Women still lack prominence at Web Summit and in tech

With a last minute opportunity to get coveted exhibitors space at the Web Summit, founder of Irish organisation DigiWomen Pauline Sargent thought on her feet and quickly created a survey designed to measure attitudes towards women leaders in technology.

“I didn’t want to waste the opportunity to talk to Web Summit attendees about the issues surrounding women in technology. We thought the survey would be a good way to get some data on this.”

Over the last few days she has been talking to men and women of all ages and backgrounds who shared their experiences (positive and negative) and took the survey, which will soon be turned into a report. People were quizzed on whether they thought women speakers were as likely to draw a big crowd at tech conferences and if they were perceived as interesting or inspirational in comparison to male speakers.

“The Web Summit has been doing a good job of getting more women speakers year on year with a total of 96 this year in comparison to the 29 that spoke at last year’s event,” said Sargent, who made her way into technology via a masters degree in digital marketing after working for years in the travel industry.

Sargent, however, pointed out that a closer look at the 96 women speakers revealed that this included a number of moderators or those introducing or facilitating other speakers, which she observed was not quite the same as being the person that people came to see give an inspiring talk.

So that figure of 15 per cent: there weren’t quite as many female speakers as we would have thought? Exactly, says Sargent, who is confident that there will be many more next year if DigiWomen’s feedback from Web Summit attendees is anything to go on.

She says that one of the barriers to getting a lot of young women interested in startups in the technology space is that they think they’re not “techy” enough. But sometimes they’re faced with stereotypes, she says, describing young female app makers who had recently been awarded a prize for their idea only to be told that they were chosen because they were “nice girls” and told their business wouldn’t sell.

Sargent met them here at the Web Summit and introduced them to IDA Ireland with very positive results. "That's what DigiWomen is here for. We want to help women get those opportunities."