Interesting (and stupid) stats on us
This blog post made me wonder if it would really be that unlikely to meet women at LIFT08, and so I took 5 minutes to do some interesting and less interesting stats on the 541 participants who are set to attend at this point.
Let's start with the interesting stats.
Gender of attendees.
We have 412 men and... 129 women. Good for 24% of all attendees.
(sorry I couldn't resist the cheap color code ;)
24% is of course not enough, but on the other side I think we are 1) getting better 2) above the average of other tech conferences. I very seriously toyed with the idea of giving women a discount like they do in French nightclubs (you see where I get my ideas from ;) but at the end of the day I thought if might sound a bit too... desperate? And as much as I think we need to care about this issue (especially in the conference program, i.e. the part we control) I believe womens' under-representation is more a global than a LIFT issue. We are doing our part, but society needs to evolve a bit too.
Countries of attendees.
We have 30 different nationalities registered, a figure that is actually lower than the truth. I always say that LIFT is 60% locals, 40% foreigners, but only 40% Swiss and 60% foreigners. That is because Geneva is such an international city. We have many attendees living in Geneva (and therefore reporting "Switzerland" as their country) but coming from abroad, so the number of countries is always a bit under evaluated.
This year we welcome new countries like Israel, Singapore, Costa Rica, Serbia, Romania, Malta, Slovakia or Mexico!
Job titles
The most used job title is "journalist" (we gave 60 passes to the press and bloggers, 30 more than what was planned, and we could not accept all demands, sorry about that), barely beating CEO (what else!)
In our system the job title is an optional and free field, so this data set is not very relevant, but still funny.
Most used last names
That's for the stupid part: the most used last names. And we have some clear winners with the Smith, the Favre, the Jones and the Richard! 2 English names in the top 4, we are an international community. At LIFT Asia this stat will be very interesting, and I am ready to bet a lot of money that Lee, Kim and Park will top this list VERY easily.
- Laurent Haug's blog
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Comments
Laurent, Interesting data!
Laurent,
Interesting data! Well done.
On women participants -- How about women speakers? The % of women speakers is lower than the participants'.
On countries -- Data on Switzerland is tricky. Many people who live in Switzerland do not necessarity "represent" the country. For example, more than 50% of the residents in Geneva are non-Swiss. Swiss may not be so dominant as it looks in the number.
Yoshiko
I would be interested in
I would be interested in comparing the percentage of women in the official program to the percentage in the community program.
One thing to keep in mind when manipulating these figures: the number of women you see in the program does not correspond to the number of women we invited. So take great care when talking about these numbers, because they don't necessarily reflect the efforts we put in bringing more women to the conference.
Laurent, Your point
Laurent,
Your point taken.
This gives us another question -- Hit rate of speakers.
Which was higher between women and men -- rate of acceptance of invitation to speak at LIFT 08?
Above said, I want to be constructive. I'm happy to help you to increase the number of women speaker, at least one more women, at LIFT 09, if the LIFT Committee would feel it help.
Yoshiko
Wow - the percentage of
Wow - the percentage of participating CEOs must be higher than Davos'...!? ;-)
Thank you for the last names
Thank you for the last names analysis. My plan for world domination is working nicely ;-)
Scott, You are in for a
Scott,
You are in for a tough battle with the "Wang" in China (100 million)...
laurent! your place in
laurent! your place in heaven is a sure bet, only because you did not give women a discount ;-)
why would we be surprised that a conference focusing on society and technology attracts a great number of journalists (media workers), when the technology in question here has a whole lot to do with the advancing edge of media and communication?