass, flights, 5 star hotel and complimentary hair styling and manicure on the day” — this should keep everyone happy. Couple of extra things: If you’ve got a mixed line up of speakers, and draw panellists from previous speakers, make sure it’s representative (as long as it’s relevant) — MSM09 backchat was grumpy that with two excellent female speakers, the panels were all-male. Secondly, check your audience balance. If no women attend, maybe that’s why no women spoke…

(* Is this an issue with female-run events? I don’t know. Events I’ve attended where I’ve known the organiser have unilaterally been male-run, but often with a bit of female help, such as Mike Butcher organising TechCrunch Europe events but with Petra behind the scenes doing all the hard work ;) Still, my guess is that an obviously female-run event wouldn’t fear being accused of being sexist, so this entire issue is avoided.)

Sometimes I wish people would just shut up about the whole women in technology thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire that people notice a gender imbalance, and spot that it causes women to feel uncomfortable because they’re so much a minority, and try to address it either with hot air and bias or with sensible, practical ideas.

But I fundamentally disagree with the concept that talking a lot about women in tech is going to change things. I’ve watched the Women in Games movement unfold ever since I attended the WiG conference, sponsored by Microsoft, in 2006. I’ve been something of an activist myself, organising WiG events at university, taking part in Women in Computer Science outreach events, being a leader in the all-girl PMS Clan, and you know what? Nothing’s really changed.

At PMS our mission was to create a safe place online where girls could get their game on without the 12-year-olds on Xbox Live telling us to get back in the kitchen. Yes, female players got treated badly if they owned up to it, but to be honest, most of us didn’t use particularly giveaway names – nor did we speak, and even if we did, people thought we were boys. The real advantage of PMS was a group of girls to gossip with, to talk games without any preconceptions or uphill struggles. The only thing that disappoints me is the way PMS gamers were often hired out as ‘booth babes who actually like games’, making female gamers more visible on some levels and more of a rarity on others.

You see, and this applies to technology, startups and gaming all, I’m just fed up of being told I’m special.

Whether it’s women-in-X panels, conferences, articles or movements, the very existence of something that says “Women in technology are rare and precious beasts!” seems to make it harder for me to get on with actually being one of them. Everyone(TM) knows that women programmers are rare, therefore nobody assumes I’m a programmer. Everyone(TM) thinks women don’t play games, so they’re happy to believe I just dabble in MMOs and won’t concede that I could beat them at Halo or CS any day.

I am fed up, fed up fed up fed up of having to explain myself, having to beat it into people’s heads that I happen to be just as intelligent, qualified and able (if not more so) than the guy standing next to me, and –  in my experience — all the movements telling these people that women in tech are rare only makes it harder for me to convince people I’m one of them.

Don’t treat me like a three-headed monkey, and maybe other people will cotton on and stop doing so as well.

On a more practical note – yes, ‘we’ need role models, mentoring, better awareness in schools and to make technological subjects at university more accessible. But we need to do things, not talk about them. I’m going to be discussing an idea for SIcamp to encourage women in tech, but not overtly, in line with my three-headed-monkey philosophy: watch this space.