The Weekly ReBoot - Mini Hack #14 Creating space for more women's voices

Today a women-in-tech inspired mini hack, how to invite more women’s voices to participate and ask questions in open forums at conferences.

If you listened closely to the podcast last week which was recorded live at LAST conference you would have heard this hack invoked in REAL time.

Here’s the problem, Men always ask questions first, and are always more likely to follow up with more questions and then build on them. Here’s the article that Ed O’Shaunessy shared that has the data on this topic and convinced me to do something more intentional in our session in the afternoon.

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/10/women-ask-fewer-questions-men-conference-talks-new-studies-suggest

Simply saying “I will take women’s questions as a preference” is enough for the men’s hands to go down and the women’s - given a little time - to go up.