Women in the eLearning Field: Beginning a Conversation

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

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

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

Really? Male speakers were so disproportionately the mostpopular 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 thanthat—there was only one film crew, so it was actually the most popular sessionin any given time block, and a number of speakers who had been filmed theprevious year had not been selected for the current year. It wasn’t necessarilythe result anyone would have planned for, but there was no sign that individualbias had been at work in the selection process.

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

Was it bias?

The first issue was the disparity in speaking-proposalsubmissions. Apparently, in our field, more men propose conference submissionsthan women. I talked to Heidi Fisk, co-founder of The eLearning Guild, and shetold me that frequently the gender breakdown of speaking proposals wasapproximately 65 percent male and 35 percent female, and that preconferenceworkshop 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 studiesa 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’vefound that some women are more likely to feel like they have to be 100 percentconfident in their own expertise before they’d consider talking publicly abouttheir knowledge, which is a pretty impossible standard.

Is it the individual or is it the system?

The second issue is the visibility of disparities at theindividual level vs. the system level. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

A few weeks ago, a Wharton professor posted a video from a few of his students about howwomen should negotiate for salaries and raises. It’s really well done, but alsoa little troubling.

The video describes how failing to negotiate a higher startingsalary is probably one of the major factors in the persistent wage gap betweenmen and women, something that is well documented in The eLearning Guild’s Annual Salary Survey.

The video goes on to explain that women who do negotiate aggressively can suffer asocial penalty that can dampen future career prospects. They can negate thoseby effects by jumping through hoops like displaying concern for organizationalrelationships and meeting an expectation of feminine behavior. The deck isstacked against it, though.

When we look at individual instances, they make sense, (shedidn’t really negotiate well, or women just don’t submit proposals, or I likethat candidate because we both came from the same small town) but when we lookat the outcomes at a system level, small disparities turn into large ones.

All people (men and women) feel an affinity when theyencounter people who are like themselves (“You went to Ada Lovelace HighSchool? So did I!”), but when all those small inclinations are amplified acrosshundreds and thousands of hiring or promotion decisions, significant gaps canemerge.

Organizations need to take just this kind of system view ifthey are committed to being fair and equitable. If the negotiation model fordetermining employee compensation is inherently unfair, then it’s not just theindividual but also the organization that needs to change.

Now what?

So what do we do about all this?

First, we need to initiate and promote more conversation. TheGuild has been very supportive of this. This is the first in a series ofarticles on related topics that LearningSolutions Magazine will run on this topic. The article series grew out of apanel discussion that Guild VP of program development David Kelly helped me organize at DevLearn 2014. (Editor’s Note: The live conversation that started at DevLearn 2014 will continue at Learning Solutions 2015 with Featured Session F1, “Bridging the Gender Gap” on Wednesday morning.)

When I talked to Guild president and CEO David Holcombe about this topic, he told me,“One of the primary roles of the Guild is to allow a place for people to haveconversations and maybe find solutions. Supporting these kind of conversationsis important for people’s career goals.”

Second, I believe we need to identify opportunities to redressdisparities in positive ways. The general computer-science community has a muchbigger gap, and people within that community are trying to make it better, withsupport for interested speakers and workshops to help people overcome issues like imposter syndrome. If you have been thinking about speaking, but have been reluctant, what would be helpful for you?

When we were talking, David Holcombe also reminded me, “TheGuild has always endeavored to also include people who aren’t the ‘gurus’—ourmission is to bring up new people and new voices. That’s why chose a guild asour model—to include the novices, journeymen, and masters, and to encouragepeople at all levels to step up and share.”

Heidi Fisk added, “Programming isn’t just speakers at events—it’scontributing to articles, the Guild Academy, the Online Learning Forums, and whitepapers. There’s a lot of ways to contribute.”

This is particularly meaningful to me, because I can rememberthe point in my career where I realized that nobody was going to come along andanoint me as ready to contribute back—to speak or write or present, and that mycontribution, while highly imperfect (I have some of my own imposter syndrome)was still worth sharing, and that putting yourself out there and helping paysyou back every single day.

So, we’d like to hearfrom you—what conversations do you think we should be having? If you havethings to share, what help or support would make that work for you? What else shouldwe be talking about in this series?