Why the Present Yourself program

June 1, 2021January 17, 2024

The following post is from a bonus module in our Present Yourself course.

To understand why we created this program, it will be helpful to learn more about the history of Women Talk Design. 

In 2013, Christina Wodtke started a directory of women speakers in design and tech called Women Talk Design. As a conference speaker, Christina often found herself the only woman on stage. She was extremely frustrated with this, knowing many qualified and brilliant women who could be up there speaking. To address this problem, she created the Women Talk Design platform so that event organizers would no longer have a reason for not having enough women speaking at their event.

This problem was not unique to design and tech and unfortunately, is still a problem today. See:

• Nature’s, “Why Women Talk Less at Conferences” (Nov. 2014)
• Bizzabo’s, “New Study: Almost 70% of Professional Event Speakers are Male” (Nov. 2018)
• AIGA Eye on Design’s, “We Surveyed Gender Representation at Design Conferences Again – and Not Much Has Changed” (Jan. 2020)

In 2017, Christina hired Melissa Kim and Jennifer Kim for a summer internship to research, architect, and design a new website for Women Talk Design. As they interviewed women speakers and event organizers, they found that the problem wasn’t just that women were not being asked to speak as often as men. They also found that women were more often saying no to speaking opportunities. They published their findings in “The 7 Reasons Why Women Saying No to Speaking and What Event Organizers Can Do About It (Parts 1 & 2)”

The reasons included:

1. Imposter syndrome
2. Lack of speaking experience
3. Fear of harassment
4. Concern about being the token woman
5. Worry about over-scheduling
6. Concern about pay gap & discomfort with negotiation
7. Desire to give others the opportunity

In the fall of 2017, Women Talk Design was incorporated into a social enterprise focused on a broadened mission to help get a more diverse group of speakers on stage. We continued to develop our speaker directory, began curating resources for event organizers to design more inclusive events that our speakers wanted to be part of, and started offering events and workshops to give people the confidence, tools, and practice to start speaking.

While our name remains Women Talk Design, our work is focused on supporting women and nonbinary people. When we talk about diversity, we mean intersectional diversity. Too often the call for more women on stage led only to more white women being added to a lineup. 

If you read Jennifer and Melissa’s original article, you’ll see they looked only at gender when doing their research. Several individuals, including Vivianne Castillo, helped point out that when taking an intersectional lens, we can’t just look at gender. We must look at the many identities the women and nonbinary people in our community have and how that affects whether or not they’re on stage.

After years of conversations with members of our community, we’ve updated the list of reasons why women and nonbinary people say no to speaking:

1. Imposter syndrome Systemic bias leading to self-doubt**
2. Lack of speaking experience
3. Fear of harassment
4. Concern about being the token woman
5. Worry about over-scheduling Responsibilities & access
6. Concern about pay gap & discomfort with negotiation
7. Desire to give others the opportunity
8. They weren’t asked

**read this important article by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey called Stop Telling Women They Have Impostor Syndrome.

We can all have a role in calling out when there’s a lack of diversity, elevating and advocating for folks often underheard, and speaking up ourselves. (See this slide deck from an event we hosted in partnership with Ladies that UX Boston, Seattle Women in UX and Design, and UXPA Boston on Tell Your Story for more information).

We share all of this to let you know that if one or several of these reasons for not speaking resonates with you – you’re not alone. We’re also sharing this because we created the Present Yourself program to empower you to speak up anyway. We need to change the systems but we also can’t wait for them to change to use our voices. This course provides you with the tools and confidence to start speaking and a community of support with whom you can practice and improve. 

At Women Talk Design we continue to learn and evolve our work. When we first started offering the 2-day version of the Present Yourself program, we found that many of the program attendees were using the skills we were teaching to help them when they presented at work. Over the years, we’ve heard from our community that while they understand it’s important to share their ideas externally, they also want to get better at sharing their ideas internally. Many of the same concepts apply. We’ve adopted this program so that you can learn how to create presentations for events or for work. We’ve also broadened our mission to help women and nonbinary folks speak up and be heard. We ask for your ongoing feedback so that we can continue to adapt and provide you with the support you need. 

And we ask that you lift others up as you rise.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for being part of our community.