Their has been much protest from conference organizers who are called on the fact that they don’t have enough women speakers at their events. The Geek Feminism wiki lists some reasons that are articulated for this problem. These are the two I hear most often:
- We don’t know any women who would be qualified.
- We asked many women and most of them said no.
The good news is that when conferences organizers actually try the can be very successful in having a strong line up of women speakers.
The Privacy Identity and Innovation (pii) , the brain child of Natalie Fonseca, (who has run the Tech Policy Summit for years) is coming up August 17-19th in Seattle, Washington. Natalie took proactive approach to recruiting women to speak and voila – their are women speakers at this technology conference.
I (Kaliya Hamlin) am speaking at the event on a panel about personal data stores (a new project I will write more about here soon). I am really proud to be amongst many other women industry leaders speaking.
- Denise Tayloe, CEO of Privo
- Marie Alexander, CEO of Quova
- Linda Criddle, CEO of Reputation Share
- Fran Maier, President of TRUSTe
- Anne Toth, Chief Privacy Officer for Yahoo
- Michelle Dennedy, VP at Oracle
- Judith Spencer of GSA
- Christine Lemke, CTO of Sense Networks
- Betsy Masiello of Google
- Heather West of Center for Democracy and Technology
- Eve Maler of PayPal
- Susan Lyon of Perkins Coie
- Deborah Estrin of UCLA
It should be a great event – the guys on the program are equally cool.
I encourage any women out there who want to learn more about or get involved in the issues and technology around privacy and identity to attend .
She’s Geeky community members can save $100 off a pii2010 ticket with this Discount Code: 4GEEKY