For years I’ve avoided talking about the topic of what to wear when presenting. I didn’t want to cover it because I didn’t want people to think that I only worried about this topic because I was a woman. I also didn’t want other women to inherit any of my neuroses around deciding what to wear. I’m the sort of person who always enjoyed thinking long and hard about what to wear the next day at work, and I know that’s not how everyone works.
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Speaker Tips – Wearing a Roaming Mic is More Complicated Than I Realised
I realise I have a bunch of experience and advice for speakers and potential speakers that I simply haven’t written down or shared. Here’s the first piece on things to consider that you might not have thought about.
Note: as usual, my advice is from the point of view of a woman (me) and is aimed mostly at women, but also as usual it’s probably useful for others to know too.
What Can Conferences Do To Attract More Women Speakers?
Now I've been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it's also because I'm a technical woman and there aren't very many technical women speaking at conferences.
In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.
What Can Men Do
So, I wrote a long email to the London Java Community in answer to an excellent question: "What can men do to support Women in Technology?".
It's a bit of a brain dump, by no means comprehensive, and is in answer to a specific question in a specific context, but I've been asked to make the information public so it can be useful in a broader context. So here it is.
Blind CFPs – a Postscript
Since publishing yesterday’s post, I’ve had a lot of great comments, so I thought I’d write yet another post to answer them. Firstly, let me state that I don’t think blind CFPs are a complete waste of time – for example, I know that there are circles in which speakers will refuse to submit if … Read more
Are Blind CFPs Really The Answer?
Off the back of yesterday’s post, I received a number of comments and questions around blind CFPs (Call For Papers – usually to get into a conference you submit to a CFP) for conferences. I often hear it said that a blind CFP will fix, or at least improve, the diversity imbalance at conferences. I … Read more
I’m so tired of it all
We work so hard to promote equality, to fight for the rights of people who are not middle-class white men, and time and again it just feels like we're not getting anywhere. International Women's Day highlights the issues that face women all around the world, and make our women-in-tech problem look like a genuine First World Problem, and yet we can't even get that right.
Improving Speaker Diversity
Last month at Devoxx I was in a session discussing what we can do to encourage more diversity in our speakers (specifically, although not limited to, increasing the number of women speakers). I’m going to outline the things I remember being discussed, although as usual we did not find the answer to the problem, only … Read more
…but most of all, it’s fun
I loved this analogy: Cycling is awfully similar to being a woman. It nicely describes how it feels to be marginalised and not quite "normal". But there are some things that I'd like to add:
Should you notice I’m a woman? Should I care?
So, following on from my observations of being an outsider at FOSDEM because I'm not an open source developer, I do have another story to tell where my female-ness is actually relevant.