Yesterday, in frustration at a post that I read by one of the mesh conference organizers explaining why they were yet another tech conference with no women keynote speakers, I wrote a post that parodied their unnamed reasons for this. I didn’t give a lot of background to this in the post, but it’s key to note the instructions on the mesh contact page:

mesh isn’t your typical pitch-us-a-speaker type of event (sorry, PR folks). We look for people we would like to hear from — and think you would like to hear from — and then we ask them to participate.

In other words, don’t call us, we’ll call you; and since we already have our clique lined up, don’t hold your breath. In spite of those instructions, I emailed one of the organizers about the potential for participating, with no response; it took my post yesterday to even get them to engage in a conversation.

I was a little surprised by Leesa’s reaction to my post, which was (to paraphrase):

• Total eye-rolling exasperation that I would even raise this subject.
• The topic that I suggested for mesh was lame.
• My idea was ignored because I didn’t email to enough of the conference organizers.
• It’s women’s fault that we’re not being invited to be speakers.
• I’m just a big ol’ whiny complainer.

I raised the subject because it’s still an issue, and I’m not the only one noticing that there needs to be more diversity (I’m focussed on gender diversity, but obviously there’s other underrepresented groups as well) in conference speakers. I go to a lot of technology conferences each year — usually on my own nickel — and I speak at a few of them. I have a widely-read blog in my area of technology (business process management and Enterprise 2.0) that enables much of this by providing the opening for the conversation, as well as presenting my ideas in a public forum. I host online webinars and panels, including one this Tuesday on BPM and Enterprise 2.0. In other words, I’m not sitting around waiting for someone to call me, I’m out there calling (or emailing) them, and it’s having results for me.

In other words, I’m not pissed off because I’m personally not speaking at mesh (although I’d love to talk about Enterprise 2.0), I’m pissed off because even though the mesh organizers assured us that they were the experts at finding us people who we want to hear from, they couldn’t find a single woman keynote speaker. I’m not holding out a lot of hope for the rest of the roster, whenever it’s announced.

Elisa Camahort (of BlogHer) recently recapped the issues, pointing out the advantage of diversity amongst the speakers, and puts the onus on the conference organizers to make sure that that diversity exists: conference organizers become shapers of our industry based on their selection process, and have a responsibility to do it right.

Last year, there was a certain amount of noise about the fact that the mesh organizers managed to find only a tiny number of women speakers — 6 out of 50, or some such ridiculous ratio — and this year is not shaping up to be any better, with exactly zero women keynote speakers. It appears, however, that they’re trying to head off the protests via a somewhat disingenuous post on Mark Evans’ blog:

The truth is we wanted women keynotes, spent a lot of time compiling a list of excellent candidates and tried to make it happen. But, for a variety of reasons, we couldn’t make it work.

Yeah, those reasons being:

1. If we talk to them, we might get cooties.
2. The strippers women who we usually hang out with don’t meet the requirements.
3. None of them would agree to get the coffee and take notes.
4. The only ones that we could find didn’t have good enough tits.
5. We didn’t think that their husbands would let them attend.
6. What do women know about technology, anyway?

In spite of my modified Skype description that has stopped most of the unsolicited requests for contact, there’s still a few morons who don’t get the message. I’ve decided to create a rogues’ gallery of Skype Scumbags on Flickr showing their requests; you can find the entire set (as it grows) here, and I encourage others to share their snaps using the skypescumbag tag.

Today’s entry:

As part of the whole transparent lifestyle, I publish my real name, my age and my gender on my Skype profile. Unfortunately, some morons take the “female” indicator as an invitation to start a chat with me that they think is going to lead to some sort of hot IM conversation. I allow chat messages from people who are not on my buddy list, since that’s a good way for people to make initial contact with me, but I had to disallow inbound phone calls from anyone not on my list because of the many unsolicited (and unanswered) calls coming in.

Since my first name is gender-neutral, I could just leave my gender unspecified, but it’s kind of funny to see how, within hours after setting it to “female”, the unsolicited chats start. If I turn it off, they stop. Back on, they start. Like Pavlov’s dog.

