This is a guest post by Simone Brummelhuis. She’s co-owner of Iens and European Museum Guide. Currently, she works and lives in London. This is a series of Four Guest Posts which will be posted one a day.
As the Web 2.0 conference in San Fransisco is approaching (this event has now taken place!), I thought to take on a look how many ‘female Steve jobs’ will appear on stage. By counting the list of 200+ speakers, 20 are women, so that’s 10%. Among them is somebody whose according to my definition a female hero, Tara Hunt, CEO of Citizen Agency.
Interesting is that of those 20 women, at least 10 still need to submit their bio (10 days before the actual conference), while of the male speakers about 99% have their bio submitted. Come on women, write down your achievements, or if you are to shy, hire a personal branding agency.
Of the keynote speakers, I only counted 2 women. One of the underlying ideas of these series is to promote that more women put themselves, or are asked, on stage. Not only could these women act as role models for aspiring Internet entrepreneurs, another effect of making women visible in the Internet industry from the beginning, is that it may prevent devaluation of the industry at a later stage. Indeed, what has happened in some industries when women entered or became visible at a later stage is that the whole profession started to devaluate, in status as well as money wise. This happened, for example, when women entered the education workplace or became judges or doctors. But since the Internet industry is only 5000 days old…, an thus we are at the beginning of an era, it is in the interest for men and women not to let this happen in this industry.
So, as a tip to the organization of Web 2.0 expo San Fransisco, here are a few American female heroes from my database: Patricia Gallup , CEO of PCConnection. Jean Armour Polly, founder of netmom.com, and the first woman elected to the Internet Society board of Trustees, currently working on connecting rural libraries to the Internet. In this time of social networking by kids a valuable contributor to the discussion. And just to name a few other American female heroes: Nancy Cruickshank, CEO of Videojug, Michelle Pelluso, CEO of Travelocity, Dawn Lepore, CEO of drugstore.com, Rebecca Blood, author of a weblog handbook, Janet Hanson, founder of network 85broads.com, Lisa Sounia founder of Dopplr, Joyce Chung, early stage investor at Garage Ventures, Peggy Liu of Mustang Ventures and Joanna Rees, also an investor. Who else is ready for last minute booking?
About the author: Simone worked as a successful lawyer before becoming an entrepreneur by setting up her own B2B publishing company Brummsbooks. Thereafter as co-owner and managing director IENS she developed this start-up into the no. 1 user generated content database publisher of restaurant guides in The Netherlands (online and offline). With the Europeanmuseumguide.com, she intends to do the same. these posts are written as contributing editor for the nextweb.org and are re-produced to reach a wider audience.
As a woman, professional speaker and communication coach I applaud you for stating the obvious…We need more women on the stage! Women represent 89% of all buying decisions made but our voices are not present in the venues that drive decision makers.
Thank you for trying to light a fire under professional women everywhere to get out in their communities and industries and share the wealth of their knowledge.
If we ask for women speakers enough from the audience…event planners will need to respond!