Stephen Caver

Jason Kottke recently addressed the problem of gender diversity at web conferences in the industry, pointing out that at web conferences men speakers outnumber women speakers by at least 4 men to every woman. This is, indeed, a troubling issue that needs to be addressed by the industry at large.

However, I must raise some issues that Jason neglects. When looking at the statistics we must ask ourselves a few other questions to put them in a larger perspective. What is the ratio of men to women in the web industry compared to the population at large? If it is disproportionate, why is that so? Could these statistics merely mirror the number of women in the industry? Does that mirror the larger population?

The problem could be a larger one, and looking at the overall industry seems to be going more to the root of the problem than merely looking at web conferences. If there is a disproportionate amount of men to women in the web industry compared to the larger population we must address this issue before we start laying blame to those who are putting on conferences. The lack of women speakers could be derived from the larger issue of a lack of women in the industry.

I don’t have any statistics to make a detailed assessment of this problem, if there is one. What needs to be done, before we start burning people at the stake, is to make a general overall assessment of the industry. From looking at the statistics of women speakers at conferences they would appear to closely map to the proportion of men to women in the interactive media design major at my school. This, of course, is not based on statistics but merely my observations. If that is representative of the entire industry (I’m not saying that it is), then we have a bigger problem.

Gender diversity at conferences is a very important issue. Women play an important role in our industry and we need to figure out if there is a reason why there are less women to men and if that maps to the larger population (my guess is that it doesn’t). Bringing up a smaller issue like this is important, but I think there needs to be some context in which these statistics are brought up.