Web 2.0 Maintains Rate of Women's Participation

Environment: The sold-out Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco this month, hosted by O'Reilly Media and CMP Technology.

Caveats: I made this year's count based upon the attendee list, which tends to be more accurate than counting heads. (In 2005, I counted heads during one of the headliner sessions.)

Count:
Women: 222
Men: 1003

Women at Web 2.0: 18.12%

At last year's Web 2.0, women made up 17.65% of the audience. While this could be taken to mean that Web 2.0 has increased its reach across genders, this may also simply be a factor of the different counting methods. I'm also not sure what statistical error rate is in effect for 1225 data points. (Any stats hounds out there that want to comment?) Like this year's DEMOfall trip, the repeat visit to Web 2.0 enables me to compare apples to apples and look for trends. DEMOfall, however, showed a substantial increase in women's participation - from 14.67% in 2005 to 18.28% in 2006. Web 2.0 did not - but then again, Web 2.0 started from a higher baseline and had less relative improvement to make.

Comments

[Beth]

Christine: You might want to consider doing a post on the "Take Back the Net" campaign
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/11/kablog_reclaimi.html