Re: Where are the women?

Hi everyone,

I'm one of the organizers of DjangoCon Europe 2012 and as Daniele pointed out, it made me sad when seeing the amount of women that submitted a talk. While we have no statistics of a gender breakdown for the tickets sold so far, just glancing at the list of names makes me sad.

I wonder how much of this is just bad organizing and communication from our part, and how much it is because there are less women in the Django community than men (if that's even the case). On that note, thanks for giving your views on this topic everyone.

I will see which suggestions we can still implement for DjangoCon Europe and if you have any more suggestions, please feel free to contact me directly at ojiidotch@gmail.com, as I often forget to check mailing lists.

We'll publish a code of conduct soon, the reason why this was not done yet is because I naively thought that it is unnecessary, as everything usually mentioned in a code of conduct is covered by Swiss law anyway (especially discrimination).

Jonas Obrist

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 8:28:07 PM UTC+2, Katie Cunningham wrote:

If you want to get more women to a conference, a few things have been
successful on this side of the pond:

 - Scholarships set aside for female attendees
 - Specifically invite potential female speakers to talk, or at least
submit a talk
 - Reach out to women-based tech groups, and make sure they know about
the conference
 - Talk to females that are already attending, and see if they can share a room
 - Encourage sponsors to sponsor costs for a female attendee.
 - Have a code of conduct that is public, explicit, and enforced.

Even doing the scholarships for a few spots shows that your conference
shows that you're serious about women attending. I don't know, when
looking into a conference, whether your conference is going to be one
where I'm going to get cat-called or one where I'm going to feel
completely at home.

Katie Cunningham 

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