An apology

Yesterday we ran a banner ad that was stupid, and on reflection, insulting. It certainly didn’t reflect our views and if you’ve seen the offending ad you can see that it lacks the intelligence to be anything other than plain stupid.

By contrast, our track record and future plans clearly demonstrate our commitment to enhancing the standing and participation of women in the tech community. We know there aren’t enough women in tech and we’ve been doing our bit to encourage more women into the industry.

For example:

-  The first 10 speakers announced for last year’s Web Summit were all women. We made a point of this, to highlight how male dominated tech conferences are. In the end over a quarter of our speakers were female. It’s not 50/50 like it should be but the average at tech conferences is closer to 10%.

-  That ratio is set to grow this year. Two out of our first five major speakers in our announcement today were female.

-  Our public call for speaker suggestions this year has been solely dedicated to female speakers. We want to highlight the success stories.

-  We also organised the highly successful Leaders’ Lunch as part of last year’s Web Summit – a networking event for women in tech, highlighting the successful leaders in the tech industry in Ireland, many of which, just happen to be women.  This year we’ll repeat and expand the event.

We’re just as embarrassed by this as you are outraged. We hope that the substance of our events is a much clearer indication of our commitment and attitude towards the role of women in the tech community than one poorly judged ad, for which we unreservedly apologise.

Our door is always open. Fire me across a mail at p@news.websummit.net if you have any thoughts, or suggestions on what we can do.

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