Celebrating our wins: 6.5* years of Women Talk Design
(*or 11, depending on when you start counting)
As we narrow our focus and scale back Women Talk Design (for now), we want to dedicate time and space to celebrating our wins over these past many years.
Here’s an excerpt from the Present Yourself book that shares the origin story of Women Talk Design:
Christina [Wodtke] and Danielle [Barnes] met long ago at a startup and have been friends ever since, but for the purposes of this book, our story begins in 2013.
Christina had spent more than a decade working in design and product development, authoring four books, leading teams at Zynga, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, and speaking at dozens of conferences and organizations around the world. As a speaker, she was tired of seeing all-male panels and conference lineups. She hoped—like many people—that such lineups existed because organizers just didn’t know many women speakers. Starting a little blog called Women Talk Design, Christina aimed to change that.
Years later, two of Christina’s most promising female students didn’t get summer internships, so she raised enough money to hire them as researchers, tasking them with an investigation of the conference space. She wanted to better understand why event stages had so few women. As well as the expected results, such as implicit bias, her students discovered that women often felt underqualified to speak.
With this information in hand, Christina began to brainstorm. She wanted to transform her blog into an initiative that would help women feel comfortable on stage—but she couldn’t lead this initiative, as she was busy giving workshops and talks when she wasn’t teaching at Stanford and raising a teenager. So, she turned to Danielle.
Danielle had already led some big projects, founding Austin Design Week and launching campuses for General Assembly (a tech education company) in San Francisco and Austin. However, she had never been a CEO, which was an oversight in Christina’s opinion. Danielle took on the challenge, and together they designed the first Present Yourself workshop with help from a few others, including book contributors Eleanor Mason Reinholdt, Alexis Wong, and Alla Weinberg. Under Danielle’s direction, the mandate expanded to non-binary folks and others with marginalized identities—from all industries. She created a business model that uses money from corporate training (open to employees of all genders) to fund free and low-cost programs for the community, as well as scholarships for those who can’t afford speaker training.
The rest is history.
Here’s some of that history:
In 2023, we celebrated 1,000 speakers
Women Talk Design started as a speaker directory, and that directory continues to be a resource for event organizers to discover speakers and developing speakers to get inspired. Late last year, we welcomed our 1,000th speaker to the platform.
Our community supported us through two crowdfunding campaigns
In the summer of 2017, Christina launched a GoFundMe campaign to hire Jennifer and Melissa as interns to work on the Women Talk Design speaker directory she created. The campaign took off and provided the impetus to invest more resources in Women Talk Design.
Our community showed up for Women Talk Design again in 2022 to fund the Present Yourself book Kickstarter campaign. This time 400+ of you contributed your dollars to help us see this important project through.
Last month, we graduated our 28th community cohort of the Present Yourself program
That original GoFundMe campaign funded the creation of the Present Yourself program, which was first run as a weekend workshop in San Francisco. The enthusiasm and outcomes of the program led us to continue to run it throughout the US—from Boston to Austin, Chicago and LA. Unsurprisingly, the program moved online in 2020. Then in 2021, we redesigned it as a 8-week hybrid online program. We now have alumni all over the globe and this continues to be our flagship program.
We’ve hosted 200+ community events
We hosted our first event in November 2017. Following our very first Present Yourself program, we organized a Lightning Talks event, intended to give recent graduates an opportunity to practice the short talks they developed in the program. You could physically feel the support and energy from the audience radiating throughout the room. This indicated to us that this was an event we needed to keep running. Since then, we’ve run Lightning Talks in-person and online, most recently running a special edition at SXSW 2024. In addition to Lightning Talks events, we’ve run panels, Speaker Stories, and talks in-person and online over the years. You can watch a few of them on our Youtube channel.
We’ve found creative ways to highlight the work of our community
Women Talk Design started as a directory to amplify speakers. As we continued to grow, we sought out additional ways to feature our speakers—through events, our social channels, and our blog.
Our Speaker Stories event series interviewed speakers about their journeys and shared their advice with the community. We’ve also highlighted community members’ work through our gift guide, book list, and podcast roundup.
We created an online space for community members to support one another
Since that very first workshop in 2017, we knew we wanted to have an online space so that the women and nonbinary folks in our community could have access to one another, regardless of whether or not they were attending an event. This space started as a private Facebook group and is now hosted through Mighty Networks. We’ve had community members run takeovers to talk about topics important to them, folks share speaking opportunities, requests for advice (and helpful responses!), and lots of celebrations.
We cultivated strong partnerships with community and corporate partners
We’ve had the privilege of working with many different communities who are also working to bring together and amplify women and nonbinary folks. A special thank you to TechLadies, Ladies that UX, SeaDUXX, Hexagon, and Design Spaces. We’ve also had the chance to partner with companies like Adobe, Figma, Dropbox, McKinsey, and others to make our events more accessible, offer scholarships, and train their teams. It all started with a large sponsorship from Facebook (thanks, Jon Lax!)
We kickstarted, wrote, and published a book!
How it started → how it’s going.
While Women Talk Design will look a little different in the months to come, we’re continuing to provide inspiration, support, and a space for the community to rally around one another. We can’t wait to see what the community does next.
