Women speakers at Web 2.0 expo SF?
Written on April 12, 2008 – 11:49 am
Simone Brummelhuis, writing about women on the web
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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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
