PHP NW 2009 was a one day formal conference with a social on the night before the conference and more informal talks session on the Sunday morning, the day after.

Personally I feel uncomfortable entering a room mostly full of men. It’s not that I feel unsafe its just that I feel that many many eyes will suddenly be looking at me, appraising my appearance, my age, my potential skills, all in that single moment. I want to see a friendly face so I tend to gravitate to other women in the room. As I am a member of PHP Women prior to PHP NW I tweeted suggesting we met at the social and had a dinner together. I got a few replies and on the Friday night a few of us had a great curry in a near by restaurant. At least one at the table was a woman who didn’t know about PHP Women but seemed pleased that we were there and she had a group that she could hook up with.

The following day was the main conference. There were both men and women assisting with registration and a fair few of the conference assistants were women. This, to me, made the event less threatening and allayed my nerves. Also one of the main organisers is LornaJane adding to the strong female presence. PHP Women had a visible table in the main conference area which gave us a place to congregate between talks and somewhere for other women to come and find out about the group.

There were a respectable number of women among the speakers. LornaJane gave one of the two talks that followed the keynote; Sara, one of the core PHP developers, had travelled from the US and talked on the Sunday about the new features PHP 5.3; and there was a talk about UTF-8. The women weren’t chosen as speakers because they were women but because they were good speakers with interesting talks. But it all helps. It gives a feeling, to me anyway, that we’re not a curiosity, we’re just developers like everyone else attending a conference which is how it should be.

So you want to encourage women to attend your conference review this check list and ask yourself whether you’re doing enough.

Women Organisers

Try an ensure your main organising committee has both men and women. For one thing you’ll get a more rounded set of ideas due to different experiences and social history but also it should give the conference a more women friendly feel, especially when other women see there are women organisers.

Women speakers

Women are the minority in the IT industry. That I can’t deny. However there is no excuse for having a completely male set of speakers. You don’t have to have positive discrimination or affect the calibre of your speakers by choosing a female speaker as there are plenty of good women speakers knowledgeable in a variety of topics. Have a look at GeekSpeakr for example.

Women staff

Registration is the first time delegates get a chance to decide the tone of a conference. Ensure you have a mixed staff at registration. Also ensure there are some women available at all time during the conference because there may be issues that women are uncomfortable bringing up with a male member of staff.

Personally I don’t really have a problem with the ‘Booth Babe’ but if that’s the only women that women delegates see then that does far more damage than if they weren’t there at all. Try and keep some balance. PHP NW’s ‘uniform’ was generally unisex t-shirts carrying the sponsors logos, jeans and sneakers. Perfect.

Women friendly talks

Strongly encourage your speakers to be aware of women delegates and to pitch their talks appropriately. Unfortunately at one conference I attended this year two of the talks had slides with questionable content for example scantily clad women. Infamously both Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth have been blatantly misogynist recently in their talks. One bad speaker can ruin a whole conference.

Support the women’s groups

The are various groups such as PHP Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, Systers, etc. who would more than be happy to have a presence at your conference. Help them out by having a table or booth in a prominent position and donating a couple of tickets. Such booths give women a focal point to congregate.

Post conference feedback

Finally in your post conference feed back try and get the opinion of women delegates and take note of any ideas they have as to improving the conference for women next time. Please try not to be defensive and if something unfortunate has happened just apologise, don’t try and qualify that apology you’ll just make it worse.

The opinions above are purely my own and I may get some flak from them. Also I know the list is in no way comprehensive or complete. If you have any further ideas I would be interested to hear from you. May be we can produce a definitive guide.

This is totally unacceptable and rather disappointing. The IT industry is one of the remaining industries where women are under represented. “Entertainment” like this does nothing to encourage women or make them feel comfortable at events like this.

However in the past this may have gone unnoticed but this time people tweeted about it, there were e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts and so on. Social networking ensured that Yahoo! heard about the disgust and they have apologised. The text of the apology is below:

All,

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of
female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack
events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about
our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the
“Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that
spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send
about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone
feel welcome, including women coders and technologists. 

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have
offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

Best,

Chris Yeh
Head of YDN

twitter: @ydn
email: cyeh at yahoo-inc dot com

This is a good thing. However what about the Go-Go dancers at last years event? I was going to link to video on Youtube at this point but as I was doing it they went private! May be they’re ashamed?

Another “Win” for social networking was the outcry against Jan Moir’s homophobic article on Stephen Gately’s death. It ran with all the clichés i.e. that gay people are sexually promiscuous, that a civil partnership is less than a marriage, and so on. However so many people complained (over 21,000, the highest ever) both on the Daily Mail’s site and the Press Complaints Commission’s site (which actually buckled under the strain) that the PCC is to examine the article and the Daily Mail.

Social networking now means that intolerance and injustice can not go unnoticed anymore. This is a good thing!

The whole of my working life, accountancy, academia (Computer Science and the Physics), and then industry I’ve been one of the few women amongst many men. I’ve gotten used to it. I can’t remember all the injustices but a few come to mind though; Such as the male students I was supposed to be supervising during their masters (since their work was based on my work) who went to my professor rather than me; Or being an acting team leader for a couple of years but whenever I tried to get the promotion I was told “I didn’t have the right attributes” even though I was going the job (I eventually decided the right attributes were a set of male genitalia); Or listening to colleagues discussing the possible appearance of a prospective employee once they discovered she was female. I just learnt to live with incidents like these as did most other women I knew. Yes I could complain but then I would just be seen as a moaning woman but it would have never gotten me anywhere so I kept my head down and got on with work.

Online it was worse! The anonymity that the net gives people allows them to be blatantly bigotted or misogynistic with no recourse. I know women who only post anonymously on Slashdot for example since if they didn’t they would basically get attacked. Some would argue that in most cases it is just words on a screen but eventually enough words have an effect. More often than not I hid behind my nick which is not obviously female. So in the last few years I just haven’t been publicly active on-line.

There is a real issue with gender prejudice and some of the incidents have become really quite nasty. Emma McGrattan of Ingres caused a stir when she commented on gender and coding styles. Discussion sites such as Slashdot had many rather vitriolic posts by people who hated her over it. Kathy Sierra , however, got hate mail and death threats and ended up shutting down her blog because of what she had written. Other female bloggers and speakers worry about having content in which they have opinion because of the backlash and bullying that seems to occur from a section of the IT community. My issues have been light in comparison.

Then recently there have been a few speakers at various conferences who have had inappropriate content. I have written before about the inappropriate slide content of a scantily clad woman parading across the screen at PHP Conference UK 2009. Richard Stallman did not endear himself to women when he gave the keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in 2009. And finally, (since I don’t want to make this a long list), there’s Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at LinuxCon where he used ‘guys’ almost entirely, made an ejaculation pun, and talked about “explaining to girls what we actually do”. All of this is discouraging to women in the industry and I frequently have conversations with women who talk about changing career at some point due to this kind of atmosphere.

But in all this negativity there is a ray of sunshine. Unlike when I first started in IT there are now women’s groups both virtually and actually for example PHP Women, Linuxchix, Systers, Girl Geek Dinners and so on. These groups are supportive to women, provide encouragement to young women interested in a career in technology, and also give us a place to talk to one another about issues we are facing. Some of this conversation obviously turns towards incidents like those I’ve written about above and we are at least annoyed at most angry about it. However rather than just merely griping we’re doing something about it. All of the speaker incidents have been blogged about quite extensively. There are sites such as the Geek Feminism Blog and the Geek Feminism Wiki to name a couple. We’re being positive; we’re doing something about it; and it makes me optimistic for the future.