It’s been a frustrating week. On Monday I got an email from SydStart announcing that pre-release tickets for “the biggest startup conference in Australia” were about to go on sale. Excited, I scrolled down to see the speakers list and was greeted with a list of all men. “Wait, really?!” I thought. I’m not naive; I certainly didn’t expect equal representation. But I thought they’d at least put a token woman on the list. I went to the website and saw the same wall of dudes. Frustrated, I sent them a tweet:
Hey @SydStart – if you want to actually include any women speakers in your event, I can recommend several (including ME)!
— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) July 13, 2015
I got a reply not long after saying: “Hi. We’re looking forward to announcing more speakers soon! Stay tuned!” Kind of a non-answer, right? Does it mean they have some amazing women speakers yet to be announced, or they’re currently scrambling trying to find someone? I shared the screenshot and my complaint in the Girl Geeks FB group and was heartened to see I wasn’t the only one annoyed by this. Other people were tweeting to them as well. It got picked up by StartupSmart, who reported that the organisers claimed they had invited a couple women but they wanted speaking fees and there was no budget for it. But they’re totally asking some others! (So yeah. Scrambling.) Today Women’s Agenda posted a list of female founders they could have asked. I also discovered that someone has actually set up an All Male Panels Tumblr to catalogue stuff like this (complete with hilarious photos of the Hoff added).
Frustrating, right? Look, I know that there aren’t as many female startup founders at the “Global Influencer” level, and the few that are probably turn down 90% of their speaker invitations. Totally get that. (In fact, I work for one of them.) The solution is not to throw your hands up and say, “Welp, we tried!” when you can’t find a female Elon Musk for your event. There are so many other options!
And of course, this all happens alongside the Reddit shitshow, which I can’t even discuss without launching into a rant. Now it looks like Pao wasn’t even involved in firing Taylor, and their female lead engineer just quit, and maybe it was all a long con anyway? Regardless, the haters are cheering. I have no idea whether Pao was good at her job or not. It’s impossible to tell when 99% of the criticism thrown at her is sexist ranting. But hey, at least I learned what the term “glass cliff” means.
Oh! And add “algorithmic bias” to this week’s vocabulary lesson. Seems that Google shows prestigious job ads to men but not women. Sorry, Ellen. Finding the next role just got that much harder.