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In 2013, we had 4 women speakers out of 28 at WordCamp Vancouver.

Female audience members didn’t feel comfortable being there and called us out publicly.

The thing is, it wasn’t that we weren’t accepting them, it’s that they weren’t applying in the first place. Women were feeling like they’re not expert enough to speak on anything, or that they wouldn’t know what to talk about.

So I lead the creation of a workshop to help women who wanted to speak but weren’t feeling qualified, and in one year, we had 3 times the number of female applicants and 50% of our speakers were now women.

I’m now the lead of a project in the WordPress community called the Diverse Speaker Training group that is spreading this work out not only for women but for all underrepresented groups globally.

To give you an example of how quickly we’ve scaled and how effective this work has been, in 2018 alone so far we provided diversity support to 55 Meetup organizers in 26 countries, delivered 15 train-the-trainer workshops, 12 meetups ran our speaker training workshop in 6 countries, and other WordPress-related groups ran it as well.

The results have been phenomenal. In only a few months, WordCamps have gone from the usually 10% or less diverse speakers to typically 50% or more. This is incredible!

And things are changing at WordPress because of this. Having more diverse speakers has improved the brand and even the product itself.

We want to keep that momentum going so that WordPress is the leader.

With 800+ chapter meetups around the world, we plan to serve 100 of them a year by the end of 2020. There are already 40 meetups waiting for us to deliver training but we need your help.

Thank you Automattic for sponsoring 50% of my time needed for leading this project.

By being one of the sponsors to give to the other 50%, you will be helping us scale up considerably and you will be tied win with something that is making an enormous positive impact in the community.

Let’s start the conversation

—-

Jill Binder
hello at jillbinder dot com | DiverseIn.tech | twitter @ jillbinder

P.S. Want to read more? https://heropress.com/essays/accidental-activist/

Jill Binder

Founder and Chief Consultant / Trainer

Jill Binder is the Founder and Chief Consultant/Trainer of Diverse Speakers in Tech. She leads the Diverse Speaker Training group in the WordPress.org Community Team (with a 50% sponsorship from Automattic) which encourages underrepresented people to speak at WordPress events. She helped organize the first BuddyCamp and for three years co-organized WordCamp Vancouver. She was named one of the top 100 Influencers of WordPress in 2014 by Torque Magazine and one of the top 10 Women of WordPress by CloudWays.

Jill’s work has done a lot to further the diversity and inclusion effort in WordPress.
Andrea Middleton, WordPress Community Organizer
Jill's work has done a lot to further the diversity and inclusion effort in WordPress. I would heartily recommend her. The initiative she helped develop has already had a powerful impact on WordPress communities.
Read full letter from Andrea
From underestimating my experience to becoming more comfortable and confident.
Kirsten, Web Developer, Vancouver
It had never occurred to me before that I had anything worthwhile to offer the WordPress community. Through the workshop, I saw that I had been underestimating my experience and perspective, and I became comfortable and confident about speaking on a topic I felt would be of interest to others.
An unprecedented 60% growth of women speakers thanks to Jill.
Nichole Betterley, 2017 WordCamp Seattle Speaker Wrangler
The Diversity Speaker training workshops we ran at local meetups using Jill’s material were highly successful and helped us achieve an unprecedented 60% of women speakers that year. I highly recommend it to anyone who is conscientious of encouraging more women and other diverse groups to speak at technical events.
Jill helped us find the strength we needed to overcome our fear of public speaking.
Simona Simionato, WordCamp Milan Italy organizer 2018
At WordCamp Milan 2017, we had only 4 women out of 19 speakers. After we ran the workshop as well did some personal outreach, in 2018 45% of applications were made by women and there were 11 women out of 21 speakers! One of them was also an LGBT community member. The workshop helped people find the strength needed to overcome the fear of speaking in public, and helped folks find topics – solving the “I do not know what to say” issue.
Jill’s diversity work paved the way for the highly effective public speaking workshop at Automattic.
Kathryn Presner, Theme Whisperer/Happiness Engineer at Automattic, Montreal
Jill Binder’s diversity work paved the way for the public speaking workshop I developed with my colleagues at Automattic. I’m really excited to see Jill expanding her diversity work and would highly recommend it to anyone looking to broaden their speaker rosters or other professional pathways.
I highly recommend Jill to anyone who is trying to increase diversity at their conference.
Morgan Kay, Founder of WordPress Study Group for Women, Seattle
I can attest that Jill’s workshops are very effective at getting a much more diverse speaker pool. I highly recommend Jill and her work to anyone who is trying to increase diversity at their conference or event.
The impact of Jill’s speaker diversity project is highly impactful and inspirational.
Angela Jin, Community Organizer at Automattic
I’ve really enjoyed the work we do in the WordPress Diversity Outreach Speaker Training project, and can see its impact. It is super inspirational!
I would recommend Jill to conferences and organizations looking to push the envelope and do things they never believed possible.
Nicolas Demers, Web Developer, Vancouver, Gay
Before Jill’s workshop I did not think I had it in me to speak in front of a crowd. But she gave me the confidence and tools to get on that stage and deliver a well-received presentation. I would recommend Jill to anyone looking to push the envelope and do things you never believed possible.

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Jill’s work has done a lot to further the diversity and inclusion effort in WordPress.

Who we are

Jill Binder

Jill’s work has done a lot to further the diversity and inclusion effort in WordPress.

From underestimating my experience to becoming more comfortable and confident.

An unprecedented 60% growth of women speakers thanks to Jill.

Jill helped us find the strength we needed to overcome our fear of public speaking.

Jill’s diversity work paved the way for the highly effective public speaking workshop at Automattic.

I highly recommend Jill to anyone who is trying to increase diversity at their conference.

The impact of Jill’s speaker diversity project is highly impactful and inspirational.

I would recommend Jill to conferences and organizations looking to push the envelope and do things they never believed possible.

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