SEM No Longer A Boys Club?

Jacqueline Dooley sent me a link to a

nice piece she did looking at what it was like attending SES back in 2000 –
the very first New York show, and only the second SES ever held — compared to
the massive event last week. From that, I spotted Rebecca Lieb’s
Search Chicks
piece, talking about how SES and search marketing is no longer a boys club.

It never was.

OK, I can’t pull attendee stats from way back then. What I do know, from
those 11 years now of
covering search, is that there has always been a strong presence of women
commenting on search and search marketing. I especially know this because I’ve
programmed all the SES shows in the United States since they started in 1999.

(For the record,
no — SES NY
was not the last SES that I’m running. I’m still doing the SES San Jose agenda.
More on that
here
and here.
And while I’m clearing things up,
Search Marketing Expo is the completely separate conference series backed by
my new site, Search Engine Land, with
the first of many different events happening this June –
SMX Advanced, that
particular show for advanced search marketers).

Programming means I’ve generally selected most of the speakers, so I know
there’s a strong proportion of women among them. In fact, I’ve (honestly) been
planning a post-SES round-up to assess the number of women who speak at the show
to better illustrate this. I got the bug in mind after seeing
Gender
diversity at web conferences from Kottke earlier this year. The percentage
of women speaking at some of the shows he mentions are fairly low. SES should be
much higher.

I actually did this exercise once before, back in 2004, I believe, when
Andrew Goodman

last wrote about this issue Some of the things he noted after SES San Jose:

Gender gap: A male member of the audience in one session (Creating
Compelling Ads and Landing Pages, which had a 50-50 gender split if you
include me, the moderator) made the important point that most panels are
male-dominated and that the female presence at shows like this tends to be
restricted to sessions dealing with writing. (Perhaps not entirely true, but
that was one attendee’s perception.) The audience and the panel couldn’t have
agreed more! What seems to happen is that small to midsized startups are (more
often than not) created by groups of young men who have an idea and drive, but
little capital. Limited capital and high risk require high trust — in many
cases that need for trust equates to what the pop psychologists used to call
"male bonding." It takes a long time, sometimes, for the hiring process to
reflect more diversity. The search marketing industry has happily reached
the point where — although at any given time there might be more men than
women at a given lunch table — it is not particularly male-dominated. As
our postsecondary institutions are now graduating more qualified women than
men, it would be bad indeed if this business were to have evolved into an
anachronistic male enclave, but fortunately, it doesn’t seem that it has.
That’s not to say that companies like Google — which evidently has a diverse
makeup in the middle and lower ranks — aren’t dominated by men at the level
of ownership and control… but if the proportion of successful female search
execs, and owners of and partners in search-related software and service
companies, increases every year, we’ll be getting somewhere.

I bolded a key line, that back in 2004, you’ve got someone talking about how
the "organic optimization" of more women in the search industry was already
going on three years before it’s getting talked about by Rebecca.

Still, when Andrew’s article came out, I was surprised. I know that there are
plenty of panels that were women dominated — and no, not just the writing ones.
Indeed, I’ve had to roll my eyes a number of times when I’ve seen people declare
they were on or saw an all-woman panel as if this was the first time it
happened. I roll them because it’s not that rare of occurrence.

In fact, go back to the
first SES
event in 1999, and you had an all female session there — Shari Thurow, on
Designing Search Engine Friendly sites. You also had Cat Seda and Dana Todd in
the majority on the Buying Ads panel. Neither of those sessions are "writing"
sessions. One is tech-oriented; the other is buying and selling. And Dana Todd
in particular has continued to rule that Buying Ads panel in its various
incarnations over time. For good reason, too — she’s an excellent speaker that
knows her stuff.

After Andrew’s piece, I sat down and started counting. Here’s what I sent him
back then:

"Gender gap: A male member of the audience in one session (Creating
Compelling Ads and Landing Pages, which had a 50-50 gender split if you
include me, the moderator) made the important point that most panels are
male-dominated and that the female presence at shows like this tends to be
restricted to sessions dealing with writing."

That kind of surprised me, because I know I’ve had plenty of panels where they
were woman dominate or even all women panels. So I really quickly ran through
all the sessions where I could somewhat easily pull out that type of stat at a
glance. I sort of ran out of steam on the details, but it’s interesting:

All male: 16
Intro To SEM
Consumer Research
Contextual & Non-Search Ads
Search Term Research
Lobbying For Your Search Marketing Budget
Personalizing Search
Organic Listings Forum
Link Building Basics
Flash
Advan ced Link Building Forum
Search Ads Beyond Google & Overture
Exective Roundtable
Converting Visitors Into Buyers
Competitive Research
Getting Local: Part 2
Advanced Search Term Research

