Gender balance in MyData 2017 and what we plan to do about it in 2018

Tech is an industry where, as we all know painfully well, gender balance is often quite … bad. Tech events and conferences easily become manifestations of this lack of balance and inclusion. A lot of great work is done by many to remedy the situation already, but it’s obvious that there is still a lot of work to be done in the years to come.

As an event with significant relevance to the tech field¹, it is not entirely surprising that the gender balance at the MyData 2017 conference, both among presenters and attendees, was not what it should have been. Of our attendees 36% were women and of our presenters only 33%. We are not happy with this and we must work towards a more balanced, diverse, and inclusive conference in the future.

We believe diversity and inclusivity should be at the core of any movement whose goal is a better world for all. They also cannot be taken for granted or paid mere lip service: in order to achieve balanced gender representation, real and conscious steps must be taken. We recognise that we need to improve in this regard and we are eager to take the opportunity to do so in planning MyData 2018.

We turned to Open Heroines, a community of women working in open government, open data, and civic tech, and asked for their insights on how to improve. Here is what they advise:

• In marketing, “always be as excited about less known women speakers as you are about the male celebrities”.
• “Having women as priority helped us a lot — the moment we let go, the ratio started to slip to the usual 20/80 female/male.”
• “Women, if they cancel, usually suggest a male colleague to replace them”. To avoid this skewing your balance, you should always think women first when inviting presenters.

Here is what we decided to do:

1. To thank our MyData 2017 presenters, instead of buying speaker gifts we made a donation in their name to a Mozambican-Estonian group ACM-W (https://women.acm.org/) who work to empower women in tech. Read more here.
2. The programme team for MyData 2018 commits to work from the very beginning according to the recommendation from Open Heroines of “having diversity as a priority”.
3. The communications and marketing team for the 2018 conference will campaign to ensure more diversity at the conference.

You might have some questions about the above, let us try to anticipate those:

1. Why did you even ask for attendees’ gender in the registration process for MyData 2017?
For some attendees, it was necessary for us to gather this information in order to arrange international travel during the conference.

2. What about those who do not identify as “male” or “female” or who do not subscribe to the binary conceptualisation of gender?
We wish to fully respect each individual’s right to their gender identity and we do not wish to imply that male and female are the only options. As our Jedi and Apache Attack Helicopter attendees from 2017 can attest, everyone is free to identify themselves as they wish.

3. What about diversity of background, religion, ability, or other such factor? Why just gender?

We believe gender balance is an important goal that we have chosen as our focus at this time, but this in no way implies that we are not committed to building a conference, and a movement, that is diverse and inclusive whichever metric we use. If you’d like to share your ideas for how to achieve this in areas other than gender as well, please do!

And yes, we too think that in the year 2018 this should no longer be an issue, but sadly it still is. However, we’re convinced that through relentless work by countless people across the globe, we can make equality a reality!

If we are missing something here, please comment and discuss! How did your event do it? What else should we take in account?

¹ MyData has been a very interdisciplinary event, where attendees as well as presenters come from legal, academic, tech, business, and NGO backgrounds.