Prompted by some tweets from Su-Shee, I've been thinking about women speakers at Perl conferences, and in particular for keynotes at YAPC::EU this year. These are some thoughts on how we might be able to address this.

I realise this post should probably be tagged mansplaining, but I'm hoping this might prompt some more women candidates on the keynote voting list for YAPC::EU 2016.

Cluj.pm (organisers of YAPC::EU 2016) opened up voting for keynote speakers, which is an interesting change. Several people pointed out that there aren't many women on that list. I haven't checked, but I'd guess it's about the same ratio as for women speaking at Perl conferences, and women CPAN authors.

If we want to change those latter figures (Perl speakers and CPAN authors), then we need more inspiring women talking at our Perl conferences, amongst other measures. Keynote speakers don't have to be Perl developers. They don't have to be developers even, but given YAPC::EU's focus, I think it would be great to have a woman talking about open-source in a different programming language / community.

Based only on a bit of googling, and what I've picked up on twitter, here are some examples.

Allison Randal is well-known in the Perl world, but also beyond. She currently works on OpenStack at HP.

Sarah Sharp was the coordinator for the Linux kernel project within the Outreachy mentorship program from 2013 to 2015. Now works as a co-coordinator for the overall program. She was 2015 community award winner in Red Hat's women in open source awards.

Deb Nicholson won the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Valerie Aurora is executive director of the Ada Initiative, previously a programmer.

Selena Deckelmann is "an active member of the PostgreSQL community, sysadmin, and presenter. She is the founder/co-founder of Portland PostgreSQL user group (PDXPUG) and Code 'n' Splode, a programming group for women in Portland, Oregon".

Olga Natkovich is a Director of Engineering for Hadoop team at Yahoo! Inc responsible for Pig, Hive, HCatalog, Oozie, and HBase projects. She says she specializes in "open source, cross platform object-oriented software development, large-scale data processing, and distributed systems"

Natalie Weizenbaum is lead designer and developer of Sass, and works for Google on the Dart programming language.

Randi Lee Harper is probably known to any perl hackers on twitter. She wrote the first version of ggautoblocker in Perl, though the current version is in Ruby.

Who else should be on a list of candidate keynote speakers?

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