I like Lena, she writes an insightful post suggesting that the same ol’ speakers at conferences is getting boring, I agree. She makes a call that we need diversity in our speakers and asks where all the social media female speakers are at.
I left four comments on her blog of different speakers that are female and focus on the social media industry, please swing by and leave some other examples, hopefully conference organizers will see this, and attract new talent. I listed out:
Tara Hunt (social media/anti-marketing marketing) Connie Benson (community) KD Paine (Social Media Measurement) Jennifer Jones (Marketing Voices Podcast) Any of the blogher founders Deb Schultz -Social Media Marketing Heather Champ –Flickr Teresa Valdez Klein, she’s really fantastic. Charlene Li, my colleague at Forrester
Know of other female speakers who rock at social media? Leave a comment here or over at Lena’s blog
Some conferences are pretty balanced, for example today, I’ll be at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference at the presidio in SF, it’s being put on by the Get Satisfaction team (a website that is a disruption to your corporate website) I’ll be running a workshop on online community best practices (and area of coverage as an analyst) and will be leading the attendees to share their best practices. I’ll be capturing the top attendee responses and will share via this blog. Many of the speakers are female, it appears to be a mixed crowd.
A few years ago I bitched about the lack of asian speakers, and ended up creating this list. I guess if I’m over-exposed now, then things have certainly shifted.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if our speakers are pink or purple, transgender or androgynous, what matters is 1) they’re experts at their field 2) great presenters 3) the audience walks away with more than they did before the session.
Update: Lena has suggested that making lists isn’t enough. I’ve send this post to an upcoming conference organizer whose having a hard time getting speakers, I hope it makes a difference. Susan Getgood says to vote with your feet, a practical approach that hits conference organizers in the wallet.
The really unfortunate part is that when women do speak up and say something about sexism in the tech world, they can do themselves some real career damage (which is why I’m not using my real name here).
It’s there, and it’s rampant, and it’s incredibly frustrating — all the moreso becasue so many of the perpetrators genuinely do not think that they’re sexist. If you asked them, they’d say that of course women do great work, and that they believe in equal opportunity, etc etc — but when push comes to shove they fall back on their boy’s club comfort zone.
The solution is for more men to push themselves out of their comfort zone on a regular basis. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of potential payoff for men to do so, which is why change is so slow to come.
Kristen Nicole, from Mashable.com