Gender balance of our speakers

Background and rationale

With GeoBeer, we want that everybody with an interest in «geo» feels welcome at our events. Specifically, our manifesto declares:

• «Networking is inclusive: Everybody adds value.» and
• «We (…) welcome everybody: all genders, creeds and colours, citizen or expat, speaking French, Italian, German, Romansh, English, Python, C# or Javascript.».

We want to make GeoBeer events better events by holding up these principles (and the remaining principles of the manifesto).

Against this background, we sometimes discuss questions of openness, representation, and diversity within our team and with some of our sponsors, organisers, and audience members. Questions of representation pertain to many characteristics of humans, of course. For example, age, nationality, gender, path of education, language, sexual orientation, race, and many more. Here, we derive some data on representation by looking at gender balance of the GeoBeer speakers to date.

We used to not have any written restrictions or preferences regarding speakers at our events. As we have grown more and more aware (and concerned) about the afore-mentioned topics, we have included a clause in our dossier for local organisers that stipulates (but doesn’t enforce) more representation of women.

If you want to know more, please read about our reasoning about diversity and gender on our page about the gender balance of our audience.

Results

In GeoBeers #1 (in 2013) through #31, we have had a total of 75 talks (including technical contributions such as demos, but excluding welcome notes). Out of these talks, 15 were held by women and 60 were held by men. This puts the gender balance at 20% presentations by women and 80% by men.

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→ Look at our analysis of the event locations

→ Look at our analysis of the ticketing process

→ Look at our analysis of the audience gender balance