How to Meet Other Women at Tech Conferences

There I was, sitting in the #w2s audience amongst a sea of men, my Macbook resting on my lap, listening to Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist from Intel, speaking about the life of data. I glanced down at Tweetdeck and the stream of tweets with the hashtag #w2s to see what others thought of her and noticed this tweet by @solete:

"Will the women in the #w2s audience (((wave))) their hands please! Can't see many women."

I retweeted it and from there other women piled on and before I knew it I was virtually meeting other women at the conference. I loved it.

When Genevieve finished her talk and John Battelle thanked her she wagged her index finger at him and asked if she was the first woman to speak at Web 2.0 Summit that year. John nodded yes, to which she replied, "We can't talk about the future with all the same people!"

There was a lot of real-life cheering and virtual-cheering via Twitter from female attendees. I think it was actually a bonding moment for many of the women at the conference. From that point on it almost felt easier to meet other women and it led to a "women only" lunch gathering.

Watch this video from Genevieve's talk starting at 8:05 to hear her comment and the subsequent cheering.

We had a great turnout at lunch, three tables were filled and Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation joined us.

What I learned from that experience was to not only pay attention to tweets at conferences but to take advantage of them to meet up with other women, or niche groups.I went to the conference with no expectation that I would meet other women and came away meeting more than I have at conferences with a large population of women. The experience impacted me so much that I continue to converse with the women I met, and would recommend the conference to anyone. When you have a niche group of people, the need to bond together and create alliances is that much stronger.

I brainstormed some other ways to meet women at conferences and here is what I came up with. These examples work well for general networking too. Please add your ideas and experiences to the comments.

Before the conference begins, do your homework:

• Find out the conference hashtag and reply to others tweeting about the conference
• Say your virtual 'hellos' to the attendees and speakers you're interested in meeting and tell them you'll look for them at the conference
• If there is a conference attendee directory, add the people that you want to meet
• Look on the website schedule for women specific meetups, activities, etc.
• Contact the organizer and ask if there are networking activities for women and if not if they will plan some.
• Review the sponsors and see if any of them are skewed towards women (e.g. women 2.0 was at O'Reilly. Unfortunately I think they missed an opportunity to help women network)

During the conference do your follow-ups and get to work:

• Ping the people you want to meet up with to sit together at a session or during a break
• Send a public tweet out with the conference hashtag to do impromptu meetups
• Take a deep breath and go up to another woman and introduce yourself. I have never had someone turn on their heel and walk away.
• If there are exhibitors that are woman, go chat with them. Typically, they will want to stay in touch

After the conference do your usual networking followup:

• If there are women in the same city as you, meetup for coffee:
• Continue to connect on Twitter, LinkedIn, the conference attendee directory, etc.

I hope this gives you some ideas and confidence to meet other women at the next conference you attend.