Women in the eLearning Field: Beginning a Conversation by Julie Dirksen

“First, we need to initiate and promote more conversation. The Guild has been very supportive of this. This is the first in a series of articles on related topics that Learning Solutions Magazine will run on this topic. The article series grew out of a panel discussion that David Kelly helped me organize at DevLearn 2014.”

I was at an industry conference a few years ago, and soon after the conference a list of the video-recorded sessions came out. Of the dozen plus recorded sessions, only one was from a female speaker.

I thought, that’s funny ... that’s not the conference I attended. The conference I attended was full of great female speakers. How did things get so skewed at the session-recording level?

I asked about the criteria, and apparently the recorded sessions were the ones that the most people indicated they were going to attend based on a pre-conference survey.

Really? Male speakers were so disproportionately the most popular speakers? I supposed that was possible, but it was kind of depressing, in the same way that a recent study about higher education teaching evaluations favoring male teachers was depressing.

It actually turned out that it was a bit more complicated than that—there was only one film crew, so it was actually the most popular session in any given time block, and a number of speakers who had been filmed the previous year had not been selected for the current year. It wasn’t necessarily the result anyone would have planned for, but there was no sign that individual bias had been at work in the selection process.

It did raise a few interesting issues for me, though.

The first issue was the disparity in speaking-proposal submissions. Apparently, in our field, more men propose conference submissions than women. I talked to Heidi Fisk, co-founder of The eLearning Guild, and she told me that frequently the gender breakdown of speaking proposals was approximately 65 percent male and 35 percent female, and that preconference workshop submissions were often closer to 75 percent male and 25 percent female. This is despite the fact that the Guild’s membership is pretty close to 50/50, and conference attendance is pretty equally distributed.

Are women less likely to put themselves out there? In studies a few years ago, investigators found that women were more likely to report imposter syndrome (the feeling that you are faking it in professional terms). Anecdotally, I’ve found that some women are more likely to feel like they have to be 100 percent confident in their own expertise before they’d consider talking publicly about their knowledge, which is a pretty impossible standard.

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