DEMOfall Increases Women's Participation by 25%

Environment: DEMOfall 2006, my favorite product launch conference, due to tremendous company selection and hosting by Chris Shipley.

Caveats: To be consistent with last year's count, I again made the count based on the attendee list. And again, I didn't count anyone, male OR female, from the list that was clearly third-party conference support (e.g., PR consultants.) 25 names total culled from the count due to this call. And I had to make best guess on about a dozen very international first names.

Count:
Women: 115
Men: 514

Women at DEMOfall 2006: 18.28%

I've officially been counting the XXs for one year - the first public count that I provided was for DEMOfall 2005. This means that I can finally compare apples to apples - same conference organizers, similar event marketing, consistent target group, etc. - and start to look for trends in the demographics. (Mmmm, data!) In 2005, 14.67% of the DEMOfall attendees were women. Regardless of what small error rate there may be in my methods, the 24.6% increase in the ratio of women attending is noticeable. I have no idea if this is due to any specific effort of IDG or Guidewire Group staff, if this is indicative of other trends in emerging companies, or (hopefully not) if this is just a data anomoly....though I do know that it was a pleasant surprise.

Comments

[jennyw]

Great to hear! Did you do any stats on how well women were represented as demo'ers?

[Silly]

Hey why not count how many white people there were vs. black? Or Indian vs. Hispanic? Or people over 6ft. vs under?

When will people learn to just accept people as people and not pay attention to these silly little things.

[Christine Herron]

People pay attention to what they care about...I don't believe that the authors of Title IX were being silly, and the positive impact of metric awareness has been well-studied. This post is for those who find demographics worthwhile, not those who find the numbers irrelevant. Isn't choice marvelous?