Jeni's Musings

It’s XTech 2008 next week. I’ll be there to talk about the work we at TSO have been doing with OPSI to add semantic information to the London Gazette using RDFa. It’s really interesting and timely work on all sorts of levels; you can read the abstract of the talk to get a taster and of course it’ll be published afterwards.

Anyway, I was just browsing through the schedule and it struck me how few women they were speaking. Looking at the speaker list, out of the 64 speakers, just three are women. Three! That’s not even 5%!

Looking back at last year, it was a little better, at nine out of 94, which is getting towards 10%. It wasn’t much better at XML 2007, where nine of the 82 speakers (11%) were female. At Extreme 2007, eight of the 60 speakers (13%) were women.

I wonder whether there are a low proportion of women attending these conferences generally, or whether women attend in higher proportions but don’t submit papers, or whether they submit papers but a smaller proportion are accepted.

Anyway, if you’re a woman who’s going to XTech 2008 and you want to get together to talk about kittens, drop me a line.