If you’re looking for a speaker, please understand that we offer the names and details of women on this site as a starting point for further investigation. It’s up to you to discover more and find the right fit for your event.

For more information on “why?” you should reflect upon (and act!) when it comes to events, here’s a few recent articles well worth checking out:

The Atlantic, by Rebecca J Rosen - A Simple Suggestion to Help Phase Out All-Male Panels at Tech Conferences:

…Maybe you’ve thought, it’s too bad the organizers didn’t think to balance this out a bit more and ask some women to speak too.

I love that this has bothered you. And I am happy to tell you about a simple step you can take to help change this: Refuse to speak on all male-panels. Just say no.

I am borrowing this idea from the Jewish non-profit world, where an organization known as Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community has created a pledge that asks men to forswear all-male panels.

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Faruk Ateş with The Problem with a Slate of White, Male Speakers:

With a small sample size from a male-dominated industry, getting all men is an easily replicable scenario. However: who says that all those guys actually are “the most interesting candidates”? Whose standard is that by? Because I can promise you that I won’t find an all-male (and all-white) lineup “most interesting” at all, as a conference attendee. Because I would argue that, no matter what they’re speaking about, I’d feel like I’m getting a homogeneous point of view presented to me.

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From Geek Feminism, by Courtney Stanton - How I Got 50% Women Speakers at My Tech Conference:

Short version: I’m not perfect, neither is this event, but I am looking for ways to make it better and more open to all people working in games, both this year and in future years. And in the meantime, at least I’m putting on a conference where a version of myself from another dimension wouldn’t sit in the audience tweeting, “oh hey, a panel with a bunch of dudes on it, how novel.”

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From Beating the Odds — How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012:

The most common feedback Tiffany got for We Are All Awesome was that people don’t care about the gender of the speaker, they just want a great talk. We agree: our industry systematically biases against 50% of great speakers and misses out on a significant amount of talks, topics, discussion and thus progress. We hope to do our little part to get this solved.

Here are few select statistics for women in computing:

• 12% of computer science graduates in the US are women (Source).
• Open Source contributions linger at 1.5% (with some communities having notable exceptions) (Source).
• Technology Startups founded by women: 8% (Source).

There is a long way to go, but we are happy to celebrate our 25% milestone.

As stated earlier, our goal is a more diverse conference, a more diverse industry. Women are only one of the under-represented groups. We need to broaden this effort in the coming years.

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From Three Chords - Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013? on the newly-announced Edge Conference:

The lineup of speakers is brilliant — there’s some of the leading lights of the British web development scene on that list. But none of them are women. Are there no women out there worth a place amongst these 22 web technology experts?

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From CurryBet.net by Martin Bellam - One day my daughter will ask me how we tolerated this:

This isn’t a witch-hunt against a particular set of conference organisers, it is a problem for our entire industry. We simply can’t be building the best products, which will be used by the half of the human race who are female, if we don’t involve women in their design and manufacture. I’m not talking about ushering in some communist dictatorship or socialist utopia here, I’m just pointing out that limiting your ideas and discussion pool to the 50% of people who happen to be male just doesn’t make sense.

…If my daughter grows up and wants to go into tech, and is still faced with events where organisers think it is OK to have 22 male speakers out of a possible 22 speakers, she’ll be entitled to turn around to me and ask why I didn’t make a fuss when I could.

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From The New York Times by Helen Lewis - Game Theory: Making Room for the Women:

Some of the most alienating practices are also being stamped out. In October the Eurogamer Expo said it didn’t want “booth babes” — scantily clad women hired to pander to the belief that gamers are gaping dudes who can’t be interested in anything unless it has joyless breasts draped over it. Meanwhile, both Ms. Wolfkill and the 343 Studios leader, Bonnie Ross, made clear during their publicity tour for Halo 4 that they would do everything they could to make Microsoft take seriously the problem of sexist abuse in multiplayer voice chat.

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And don’t forget the power of Twitter!

Chicks brook no excuse

Blatant free plug: Blokes who organises gabfests and fail to invite female speakers because women are so hard to find now have do defence. A website just launched – called No Chicks NO Excuses (nochicksnoexcuses.com) – has a lit of about 45 “bright, interesting and funny women” who are available to speak. The site is the brainchild of Leslie Cannold (author, ethicist and activist), Jane Caro (author, lecturer and advertising writer) and Catherine Deveny (TV comedy writer, comedian, former Age columnist and ABC regular). Cannold says the site is a tad Melbourne and Sydney-centric at the moment but will have increased national reach as ore speakers sign on

http://radioadelaidebreakfast.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/18825/

http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110211.9483/looking-for-an-expert-female-speaker-for-your-australian-event