The Sikh Geek

The conference yesterday had the title “Women” in it and one of the questions that the organiser Sue Thomas asked was “Why a Women’s” conference? I was one of 3 guys there and was only there because Sue had seen my blog post about the event and posted that men were welcome. I’m really glad she did. It’s an interesting question because there was an obvious feeling that the types of conversations were different than had it been a largely male dominated event. I can understand the motivations because being Indian and therefore from a recognised ethnic minority group, the same thought processes prevail when Minority Business Groups are formed. It’s natural to want to collaborate and network with people who you have something in common with, whether that’s gender, ethnicity or something else.

There were many extremely successful, intelligent and articulate women there and as I said in my previous post about the conference the presenters could’ve easily carried their own in any forum. I was talking to one of the presenters, Jory at lunchtime and were discussing BlogHer which provides a community for women bloggers and which now is being courted by many mainstream advertisers.

Was it about feminism? I think not, in the tradtional sense of feeling disempowered by a male dominated society. It wasn’t a “look how badly we are treated by the world” and “we should take up arms against it”. The great thing about Blogging is that it is a leveler in many senses and you are judged on the quality of your content as Meg Pickard showed. The fact that “Women” organised a conference on new media technology such as Blogging in Leicester, just shows you how forward thinking they are!

There are issues as to how female bloggers are perceived, in that once someone knows that a blogger is a woman they want to know what she looks like. Eileen talked about this experience in her talk and eventually she put a picture up of herself on her blog. The Kathy Sierra threats have been very sexually explicit in their threats, which forced her to stop blogging. I’m not sure you would get those type of threats against a male blogger?

Therefore, I would say keep it a women focused event because by showing a sucessful forum for women will automatically breed wider success just as Jory has done with BlogHer. It also goes to show how uncreative we men are! It’s true women are great communicaters whereas a male environment can get very competitive and egotistical!