About

Vision of one woman, supported by many, to work to change the gender
diversity of tech conferences through data and stats.

Mission

Bring awareness to the gender disparity that exists in tech conferences, by profiling individual conference events to calculate their diversity stats against the industry, and other tech conferences.

How It Began

I attended my first tech conference in 2008. Everyone else I knew attending was a man, but I thought that was the nature of my current group I was working with. In the sessions I saw few women attending, and remember seeing a Tweet come through for all the Women In Tech to gather for a group pic.

Since the conference was a couple thousand I figured I see a few hundred women. If I had to guess, there was 50. Fifty women out of 2000 attendees. It then occurred to be to look at the speaker line up, over 90% men speakers. My math brain immediately runs the numbers. Surely though, this was an edge case. Other conferences that year, I ran the numbers. Horrible. Such low numbers of women speaking at near every tech conference.

A year goes by and I'm back at that same original conference. Same, out of 150 speakers, 10 women. Looking at the speaker list on my phone, multiple scrolls to get to a women. That was it. I started tracking and reporting the data.

Why

Being a women in a male dominated industry is a battle. Battling for fair opportunities, to be heard, to find allies, and to let your talent be seen. Tech conferences are the window into the tech industry as a whole. It is what everyone sees as the choose and enter this career path. What if that was full of color and all genders?

I have learned expressing how situations made me feel, or times I felt mistreated changed very little. Queue gaslighting, and being told I needed to change. But the data. You can't argue the facts. That's what we are here to do with Comprend Us, show the data.

Comparing tech conferences across each other and to the average women working in tech within the US. Let's start this change by acknowledging where we are at, how we can change, and let's get started!

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Made with❤️by Sara Gibbons