originally posted by DARIUS KAZEMI on AUGUST 25, 2011
Setting goals
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m directing New Game, a conference about HTML5 game development. One of my goals for New Game was always to have a good gender balance in terms of speakers — namely, I was hoping for somewhere between 5 and 7 of our 12 speakers at my technical game dev conference to be women. Sounds like a pipe dream, but it was an early goal of mine. Because I’m not going to run a talk that isn’t good (regardless of gender of the speaker), I knew that I needed to make sure that I had a bunch of women apply in order for me to achieve my goals. (Note that my definition of “good” is not “has lots of speaking experience” — rather, I’m looking for awesome topics. I’m willing to give a new speaker a chance, otherwise I’m pulling from the ‘experienced speakers’ pool, which is, not suprisingly, mostly men. This rule applies to newbie male speakers too, though. It’s just good practice, IMO.)
Also, in case anyone bothers to just read the headline of this article: this is not about ‘affirmative action’ (or whatever you want to call it) in any way. This is about encouraging more women to apply to speak at New Game — what I tried this year, and what I might be able to try next year to allow this to happen. With more women applicants, I’ll have more awesome sessions led by women to choose from.
What I tried, and the results
While I put out the call for speakers through the normal channels, I also posted on the IGDA Women in Games mailing list encouraging people to apply. I personally reached out to 5 female HTML5 game devs I knew (or knew of) to apply to speak. I also reached out to women in tech that I knew who I suspected might be able to introduce me to women HTML5 game devs that I’d never met.
In the end we had 72 submissions. Of those, 5 (6.9%) were women, at least as far as I could tell by their names, and attempting to verify via their website or twitter account if they had a bio there. Of the 5 women who applied, 1 was one I invited personally, so I had 4 ‘organic’ applications; i.e., women who submitted just because they saw my posts through normal publicity channels. (I was tracking invitees from the WIG list, and I had no takers there.)
Of the 5 women who applied, 4 did not rate highly enough by our advisory board to get on the schedule. This is to be expected: with 10 slots (plus 2 invited keynotes) to fill out of 70 applicants, you’d expect 13% to make it into the top 10, which means either 0 or 1 talk out of a pool of 5 women, maybe 2 if you account for some serious variance in there.
So I was left with one female speaker to put on my schedule. I ended up with 2 male keynotes, 8 male speakers, and 1 female speaker. I ended up holding one slot because I really, really wanted to have at least 2 women speakers. I reached out to more women developers, people who I could be confident would do a good job, using as a guideline my best discretion as an experienced conference organizer and someone who’s attended and spoken at dozens of game dev conferences over the last decade. I’m currently finalizing the speaker for that last slot — assuming everything works out, we’ll have 2 women speakers on our roster of 12.
One other thing that I’m trying for the conference itself is that I’ve instituted an official New Game anti-harassment policy, which is an idea that I learned about from female developers I follow on Twitter. It seems like a good idea, not just for women, but for everyone. I figure that if I make the conference a safer place for women (and avoid talks that use sexist language and/or imagery), I might attract more women to attend next year, or at least avoid repelling women from attending in the future! The language I use in the policy is based on the excellent template available at the Geek Feminism Wiki. I encourage other conference directors to follow suit.
What can I do better next year?
So, 16.6% women speakers is not horrible — it (sadly) is closer to gender parity than many tech conferences out there, but I know I must have missed some steps here. What can I do next time to encourage more women to apply? What are some groups besides IGDA Women in Games that I can reach out to to promote the event? For that matter, how could I encourage more diversity overall? I’m not just trying to reach beyond male speakers — I’m trying to reach beyond the straight white male speaker (of which I am one) who typically dominates tech industry events.
Again, my goal is to have a more diverse group of people apply to speak at New Game next year. Consider me naive if you want, but I’m pretty sure that a diverse group of applicants will provide a diverse group of awesome talks that I can put on the schedule.