You’re right that we need to take the conversation one (if not many) steps further. But now we’re talking about real culturally entrenched problems. And those conversations are super valuable. But I wonder how many men will even participate?

I like Mike and Jason’s approach as a beginning step. We all know that snark gets attention in this space so the more we can raise the flag in the beginning, the better.

And I’m just thinking out loud (or on my keyboard) here but I really do think we need more female role models in technology. And a big step toward getting there is having them speak at events! Catch 22?

Women (and men who care) need to be less intimidated to talk about the gender bias.

And VCs need to give more money to women. And we need more women VCs! Man, this issue runs deep. These are big conversations indeed.

And dammit, I have to get back to work. But yes, let’s have them.

This is where I imagine a panel discussion at sxsw about the gender bias in tech. And the audience – 100% women….

Ugh.

so, yes, absolutely, conference organizers should be doing their damnedest to get women speakers on their panels and taking advantage of the resources available to help them do that. that point has been well made, and while we need to keep up the pressure, it’s not enough. so here’s what i’d like to see this conversation evolve towards: ways to address the gender disparity in the technology realm over the long term. i want to talk about what i personally can do and what we collectively can do. how we can fix this. shaming conference promoters is effective in the short-term and undoubtedly cathartic, but there must be more we can do to promote systemic change.

sxsw does the best job and it’s still only 31% of their participants. most of the rest fall well short of that. so how do we deal with the larger issues that you bring up, micki? how do we correct for people who are “dismissive and disrespectful toward women in the field?” how do we find ways to involve women into the industry? i don’t want this all to fall down on the shoulders of the conference promoters. we all have something we can be doing here besides just calling them out, and risk failing to deal with the real problem if we just sit back and pat ourselves on the back for having done so.

so let’s have that discussion: what can we do? let’s assume the 30% ratio @ SXSW represents a truly accurate picture of the male to female ratio in the industry (i have no hard data on this but if anyone does i’d love to see it.) if that’s the case, the how do we move the industry towards having more women, so that an accurate representation of the male to female ratio at any given conference is actually 50/50? how do we turn this into a non-issue over the long term? what needs to change, and where can we start?