📣🚨 Action Alert | Microsoft Ignite Has Only 1 Woman as a Featured Speaker, Adding to Their Bad History

photo credit: Ray Bouknight [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

We’re getting really tired of influential companies like Microsoft not putting in the work to create gender-balanced speaker lineups. Check out this post from when we called them out over two years ago. Pretty bad, right? Well, things haven’t improved at all. At Microsoft Ignite 2021, men will make up 83% of the featured speaker lineup — EIGHTY-THREE PERCENT — and there is only 1 woman on the list! We know there is still a lot of work to do when it comes to gender parity, but you would think an industry leader like Microsoft, whose Board of Directors is 42% women, btw, would do what it takes to make sure that one of their most noteworthy conferences would pay more attention to the high value of diversity and inclusion and reflect that in their speaker curation.

Get it together and feature more women at Ignite, Microsoft!

It’s time for industry leaders like @Microsoft to put together gender-balanced speaker lists. One woman as a featured speaker at @MS_Ignite is definitely not enough, especially with its history. #MSIgnite #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/microsoft-ignite-only-1-woman-featured-speaker