Do women need a special invitation to tech conferences?

Let me tell you a story. I got an email once from tech conference organisers. They asked me to be a speaker during their event. I had just started my programming job then, didn’t have much experience so I was quite surprised with their question. I was doing a lot for community via my blog and Facebook group so I guess this is how they found me. I replied to this email saying that I didn’t feel confident enough to speak on tech conf after few months of work. ‘You can speak on any topic. We don’t have female speaker so the topic isn’t so relevant’, they replied. This got me thinking: ‘Is my talk being selected for tech conf only to fill the diversity gap?’.

I wanted to write about female speakers on tech conferences for a while. I while ago PHP Central Europe conf was cancelled because of lack of female speakers. If I recall this correctly, the same happened to GitHub’s Electron Conf few years ago. How canceling these events looks from female perspective?

I had an opportunity to be a speaker on two JavaScript conferences. I was one of the few women that gave presentations. To be honest, I haven’t paid attention if there was anything about special demand for female speakers on conference website. I was genuinely interested in the events and decided to submit my subject and see if it will be selected.

We all know and see that men are still the majority in tech industry. This won’t change by night. Despite having numerous women dedicated initiatives and organisations, there will be less women on IT events. Why? Because there are less women in the industry in general. In my team there are two female programmers (including me) and about twenty male programmers. For me it’s really simple — you can’t have many female speakers on tech conferences because there are not many women in industry in general.

Don’t get me wrong — I do believe that there should be more women in IT industry. I have founded one of the biggest Polish Facebook group that encourages women to start coding and see if programming is something for them. Today my group gathers more than 20K of members! It’s amazing how many women are interested in IT.

However, one word in a key here. This word is — ‘interested’. The industry is changing, the world is changing. Women can have every job they want and this includes tech related jobs. More and more women become programmers. But the industry has been growing for years. We need time to change proportions between male and female coders. Don’t expect to get 50% of female speakers on tech conferences when you can rarely find a company where 50% of programmers are women.

In my opinion this is really tough job to be tech conf organiser nowadays. You have to think about diversity but need to create interesting presentations lineup at the same time. Blind review process is an option. As I mentioned in first paragraph, when I see ‘special invitation’ for female speakers on conferences site, I start having doubts if my subject will be evaluated as I wish it to be. So based on its technical value. Not on a fact that I am a woman.

Is there any good solution here? To be honest — I have no idea. We have to show women that they are welcome in the industry. I believe that IT events dedicated for women help them to get to know the possibilities they can have. However, these events are meant for newbies. Women that are starting their careers or are thinking about changing their career paths. These women will be tech speakers one day. But they need time (and a lot of knowledge to get!).

When it comes to experienced female programmers — they already are in the industry. They don’t need special treatment. If they will be interested in the event, they will submit their talks. As event organiser, just be sure that you have reached all possible groups and did everything to have diversified speakers. This doesn’t mean writing: ‘we need women speakers for our event’ in the email. This means e.g. posting info about your event on women-friendly FB group, not only on Slack channel where all members are male programmers. Believe me — this is a lot.