2018 12d Technical Forum – Demographics

After our 2016 event, I wrote a piece (full article below) about the (albeit slowly) changing face of conference demographics…at that time, the percentage of women in attendance had grown from less than 1% in 2005 to around 5% in 2016…and as I write this today, I’m in the wake of a 2018 event which had a little over 10% female delegates.

Now, I won’t pretend I didn’t think about this in the lead-up to the event…I can’t say I didn’t wonder, at least in passing, whether we should be doing more to increase the numbers of women in attendance. Whether we should be offering incentives, creating more ‘content for women’…what’s the answer? Being a woman myself gives me exactly none of these answers.

As the Technical Forum drew nearer, I realised we’d actually been doing a bit of this organically, and I hadn’t really paid attention. In the line-up of presentations, we had more than one woman who’d put her hand up to speak to our eager audiences about a field of expertise. We’d even gone and booked a female guest speaker to try to fill the enormous shoes of Brian Shul, Dr Karl, and Dr Alan Duffy (incidentally, Dr Catherine Ball, the “Dame of Drones”, stepped up to this task with aplomb). At least two of our stand-holders in the exhibition space were women (which only sounds significant when compared with zero, even in 2016). And as things drew even nearer, I discovered that one of the top prizes in our Innovation Awards had been won by a woman, too (congratulations again to Megan Dillon of Mackay Regional Council for her ‘Banishing the Drafting Demon’ win!)…not because anyone felt that this should be the case, but because her entry was so spectacular that the judges just knew it was the one. To my mind at the time, adding too much to this organic gender equality gap-bridging would have felt disingenuous.

In any case, I don’t want to make this a blog entirely about gender (in)equality…there are other interesting demographics from the event I’ve been asked by delegates to share when possible!

This information is not only interesting, it will be useful for us in planning the many amazing information sessions that will form our 2020 Technical Forum…stay tuned for more details very soon!

–Lisa Stewart

 

2016 Piece – ‘Observations of Changing Conference Demographics’

Something came to light at our 2016 12d International Conference…we had more women in attendance than ever before. We’ve been holding these Conferences since 2005, and the numbers have been steadily creeping up over that time. We’re not talking life-changing numbers here, by any stretch – we’re still looking at perhaps 5% of delegates being female…but that’s crept up from 1% in 2005, so there’s a definite trend there. It’s noticeable not just anecdotally but statistically, and it was suggested to me that we highlight this somehow. But how?

It’s not that I’m not on board with celebrating bridging a gender gap in industries which really have no reason to be so male-dominated in this day and age. I’m not saying I don’t think it’s great that we’re slowly changing the world and not drawing arbitrary lines down who can participate in which activities. I’m just not sure how to best highlight how great this is without being patronising (I’m not convinced that being a woman myself would lessen the effect of this potential patronisation). Without subjecting these women to something I imagine they deal with almost daily…this concept of ‘othering’. Those moments that they’re reminded that they’re first women, and then engineers (or surveyors, etc.). When will we reach a point when everyone can just be a person with a job instead of a Female Engineer (“Isn’t that interesting?” “How great that a woman can do that!”)? Because why shouldn’t she be able to perform this job, or any, really?

Then again, if we pay no attention to this growing trend, we run the risk of not noticing that we’re progressing – albeit slowly – as a society. These are the indicators of this progress, and we can’t ignore them. But I think we need to just somehow point them out casually and move on, rather than making them a huge focus.