Here’s a few from a 6-day span last month:

firatveli47m says: [which pretty much makes me want to barf]

[name deleted] says: “does this work?” [his brain, I assume, and the answer is "no"] [The owner of this Skype name recently contacted me and said that he was just trying out Skype, and picked me at random to send a test message. Personally, I wouldn't recommend that practice, but I'm letting him off the hook.]

batmisho9 says: “hi” [twice, 30 minutes apart], to which I reply “do you have a valid reason for contacting me? i’m not available for chatting with strangers, i use skype mostly for business.” He disappears after that.

versace_74 says: “hi” [yeah, that's original]

sourito (tanger 2007) says: “hollllllllllllllllllla” [okay, at least that's original]

farido771 says: “212063 80 39 87″ [weird, I assume that's a phone number?]

kingmoon6 says: “hi” [a couple of times, starting to get annoying], to which I reply “who are you and why do you want to exchange details?” he says “am froom toronto” [oh, great, a rocket scientist], and I say “so?” he indignantly replies “SO ? SO”, and I block his ID.

romantic206 (Sameer) says “hi” [the usual couple of times], and I give my now-standard reply, “who are you and why do you want to exchange contact details?” He says “hi” a couple more times, then “how r u”, twice. He then follows with “your name plz”, “do you have time to see you today”, then the ever-barfable before I block him.

I cleared my gender indicator for a while to ponder this, then I saw the description on Alec Saunders‘ Skype profile: “Please be specific in your contact requests. I do not accept blind contacts.”

My profile now says:

Please be specific in your contact requests. I do not accept blind contacts, especially from idiots who think that because my profile says “female”, it means “skype me”.

All quiet on the Skype stalker front since then.

My post earlier this week about Alec Saunders’ sexist demo scenario at DemoCamp 12 (criticism that he took quite gracefully) led to both a blog post on his part, then an email and Skype discussion between us.

The topic of our private discussion quickly turned to that of hiring women in technical jobs, with Alec admitting that they have no women in their company except in support and admin, and asking what I would do to attract female engineers to an organization. This is a subject that has come up on the TorCamp Skype back channel, mostly in conjunction with the question of how to make the TorCamp community more women-friendly.

My response to Alec was as follows:

The issue of women engineers within organizations is a tough one. I went through engineering in the bad old days (U of Waterloo, Systems Design 1984), and was recently shocked to find out that the proportion of female engineering graduates isn’t significantly higher now than when I was there. What reigned in the engineering faculty at that time, and what exists in many of the technology companies that I see now, is a cowboy attitude that is a real turn-off for a lot of women. We’ve had some discussion on the TorCamp Skype chat group about this, since that attitude also prevails at DemoCamp and likely prevents a lot of women from even attending, much less presenting. DemoCamp is a sort of microcosm of what a tech startup is like: lots of bravado and showing off, which are traits that are socialized out of most girls at a very early stage of their development. As a woman, I can either choose to act like one of the boys in order to gain acceptance, which is not comfortable for most women, or just choose not to play.

I feel that the key to attracting technical women to your organization is to get some senior technical women in place. Most technology firms have “token” female VPs in finance and HR in order to appear to be non-discriminatory, but never leading technical parts of the organization. Put in a woman as VP of engineering/development, get her involved in recruitment, and you’ll see things change. I owned and ran a 40-person systems integration firm up until 2000, where I was both CEO and chief architect. My entire technical management team, and many of my developers, were women, although I didn’t select them by gender; it was an issue of technical women being comfortable working in the environment that I helped to create. I’m not saying that you should discriminate in favour of women — I am strictly opposed to reverse discrimination because it only fosters resentment — but widen your search net when you are recruiting high-level people to be sure that you’re including enough women in the selection pool.

Alec thinks that the problem is that they’re a startup; having grown a startup to 40 people and recruited a great selection of women engineers, I don’t think that’s really the problem.

I’d love to hear other opinions on this.

17 years ago today, 14 women (12 of them engineering students) were killed at Montreal’s École Polytechnique by a misogynist whack-job who blamed women for his failure to gain attendance to the engineering school. Although this event catalyzed the Canadian movement to eradicate violence against women, and led to December 6th being marked as the National Day of Commemoration and Action on Violence Against Women, I can’t help but think that those women could have been changing the world in much more profound ways if they had been allowed to wear the Iron Ring and pursue their own goals.

