A Short Take on Shorting Women

I know I've been absent from here for too long, but I keep coming up with ideas for lengthy blog posts, which then never get written due to a lack of time and other random factors (such as having gotten the SXSW Scurvy like a lot of other people).

In particular, I have a new rant I want to write on women in tech, but it keeps getting longer and longer as time goes on. I will finish it, someday, honest—just not today. But here's a short bit of something that could have been in it:

Jason Kottke recently wrote:

It's been awhile since the last conversation about gender diversity at web conferences. Here's a particularly high profile example of more of the same: Google's just-announced Web Forward conference appears to have a single woman speaker out of 38 total speakers.

This got picked up in a few other places (such as here and here) but for the most part, it wasn't covered as much as I thought it would/should be. So, here's another little push for this to get some attention.

Given that I've been ranting about this issue for several years now (boy, time flies when you're having fun, don't it?) and nothing has changed, I figured I'd try something new this time: creating a group on Upcoming.org called Needs Women Speakers. Feel free to join, and once you've joined, you can add "Needs Women Speakers" as a tag to any conference you see where you think it's applicable.

Naming and shaming… it's certainly not my first choice, but let's see if it helps any…