This document discusses Jill Binder's efforts to empower and encourage more diverse groups of speakers, especially women, at WordCamp events. It describes how she ran workshops at various WordCamps to help potential speakers develop ideas and gain confidence. At the first workshop in Vancouver in 2013, only 4 of the 28 speakers were women. However, after implementing strategies like networking, mentoring, and encouraging women to speak at smaller events first, the number of women applicants increased dramatically to 20 of 60 for Vancouver in 2014, resulting in 9 of the 18 speakers being women. The workshops and other initiatives helped promote more diversity and representation among WordCamp speakers.
1. EMPOWERING SPEAKERS:
A J o u r n e y t o E n c o u r a g e
W o m e n a n d D i v e r s e
G r o u p s a t
W o r d C a m p s
Jill Binder
jillbinder.com
Twitter : @jillbinder
21. WHAT IS STOPPING WOMEN?
• I chatted with many other organizers at WordCamp
San Francisco 2013
• Common problem for everyone
• We actually had a high number
• Wanted to accept more women, but they just weren’t
applying
22. BEFORE I GO ON…
• Going to talk about gender like it’s a binary, even
though it’s not; Women blob, men blob
WOMEN MEN
23. WHY? WHO CARES? IT SHOULD BE
THE “BEST SPEAKER,” RIGHT?
(aka speakers who have had a lot of experience
speaking…)
1. Audience not represented by the speakers
2. Open source users not represented by the speakers
3. Our speakers help shape our technology
4. Unique perspectives and multi-roles
24. WHAT IS STOPPING WOMEN?
• A lot of reasons
• One we can actually do something about:
–When we ask women, “Hey, will you speak at my
conference?”
–Their two most common answers:
27. DISPELLING THE “EXPERT” MYTH
• Person who said yes
• Impostor syndrome
• Expert on your own experiences
28. MY WORKSHOP IDEA
• Brainstorm
• Show they have literally a hundred of ideas (that is
how many we generate in an exercise)
• (Biggest problem then becomes picking one!)
33. WORKSHOP (VANCOUVER VERSION)
• Second workshop, merged with global work, refined,
added content:
–First year’s team
–Mandi Wise (previous participant who had become a
frequent speaker)
34. CITIES THAT WERE INSPIRED AND
CREATED THEIR OWN WORKSHOPS
• Seattle
• Portland
• Montreal
• Montreal ran it in New York
35. WORDCAMP SAN FRAN 2014
• Asked us to create workshop script for all diversity
• We gathered all the best from Seattle, Montreal,
Portland, and Vancouver
• Morgan Kay, Kathryn Presner, Tammie Lister, Andrea
Middleton, Jen Mylo, myself
• (Apologies if I’ve missed anyone)
36. WORKSHOP AGENDA
• Introductions
• Why are we holding a workshop for
• Dispelling speaker myths
• Why do you want to speak?
• Talk formats
• Big Braindump
37. WORKSHOP AGENDA
• Narrowing Selection
• Refining Chosen Topic
• Present Topic
• Writing the Proposal
• Coming up with a great title
• Writing Your Bio
38. WORKSHOP AGENDA
• Present Titles and Pitches
• Writing The Outline
• Present outline
• Becoming a Better Speaker
• Creating Great Slides
39. HOW ELSE DID WE GET MORE
WOMEN?
(Ambitious: Dev Edition)
• I networked with more women in WordPress
–Online
–In person
• Our team sent out personal invitations to apply to
WordPress women of our tricity region
40. • Encouraged them to speak at small meetups first
(WordPress and other, in and beyond Vancouver)
• When we asked if they would apply, we mentored
them:
–Suggest things we know they could talk about
–Explain that we didn’t want How-Tos as much as
stories
• Ask if they have a good story about something
44. OTHER THINGS WE COULD DO
• Offer childcare
• Meetings at different times that work for women with
families.
–Don’t hold all the events at 9pm at night.
• Let people opt out of being photographed
45. WE ALSO…
• Not relating to women, but relating to diversity:
–Made sure the venue was accessible
• Elevator
• Single stall washrooms available
• Requested no scents
• Said they could get up and move around
• Ask for their preferred pronoun
Please hold your questions until the end.
Big topic that can get easily derailed with interesting discussions
We’ll have a big QandA and discussion section after
I didn't know it was a problem
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Sad cat
1. A large number of the speakers at WordPress meetups and WordCamps (and tech events in general) at the time were white men. That means that the speakers did not represent everyone sitting in the audience. Underrepresented groups, for example women, may feel like they don't belong there. But there are many women with a wide range of knowledge to share and everyone can feel included.
2. WordPress is amazing in that it is open source and so all sorts of people use it. We want a more fair representation of the users in the people who are speaking.
3. One of the ways in which WordPress is being shaped is by the people who speak about it publicly. Many women, by nature of having had different life experiences, would approach problems differently. Just as how a developer's point of view is different from a user's point of view, so are our viewpoints vs the standard speaker. Women have experiences that aren't necessarily being shared right now.
4. By bringing in more diverse people, there's a better chance of bringing in folks who are straddling several roles and thus creating unique things with unique perspectives. Power users who use it in interesting ways, front-end developers, business people who use plugins to make specific kinds of sites, typographers who use WordPress to do crazy things with typography.... People to talk about running a business in WordPress, how developers can communicate with designers, different things you can do with WordPress...... etc.
A lot of societal reason
Myths:
The person at the front of the room is not necessarily an expert, it’s the person who said yes
Here’s where I’m lumping genders in a blobs again: often if a man knows a little bit, he’ll sign up to speak. If a woman knows a little bit, she’ll say she doesn’t know enough.
Women typically suffer from Impostor Syndrome more. Impostor Syndrome is thinking you don’t really have the knowledge or skills to be here, but you have managed to fool everyone and soon they’ll find out.
You are an expert on your own experiences
A lot of talks are big "how to" brain dump sessions. "How to make a plugin" might be someone walking through how to make it, maybe even live coding, and then at the end, there are questions.
WordCamp Central has found that this isn't necessarily a good way to impart information. People often walk away feeling overwhelmed and not remembering anything that they learned.
There are other talk formats that promote story-based learning. Talking about how you learned something, for example, means other people can also learn how to learn. As well, different talk formats involving more people, let’s say a duo talk, becomes more engaging.
Here are some of the various formats:
• How To: The standard way that tech talks happen
• Discussion: You are the facilitator on a topic and the audience discusses it together
• Panel: Multiple people answer questions on the same topic
• Story-based: This could be how you learned something, mistakes you made, or any other narrative format
• Case Study: The story of how you created one thing, in particular
• Workshop: A hands-on learning experience where people bring their laptops and create a thing as you go
Our results:
Many of the women who came out to our workshop were people of colour and we had women of different physical abilities. So we had more diversity.
And, some of them stepped up to become leaders in our community.
This is isn’t just about getting more speakers of different types. It’s what happens when you give different voices a voice.
Any questions or comments on
Anything I’ve talked about,
Women,
Diversity,
Men,
Not all men,
What you could possibly talk about,
Our workshop,
Community,
Answering your public speaking questions,
Me,
How Seattle did their process this year,
Anything else related
