James Governor recently blogged about his desire to have a good gender balance for his upcoming Thingmonk conference. This is something that I would like to see at our EclipseCon conferences. At the most recent EclipseCon Europe event we had only 27 women out of 589 attendees. Not very good; actually pretty pathetic.
I don’t know of any silver bullet to address this imbalance. I like to think, at least hope, EclipseCon is a welcoming event for women. At past conferences, most women attendees I have spoken with seem to enjoy the conference. If this is not the case, I would invite people to please let me know what we can do to make it so.We will be putting a code of conduct in place but we need to do more. If you have suggestions please leave a comment or send me an email (ian dot skerrett at eclipse.org)
One thing I would like to encourage is more speaking proposals from women. We have had some great women speakers in the past but they are unfortunately female speakers are always a minority. The Call for Papers is now open so the timing is good. If you are a women or know a women that would be a great EclipseCon speaker please submit a proposal. I am happy to report that we will have our first female keynote speaker. We will be announcing all the keynotes in a couple of weeks but I know she is going to be awesome.
