Why do we have a selection process?

Creating an inclusive event is super hard. Especially when you want to make an event for women who are not normally included in events.

You need to consider a lot of things — how to make attendees feel welcome, how to ensure there are genuine connections, how to make it a nice experience for women with children, how to make it a nice experience for women without children, how to include women from backgrounds that are normally underrepresented, as well as women who are *always at these events.*

One of the things that makes us saddest though, is we can’t get all the women that register their interest along to our events (yet). Because we want to keep our events to 100 attendees.

In selecting our attendees, we are committed to running a diverse event — which means our attendees cover the full spectrum of ethnicities, ages and professional expertise. Our goal is to at least reflect the New Zealand statistics of age and ethnic groups, so we all have the opportunity to listen and speak with a wide range of perspectives.

But, why do we keep it to 100 women??

• Big, affordable, and accessible venues in New Zealand — there aren’t many places to comfortably house hundreds of people. We chose our venue because it was affordable (keeping the price low), has private and semi-private rooms (we’re getting too old for dorms), and they offered healthy and affordable catering. Since it’s winter, camping wasn’t really an option.
• The number of people that you could humanly connect with — we want the women who attend to theoretically be able to meet everyone. 120 is probably the upper limit of what is possible in 48 hours. Much bigger than that, and we’d lose the sleepover vibe…
• Not everyone likes large crowds, and we’d like to get women along who don’t normally thrive in big, busy, conferences. As well as women who do thrive in big, busy, conferences. And while 120 is probably going to be overwhelming for some of the people in the room, it’s a lot less scary than 350 women. The content of the weekend is going to be overwhelming enough, without the scale of people coming into it.
• We want to create a place where people feel safe opening up. We think we can do that for 100, but we’re really not sure if we could manage it for a larger number of attendees.
• We are doing this on top of our day jobs. We want to make this happen, but we really don’t have the capacity to create something larger (even if we had more help).

Our selection process

We can promise, it was not just the cool kids club — quite a few of our coolest friends have been put on the waitlist in the past (WE STILL LOVE YOU).

The criteria we use is:

• Age — not just 30-somethings. Especially 30 somethings from Wellington.
• Ethnicity — we tried to represent NZ’s demographic diversity as best we could
• Diversity of background — we didn’t just want CEOs and startup founders, we wanted a wide range of sectors.
• Diversity of experiences — we didn’t just want the same sorts of people to show up.

We want to make the registration process open and easy so we can reach wider than our networks, and find women who don’t typically attend events like this. We don’t want to make it a first-come/first-serve event, because we wanted time to reach those women.

What’s next?

If you’re waitlisted for one of our events, fear not. You might still get a ticket as often people’s circumstances change.

Also, you’ll be prioritised for our next event. So if you don’t come this time, you’re more likely to be selected in the future.

While we would love to have all of you there, we are constrained by space, budget, and the number of women that can humanly connect in a weekend. Our selection will absolutely not be a reflection on your qualification to attend or the amount of sh*t you get done. We promise. A great experience and diversity are our primary goals!