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CFUnited Blog

Announcing Women Speakers

Posted At : April 28, 2009 11:52 AM | Posted By : Liz Frederick
Related Categories: topics, conference, speakers, website, community

Here are the list of women speakers that have been chosen to present their topic at CFUnited!

Dee Sadler - "Flash Catalyst round trip wireframe"

Lisa Heselton - "Rapid Application Prototyping w/Captivate"

Rachel Lehman - "Keeping Front End Dependencies Under Control"

Huyen Dao - "Divide and Conquer: Greenthreading in Flex/AIR"

Gail Shoffey - "Payment Processing Paradigm"

Selene Bainum - "eCommerce: Build or Buy"

These topics will be listed on the main site momentarily. Help me publicly congratulate all the ladies for submitting topics. I'm very excited to have them speaking at our conference.

STATISTIC: 14% of the current registrations for CFUnited are Women!

This entry was posted on April 28, 2009 at 11:52 AM and has received 2065 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

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#1 by Howard Fore on 4/28/09 - 6:32 PM

I'm confused. Why is the addition of new speakers that happen to be female being marketed like "CFUnited: Now with women!"? It's a technical conference, I'd expect the sessions to be chosen on their technical merit and the expected draw for an audience. As a programmer why do I care about the gender of the presenter. Why is this an issue?
#2 by Elliott Sprehn on 4/28/09 - 6:42 PM

Diversity of background among the speakers means a better conference for everyone, and one factor in that is definitely gender.

This field is also absolutely dominated by males, and that means there can be a strong male bias in speaker suggestions, and also an intimidation factor when soliciting developers to potentially speak at conferences.

By seeking out women explicitly we are attempting to work against some of these barriers to entry and provide a better conference for our attendees.
#3 by Howard Fore on 4/29/09 - 12:57 AM

Just so I don't come off as a total caveman, I do applaud your efforts to reduce the male domination of the CF community. It just seemed odd to me to call it out like this and not have it more integrated in the normal call for speakers. Then again I missed the original blog post about the new sessions and Ray's discussion.