Rest in peace.

• Geneviève Bergeron, 21 
• Hélène Colgan, 23 
• Nathalie Croteau, 23 
• Barbara Daigneault, 22 
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21 
• Maud Haviernick, 29 
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31 
• Maryse Laganière, 25 
• Maryse Leclair, 23 
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 27 
• Sonia Pelletier, 23 
• Michèle Richard, 21 
• Annie St-Arneault, 23 
• Annie Turcotte, 21

I used to work for a software company in southern California, and eventually left because of the toxic corporate culture and politics, especially the old boys network that prohibited women from having any real impact in the company. Recently, they were acquired by a very large technology company that has their own particular unwanted level of corporate politics, but which has a very different attitude towards women. On Friday, I received an email from one of my former (female) colleagues at the acquired company, which said:

The real reason for my email is that I am overwhelmed by the female presence at meetings [since being acquired by Large Co.] … so you can come back now

If you read this blog directly (rather than via the RSS feed), you may have noticed the beautiful Breast of Canada photo in the sidebar. I added this to my site after meeting the creator of this calendar, Sue Richards, at BlogHer in California earlier this year. Needless to say, I have my copy of her 2007 calendar ready to go for next year.

Since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I thought that there couldn’t be a better time to highlight her message, and encourage you to buy one of her amazing calendars (no, I don’t get a kickback from this, except in the karmic sense). Sue’s message is about breast health and having a healthy attitude towards breasts, and net proceeds from the sales of the calendar go to the Canadian Breast Cancer Network, a national network of organizations that is focussed on breast cancer survivors. Buy one for yourself, for your mother, your sister, your daughter and your girlfriends.

The calendar contains some very striking images of both healthy breasts and breast cancer survivors, just normal women hanging around topless. :)  The one of all the topless women waiting at a bus stop is my absolute favourite.

Sue also writes a few blogs: one about the calendar project, one about menopause, one on news and views about breasts, and one about Guelph, the town where she lives.

Okay, this is definitely the funniest thing that I’ve read in ages, and written by a lawyer, no less:

Ordinarily, when someone starts staring at my breasts, I assume that I’ve spilled something. After all, the girls are getting on in years. There are plenty of newer models out on the market for the lads to admire. So when I found an older gentlemen reviewing the troops during a board meeting recently, I was both flattered and stymied. What to do?

I’ve had this happen many times over the years (although, as Suzanne points out, less lately) and usually just stare the person in the eye until he finally raises his eyes to mine before I reply, but I like her suggestion of smacking my chest and yelling “Wake up! He’s talking to you!” although not sure if I could pull it off without laughing. I also recall one memorable meeting with a VC when I was raising venture for a startup years ago when he spent the entire meeting staring at my legs, but I admit that my breasts win hands-down over my legs for attention at meetings.

In a similar vein, there was a fabulous scene in the series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip two weeks ago where a journalist played by Christine Lahti is encouraged by her (female) friend to show a little cleavage in order to get the story that she wants; when she shows up in a low-cut dress and push-up bra (and looks fabulous, even not considering that she’s in her mid-50’s), Bradley Whitford’s character takes a quick look at her and says “Nice rack. Did she tell you to wear that? How old do you think I am, 15?” Matthew Perry’s character, of course, spent all of his time staring at and addressing her breasts. The whole exchange was really funny, poking fun all around. This is definitely my favourite new show.

This Thursday is Women in Technology day at the CASCON conference in Markham. It’s a long haul up there from downtown, but I’ll likely find a way to get there as it sounds pretty interesting:

The IBM Women’s Leadership Council, the Centers for Advanced Studies (CAS), and our university partners would like to invite you to “Women in Technology Day” at CASCON on Thursday, October 19, 2006. This is a day to celebrate the accomplishment of Women in the IT industry and to look forward to how we can shape the future for Women in Technology. This is an excellent opportunity to not only meet and network with other women in computing and IT, but to also learn from some of the top minds in our community!

I caught the information on the IEEE Toronto Section news forum, but it’s also available on the IBM site and on upcoming.org.

CASCON is free to attend, and although online registration for all of CASCON is now closed, the website states that you can register on site. You need to register in advance for the WIT luncheon here.