How can we make tech conferences more inclusive?

Web Summit for women: survey results & our learnings

Last year, we published a blog and created a survey, using SurveyMonkey, because we were surprised that women seemed to be underrepresented onstage at Web Summit 2016, even though its Women in Tech initiative gave 10,000 free tickets to women around the world.

We were there ourselves because of this initiative (thanks, Web Summit!).

While the balance of attendees was above that for your standard tech event, we couldn’t help but notice the ratio of female to male speakers: 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 of the survey, and our collective recommendations for improving Web Summit’s (and other tech events’) gender balance in future.

The Survey results

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.

Doing better

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?

• Better speaker, startup inclusion among women as well, but there are other diversity aspects as well to be considered — race, culture, religion, disability..
• More female speakers on stage
• 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. Have more CEOs or HR people coming. 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
• Be incredibly intentional about curating speakers from diverse backgrounds who have interesting stories to tell.
• There shouldn’t be a women in tech “only” lounge. This type of segregation makes no sense.
• Share more success stories of women in tech/diversity.
• A specific fully equipped area for mothers that bring babies/kids.

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.

In terms of a Code of Conduct, all Web Summit events do have an anti-harassment policy visible at the bottom of their site. Personally, I think it’s worth questioning whether this framing positions it as a last resort rather than an opportunity to encourage positive behaviors. As an example, I would contrast with the Internet Freedom Festival, whose Code of Conduct features prominently at the top of their Wiki and ( as one respondent suggested, is something I have seen work well at other conferences, in order to set the tone and actually bring awareness around what is or isn’t appropriate. Personally, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and codes and policies, while they can seem pedantic, can help to reaffirm new norms and standards.

As Web Summit has just commenced their second campaign for Women in Tech attendance, we were eager to share our survey results and understand their plans for this year’s show and thank their media relations team for responding to our outreach.

They provided this quote in response:

Eleanor McGrath, head of media, said: “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.”

What now?

While we can’t provide any tangible quotas or promises for upcoming events, we can share our own learnings from this exercise:

• Be proactive but understanding: norms are norms and failure to shift from them doesn’t necessarily mean any bad intentions
• But they need to change and that’s why awareness raising is so important. We should continue to hold conferences accountable
• For these shifts to happen and for the right attention to be paid, it needs to come from the top down: inclusion must be a management priority as it takes work (which requires prioritization)
• And inclusion is more than diversity — it’s the opportunity to contribution to the main conversation

Tips and resources shared with us

• 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 and a great network and resource for any females working in STEM
• Articulate: a collection of tips for making better (and more diverse) speaking events
• Articulate Network Speakers List at Lanyrd
• Callback Women: advocacy, education, support, and promotion 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 and others to commit to, resources, including sample emails to send to event organisers to encourage diverse speaker representation
• Techcrunch Include
• Girl Geeks speaker resource
• 50/50 Pledge for gender diversity at tech events: speaker list and pledge available for event organizers
• Advice from Google on building inclusive tech hubs

Thank you to our supporters

We were blown away by the response to the blog posts and the survey itself and thank you so much to those who took the time to share the post and their feedback. We’re grateful to have garnered the interest and 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
• Ada’s List, a global network for women committed to changing the tech industry
• 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

And some closing thoughts from the formidable Cindy Gallop at a previous Web Summit event:

Thank you all for the amazing work you are doing in promoting diversity and the advancement of Women in Tech, Entrepreneurship and Leadership.

Diana, Luis (of SurveyMonkey) and Rebecca

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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. Naturally, all responses are anonymous.