On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I would be interested to see the gender breakdown in the CfP for
> comparable conferences (LITA National, Access) and if Code4lib's numbers
> are noticeably lower, meeting with those groups to determine why.
>

I would be happy to run the Forum 13 numbers after our CFP window closes in
the spring and engage in that sort of conversation.  (I don't speak for the
committee as a whole, of course.)

FYI, for Forum 12, the (non-keynote, non-poster-session) speakers were 41%
male, 56% female (small% I-couldn't-tell-from-names-or-find-photos).  I
don't know about the ratio of proposers as I wasn't on that committee.  I
don't know whether I feel good or bad about the 41/56 ratio -- I mean, it's
kinda even (yay!) but dramatically unrepresentative of librarianship as a
whole (boo!)

I feel much twitchier when I break down the list by race (71% white, though
that's actually less than librarianship as a whole, yikes) or library type
(76% academic? oh my).  I am *extremely confident* that library technology
use cases are not limited to white people in academic libraries. But if the
conversation is limited to those use cases, the technology actually
produced is likely to be as well.

Andromeda