Action Alert | Something Is Missing At Web Summit 2017: Women

Elisa Camahort Page (@ElisaC), co-founder of BlogHer, started a lively conversation on Facebook last week when she made an observation about the upcoming Web Summit, “323 speakers announced thus far. 60 women. 8 black people, only one of whom is a woman. (This is based on visual scanning, so obviously I could have missed some folks that don't present in a way I can tell.*)” Others responded with similar sentiments regarding the 2016 conference, ideas to improve the gender makeup of the panel, and, of course, snarky GIFs — it is a web summit after all. While it’s frustrating that the post is necessary in the first place, we can’t help but applaud everyone who responded and took note. Web Summit 2017, you say you have 1,000 more speakers to announce. Let’s hope more than half of them are women.

* We counted. There are 267 men and 65 women announced as speakers as of August 1st.

267 men/only 65 women speakers so far at #WebSummit. @ElisaC says that’s not good enough. So do we. #GenderAvenger http://app.genderavenger.com/share/3d0f93a66af37e8199782c74496b57d4