Last year in one of my conference talks, I mentioned that I have kids. After my talk, a woman came up to me and asked me how I do it. How I have a full-time job and do conferences and write and be a mom. She was interested in this because she was planning to start a family soon and wanted to know how other working moms in our industry manage it.
This got me thinking about moms in web design and development. And I realized that out of the 40-ish conferences I have spoken at over the last 8 years, there has been only one other speaker at a conference with me who was a mom. Maybe two. In both cases, their kids were grown or nearly grown, not babies or little kids that can’t fend for themselves for a couple days while mom is away.
It’s not that I haven’t spoken with lots of great women. I’ve been fortunate that most of the conferences I’ve spoken at have had women well represented in the speaker line-up. But all of these women, bar one or two, are not mothers. I’m sure there are other mom speakers out there like me, but the point is that they’re very rare.
Dad speakers are not rare. There are tons of dad speakers at web design and development conferences. I’d say at least half of the men I speak with are fathers of young children. Lots have babies at home.
Every family is different, of course, but speaking of the larger culture, it’s usually easier for dads in our society to leave the kids for several days to go speak at a conference than it is for mom to leave. It’s also usually easier for dads to just attend the conference. I’m willing to bet that there’s a far higher percentage of dads out of the male attendees than there is of moms out of the female attendees.
Now, I have nothing against all of the lovely kid-free women at conferences that I have had the pleasure to meet. But I think making conferences more mom-friendly—and more diverse in general, in every sense of the word—benefits all women. If we want more women in web design, we have to make it easier for them to stay in web design after they have kids. Much of this comes down to employment practices, of course, but I think we can do our little part by making conferences more accommodating to the needs of moms, and by having mom speakers so that other women can see that it is possible to have kids and still be successful in your field.
So here’s what I’ve decided to do. First, I’m going to mention that I’m a mom in every single conference presentation I do from now on. I don’t usually mention my kids, because I figure most of the attendees don’t care, but I’ve decided that’s OK. They don’t have to care. If it helps that one woman in the audience who was thinking about starting a family and wondering if she could stay in web design afterwards to feel a little more confident that she can do it too, then I’d say the 10 seconds devoted to mentioning my kids in my conference presentation are worth it.
It may also help dispel the stereotype of moms as not being tech-savvy. We’re sometimes told in conferences and blog posts to keep our products so simple that our moms could use them. Moms are a lazy stand-in for non-tech-savvy, novice users. We need to stop framing moms this way. It’s just plain wrong (moms today generally are very tech-savvy) and it hurts the perception of women in our industry.
Me mentioning my kids in a recent conference talk.
The next thing that I’d like to do is help organize a parent-friendly conference. Not a conference just for parents, of course, but a conference that includes things that will make it easier for parents to attend. I’m thinking of small things like having a room dedicated for breast pumping and breastfeeding. I’m thinking of big things like having childcare available for the little kids and coding classes available for the big kids so they can learn more about what Mom or Dad does all day at work and have their own fun little mini conference to benefit from.
I know that things like this have been done before. I spoke at a conference when my son was a newborn (I flew in and out the same day), and I asked the organizers to provide me a private space to pump during the event. They were happy to do so, and I’m sure would have been happy to let other women pump there too, but this wasn’t an advertised facility of the event and thus no other women took part. I wonder if another mom or two might have bought a ticket and attended the event had she known she wouldn’t have to worry about finding a place to pump during the day? I’ve pumped while sitting on a bathroom floor in an airport. No woman wants to resort to crap like this. Give us a comfy, clean place to pump and tell us about it upfront, and you might just find a couple extra moms at your conference.
I’ve heard of a couple events that have planned for kids to attend with their parents. Last year at OSCON, they held an entire day of workshops for school-aged children to learn about computer programming. It cost just $20 and sold out. Also last year, OpenITP ran a hackathon and provided child care. You can read about how they went about setting it up and some other tech events that also have incorporated child care in the past.
My parent-friendly conference is just an idea right now. I have no idea how to organize a conference. I have no idea if this is even realistic and doable. So what I’d like to do is get your help. Tell me if this will never work, tell me it’s awesome and you want to help, tell me your great idea for what we can do to get more moms in web design and development. And then we’ll go from there.
