[diversity] Collections of women speakers, to help conference organisers

Dear Paul,

thank you for your contribution and questions!

I will only reply to one of the things you mentioned:

On 30/05/17 02:08, Paul Ebersman wrote:
> I've been going through the various slides and papers referenced in the
> RIPE blog article. I think one thing that everyone doing conferences
> would benefit from is a wider diversity of speakers. But doing that
> requires that we get folks who haven't necessarily been to RIPE.
>
> There are a couple of folks collecting names of women available for
> technical talks and that's one place to start. I'll see who has
> something they are ready to share and post here.

Here are some links to the existing collections:

http://speakerinnen.org/en

For example, in category "Science and Technology" there are 674 speakers 
(speaker-innen) , on 100 topics:
https://speakerinnen.org/en/categories/11

Then there is this collection from 2012: http://bit.ly/ITWomenSpeakers

and, what started as not entirely serious conference by only women 
called KATIE --> https://katieconf.xyz/

.. turned out into a real conference with only female speakers.
I Australia, thou, so more appropriate for APNIC, but we did want to 
share experiences with other RIRs...


Also, I have personally made several lists: of organisations for women 
in tech, Twitter handles of collectives, and mailing lists:

https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Organisations
https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Twitter
https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Mailing_Lists

I often reach to these ones, when organising hackathons.

> One concern I have is that we not only actively reach out to speakers
> beyond the usual suspects but how we'll make them comfortable. It's not
> fun being the only <NON-MAJORITY> speaker on a panel or program. Do
> folks here have concrete suggestions on how we can give potential
> speakers that comfort and support?

There are several ways - some of these things we are doing at RIPE 
meetings already...
- having a Code of Conduct
- have Meet & Greet personnel to help newcomers
- provide funding (fellowship programme; academic cooperation funds)

... others we suggested to improve:
- provide childcare facilities
- introduce "mentorship" programme
- increase support for Net-Grrls (women-only social support group)

Here are more tips, that I collected over time:
https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Increasing_the_gender_diversity


I hope this helps!

Regards,
Vesna