Mixed, male dominant: 26
Coping With Growth (2 men, 1 woman)
Inside The Searcher’s Mind (2 men, 1 woman)
Broad Matching (4 men, 1 woman, 2 of men from G/O)
Views From The Street (2 men, 1 woman)
SE Ad Forum (1 woman (and lead speaker), 3 men — this also has been all women
at times or woman dominated)
Search Detours: Beyond The Top 10 (1 woman, 2 men)
Search Marketing For Travel & Hospitality Sites (1 woman, 2 men)
Dynamic Web Sites (1 woman, 2 men)
B2B Forum (1 woman, 2 men)
Search Engines & Web Server Issues (5 men, 1 woman)
Search Marketing To Hispanics & Latin America (4 men, 1 woman)
Successful Site Architecture (1 woman, 3 men)
Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic (1 woman, 2 men)
Balancing Organic &a mp; Paid Listings (1 woman, 2 men)
Trademark Protection Issues (1 woman, 3 men)
Meet The Shopping Search Engines (2 women, 3 men)
Link Building Clinic (1 woman, 2 men)
Link Building Clinic
Site Clinic
Site Clinic
Measuring Offline Sales & Conversion
Meet The Crawlers
Advanced Design Issues
Public Relations Via Search Engines
Site Clinic
Web Feeds & Search (but female was lead speaker)

Mixed, female dominant: 5
Redesigning Traffic After A Redesign (2 women, 1 man)
Shopping Search Tactics (2 women, 1 man)
Site Clinic
Getting Local: Part 1
Site Clinic

All female: 3
SE Friendly Design
Writing For Search Engines
Auditing Paid Listings

Mixed, parity: 5
Buying SE Ads
Creating Compelling Ads
Measuring Success (not including Q&A speakers)
Very Vertical: Search Marketing Off The Beaten Path (woman was lead speaker,
most time)
Cleaning Up The Mess

So, yep, lots of men. But the stats are somewhat skewed. If I were to take
only those from SEM firms, as opposed to search engines themselves, I think
you’d find the industry is much more woman heavy. There’s lots of women
running shops. Shari, Barbara, Anne Kennedy, Cheryle, Jessie — and it’s
definitely not just that they get to talk about writing. But a search engine
might send two male Q&A speakers, which makes a panel SE heavy. A really
interesting look would be by speaking time. On some of the "male dominant"
panels, it’s actually the woman that had the most speaking time or was lead
speaker. Noted that a few places.

Overall, I’ve personally been heartened
(that’s my word of the day) that the industry to me seems to have lots of
women involved. If anything, I just
worry that sadly, it seems very white still. I’d love to see more diversity in
terms of race in the industry — hopefully, that will come.

As I said, this has been on my mind to revisit. If you look at my closing
comments to Andrew, you’ll see some of the important qualifications you have to
make in figuring out the stats. For example, some speakers are entirely out of
my control. If I have a panel made up of four search engine reps, whether they
send women or men is entirely up to them. The sessions I can directly put
speakers into might be super balanced, but the show as a whole could skew if the
search engines themselves aren’t really representative.

Speaking time is also important. It’s common for a session to have a "heavy
lifter" speaker that does most of the talking or setup, with discussion and
participation from some of the other speakers. Just counting names and ticking
off male/female doesn’t really reflect that.

Adding in moderators can do another skew. In most SES sessions, the
moderators are playing knowledgeable traffic cop. We keep the speakers to
timings, solicit questions from the audience, chime in from time to time but
aren’t to me the main stars — the speakers are.

Like I said, I plan to come back and look at the final speaker line-up and
tally some stats for SES New York. For the record, the most important thing –
the main thing — I look for when putting anyone on any panel is either how
strong they pitched or how well they’ve done in the past. But if I see a panel
that’s shaping up to be all male, one entirely in my control, I will see if
among the candidates whether I’ve got a woman that’s also strong that I can
include. I’m a child of the 70s, where
I learned (and fortunately
so) that diversity is important.

That doesn’t mean I’d go with a weak woman speaker just to have a woman. But
I do consider the makeup of a panel. Could I make it more diverse? Then again,
Jill Whalen has always been on at me
for the past two years to take part in the Organic Listings Forum that has long
been a male affair. She’d kind of joke with me about it being an all boys’ club.
But my response was that the boys — or more important, the speakers — had been
doing well on that panel. I wasn’t going to move someone off solely to make it
more diverse. For the same reason, she and Heather Lloyd-Martin have long done
the Writing For Search Engines panel first and foremost because they’ve been
outstanding at it. And I wouldn’t toss one of them off just to make sure there
was a more male presence on the panel.

Speaking slots don’t define an industry on its own, of course. Right now, the
power at search is heavily male dominated, in terms of being listed. The make up
of crawler panels, the people who could make or break a site, does tend to be
mostly men. Back in 2000 or so, it was women that ruled search. Seriously. The
most important services that could make or break a site were Yahoo, LookSmart
and the Open Directory — all human-powered. Srinija Srinivasan ruled Yahoo’s
directory; Kate Wingerson ruled LookSmart’s. I’d have them on a panel, and it
was poor Bob Keating of the Open Directory who really was odd-man out.

As for the search marketing industry, getting the stats there is even harder.
But when this comes up, I always go back to the great booth babes
debate
after SES NY 2005. My take on that was that men and women alike in the search
marketing space largely stood up and said having booth babes going after men was
a largely stupid idea given that there were so many women in the industry.

One thing that’s clear is that women in search are being noticed more. I
think credit for this especially does to Li Evans, who aside from celebrating
her birthday today has especially found a niche in highlighting various women in
search and internet marketing. You can read up on the profiles she’s been doing

here, which also provides many more resources for women in the industry.

I hope this trip down memory lane has been useful. And for those vets like
Jackie, I hope to see you at
SMX Advanced in
June, where we’ll have high level conversations, sessions and panels made up
both men and women