Women speakers at Web 2.0 expo SF?
Written on April 12, 2008 – 11:49 am
Simone Brummelhuis, writing about women on the web
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As the Web 2.0 conference in San Fransisco is approaching, I thought to take on a look how many ‘female Steve jobs’ will appear on stage. By counting the list of 200+ speakers, 20 are women, so that’s 10%. Among them is somebody whose according to my definition a female hero, Tara Hunt, CEO of Citizen Agency.
Interesting is that of those 20 women, at least 10 still need to submit their bio (10 days before the actual conference), while of the male speakers about 99% have their bio submitted. Come on women, write down your achievements, or if you are to shy, hire a personal branding agency.
Of the keynote speakers, I only counted 2 women. One of the underlying ideas of these series is to promote that more women put themselves, or are asked, on stage. Not only could these women act as role models for aspiring Internet entrepreneurs, another effect of making women visible in the Internet industry from the beginning, is that it may prevent devaluation of the industry at a later stage. Indeed, what has happened in some industries when women entered or became visible at a later stage is that the whole profession started to devaluate, in status as well as money wise. This happened, for example, when women entered the education workplace or became judges or doctors. But since the Internet industry is only 5000 days old…, an thus we are at the beginning of an era, it is in the interest for men and women not to let this happen in this industry.
So, as a tip to the organization of Web 2.0 expo San Fransisco, here are a few American female heroes from my database: Patricia Gallup , CEO of PCConnection. Jean Armour Polly, founder of netmom.com, and the first woman elected to the Internet Society board of Trustees, currently working on connecting rural libraries to the Internet. In this time of social networking by kids a valuable contributor to the discussion. And just to name a few other American female heroes: Nancy Cruickshank, CEO of Videojug, Michelle Pelluso, CEO of Travelocity, Dawn Lepore, CEO of drugstore.com, Rebecca Blood, author of a weblog handbook, Janet Hanson, founder of network 85broads.com, Lisa Sounia founder of Dopplr, Joyce Chung, early stage investor at Garage Ventures, Peggy Liu of Mustang Ventures and Joanna Rees, also an investor. Who else is ready for last minute booking?
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4 Responses to “Women speakers at Web 2.0 expo SF?”
By Drivingsouth on Apr 12, 2008 | Reply
Hi Simone.
Do you see a difference in the men-women proportion when looking at them as founders or as CxO’s?
If there are few women in the startup world which is sad, i have the perception that there are even less women as founders. Is this correct? I believe that the women issue is a lot more vocational at early stages of career than those common justifications about “family choices”.
You certainly see a greater amount of women taking MBA’s for instance but you don’t see as much on technology schools, initiatives around entrepreneurship and ultimately starting companies.
By Simone Brummelhuis on Apr 14, 2008 | Reply
On the speakers list (of f.e. webexpo 2.0.SF) the women are more likely to be consultants or freelance blog/marketing experts than founders/CxO’s. That’s one of the reasons I am compiling this database, to show that there are female founders and CxO’ out there.
Nonetheless, The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has released in 2005 a report on women and entrepreneurship. Findings include:
* The entrepreneurship gender-gap is widest in high-income countries, where men are twice as likely there to engage in both early-stage and established ventures. In middle-income countries the gap narrows to 25.6% in early-stage and broadens to 59.1 % for established business owners.
* In high-income countries there is no gender gap in term of business survival. However, in middle-income countries a woman’s business is significantly less likely to stand the test of time than a man’s.
Women in internet start their business mostly after 35 from an angle of retail, community and marketing.
I will try to get some more figures on number of women in MBA’s and technology schools.