This is part of an ongoing series called So you want more women at your tech event?
This past week I published a blog post on how having the porn industry sponsor tech events leads to decreased participation by women. A large number of people read the article, and left comments. Many of the comments were disappointing and off-topic. Continue reading
This is part of an ongoing series called So you want more women at your tech event?
If you are going to run a tech conference with fewer than 5% women speakers, you probably want to avoid additional criticism about your lack of inclusivity. But if you also have the adult entertainment industry sponsor your event, maybe you’re not really worried about being inclusive.
ConFoo 2012 (careful, that link is occasionally redirecting to porn sites in Russia*), which began yesterday, was already under criticism for it’s very low number of women speakers. Out of 109 speakers only 5 are women. That’s 4.6% to be exact. It’s also the third year that the proportion of women speakers has hovered around 5%. Continue reading
In July I was interviewed about WordCamp Montreal 2011 and on the role of diversity in the tech community. Check it out!
View the original video post here.
This is Part 3 of an ongoing series called So you want more women at your tech event?
One of the biggest mistakes I see conference organizers make is not making a public statement on gender equality. It’s a very small thing to do, but the effect can be huge.
I had been meaning to write this post earlier, but in August it’s easy to get sidelined by the summer weather. And I was looking for a good example. Luckily, yesterday I was sent a link to the Diversity Statement for PyCon 2012, the largest annual conference for the Python programming language.
At that same dinner, one African American woman summed up progress in this way: “We’ll know we have parity when mediocre black women get funding for bad ideas at the same rate as mediocre white men.”
Fraeda Kapor Klein On TechCrunch
Thanks to Cindy Gallop for drawing this to my attention.
This is Part 2 of an ongoing series called So you want more women at your tech event?
One of the easiest things you can do to get more women at your event is to make it cheap to attend.
Women have lower salaries and less disposable income than men. They are more often single parents. And this income gap is even larger for older women.
You will also have the advantage of an event that is more diverse in other ways, by removing a very real barrier to participation. Continue reading
I work and build websites in Quebec where I’m required to provide invoices in French as the default. This is perfect for my French-speaking clients. But many of my English-speaking clients prefer English invoices. This means that I need a multilingual billing system.
Many billing systems claim to be multilingual, when they are really unilingual in a language other than English. Unfortunately that type of system won’t work if you need to invoice some clients in one language and some in another. Continue reading
This week I was contacted by a potential client. They wanted a WordPress based eCommerce site. But there was a catch. They wanted it to be bilingual.
It’s tough to find a content management system that does bilingual well. It’s even more difficult when you add eCommerce to the mix.
In Quebec (where I build websites), if you are a commercial enterprise targeting Quebec businesses or consumers online, you are required by law to provide a complete French-language version of your website. But most people also want to take advantage of the larger English speaking markets in Canada and the US, and that means they need a multilingual website. Continue reading
This is the second part of a two-part series on designing for mobile.
Today, I’m going to cover SEO, server-side tweaks, and conditional tags. I’ll also look at how to deal with javascript and multimedia. I’ll be posting a short follow-up on accessibility soon. Check back for more.
Continue reading
This is Part 1 of an ongoing series called So you want more women at your tech event?
One of the first things you should do if you want more women at your tech event, is put a woman in charge. Tech events usually have an organizing committee and there should be at least one woman on that committee. You could even try two or more!
But what does “in charge” mean? It means having a woman organizer who will have some authority, who will have the power to say no and to implement positive measures that appeal to women. Yes, I’m telling male event organizers that they have to actually cede some power to women. Continue reading