Last year, we published a blog and created a survey, using SurveyMonkey, around gender diversity at Web Summit 2016, following its Women in Tech initiative which gave 10,000 free tickets to women.
While the balance of attendees was above that for your standard tech event, the ratio of female to male speakers was 100 of the 663. Digging deeper, we wanted to understand how attendees felt about the gender balance and to gather feedback and suggestions from the community on how to make events more tangibly inclusive for all participants. Here are the findings and collective recommendations for improving gender balance going forward.
The survey received 194 responses, from 132 women, 60 men and two others, 57% of whom attended the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. Nearly all respondents (90%) agreed that both men and women are needed to help drive more women into tech.
Views on the free ticket initiative were mixed. We asked: “10,000 women got free tickets to be at the Web Summit in Lisbon — what do you think?” While 47% of women responded “This is exactly what Women In Tech need”, only 24% of men did. 34% of women but 45% of men felt that it “doesn’t address the bigger issue with Women In Tech”.
What we found to be very interesting was the perspective around the gender balance of the speakers from women vs. men:
- 49% of female respondents who attended Web Summit 2016 felt that the gender mix of speakers was well-balanced
- However, 71% of male respondents considered it so
This difference in perspective around what is normal — or what normal should look like — is an important recognition in itself. This is particularly true when around 90% of VC Partners are male and venture funding of female-led start-ups is actually getting worse, not better, according to reports.
We know that addressing these issues takes much more than money. Google invests millions ($150m in 2015, to be precise) in workforce diversity initiatives but still today just 19% of their tech employees are women. Facebook and Apple share similar stats. It takes work, on the part of both women and men.
Here are some of the suggestions from our survey respondents to the question: What could Web Summit and other tech events do better to ensure diversity?
- Deliver workshops on unconscious bias.
- Have a balanced speaker and presenter panel of both women and men, including women in senior and executive level roles. Help support female-led start ups and highlight female CEOs and board of directors.
- Inspire. Women with free tickets hearing empowering things is not doing much. We need to make people that actually will decide who gets hired to hear and understand that diversity is good for a work environment.
- Code of conduct, provide a platform for role models from underprivileged backgrounds, help people with travel costs, childcare during the event
- Doing a better job in expressing the benefits of attending, specially for women
- Share more success stories of women in tech/diversity.
As those responses show, there is a lot of interest from the community to help make it easier and compelling not only for women to attend but to be put on stage. Understanding how to attract women to the conference, enabling the possibility of attending given the myriad of other responsibilities most women carry in addition to their job and ensuring a balance of speakers and stories from women were clear priorities for respondents.
As Web Summit has just commenced their second campaign for Women in Tech attendance, we shared the survey results and Eleanor McGrath, head of media at Web Summit, shared this comment: “We really welcome this feedback which chimes with a lot of the responses which we have gathered from our attendees at our events in the last year. We are running our Women in Tech campaign again this year. We are working hard to improve the experience of Women in Tech ticketholders during events and to further address the ratio of female to male speakers on our stages. There are many good suggestions here and we will have more to announce in due course. We know there is more to do.”
Tips and resources for improving conference diversity
- The Guardian: How to create a diverse event: tips for the World Economic Forum organisers
- Ada’s List: a global email-based community of women in tech
- Articulate: a collection of tips for making better (and more diverse) speaking events
- Articulate Network Speakers List at Lanyrd
- Callback Women: advocacy & education to expand expand gender diversity at tech conferences
- Ramp-Up: resources and promotion for event organisations to make inclusive and accessible events
- Diversity Charter: an open charter for event organisers
- Techcrunch Include
- Girl Geeks speaker resource
- 50/50 Pledge for gender diversity at tech events: speaker list and pledge for event organizers
- Advice from Google on building inclusive tech hubs
Thank you to our supporters
We’re grateful to have garnered the support of numerous groups and advocates including:
- Angel Academe, an award-winning angel network focused on female entrepreneurs
- FemTech leaders, a global network for women in fintech
- Tech London Advocates Women in Tech Group, London’s movement for gender equality in the tech industry
- Blooming Founders, a high-impact platform for women entrepreneurs
- The UK Women’s Equality Party
- Fab Women Series
- and many more individuals advocating for inclusion in tech
Thank you all for the amazing work you are doing in promoting diversity and the advancement of Women in Tech, Entrepreneurship and Leadership.
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Note on survey responses: To view the full results, please click here. Note that this is a broad overview and doesn’t provide the gender breakdown within each response but do drop me a line if you’d like to see those. All responses are anonymous.