Is The Blogher Conference Sexist?

To those organizers I challenge them to look in the mirror and realize that you’ve now become the same evil and sexist pigs you started out with the goal of overcoming.

So whats my gripe, that Blogher limits their conference speakers to only women. Don’t believe me go to any of the past speaker lists (link, link) and try to find a speaker who is a man, do an on page search for “his”, “him”, or ” he”, now try searching for “her” her’s” or “she”, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not that I don’t think that women aren’t qualified to speak, nothing could be farther from the truth, but I do ask the following question, if you want to provide the best conference are only women qualified to speak.

Now Blogher doesn’t completely discourage against men attending, here’s a flickr set of the Robert Scoble. However if you are a man and you want to attend BlogHer, you’re treated like second class citizen, only to be seen and not heard.

Do you think Blogher should only have women speakers, what if I told you I was organizing a conference and only men were speaking? The only way women can get in was to pay the full admission price, and go sit quietly in the audience. Have a few choice names you’d like to call me after reading that, then why is it OK for blog her to do the exact same thing, and you’re OK with that, or somehow find that empoering?

The most common argument I’ll get is what about the “mommy bloggers” or “work at home moms (WHAM)” and how Blogher has speakers that can speak on those topics better than men. To that I counter Mommy bloggers and work at home moms face the same issues as Daddy bloggers and work at home dads. We all struggle to find the work-life balance. We struggle to run a professional business and to be available to take client calls and go to meetings, but to also be home by 3:30 to pickup the kids after school, bring them to dance class, ballet class, religious instruction, swim class, birthday parties, play dates, do the food shopping and cook a dinner that’s healthy and everybody will eat, without going crazy. And yes I do the food shopping, and I cook dinner, even on the holidays like Christmas and Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” you can too. Being a visionary leader takes the courage to admit when you make a mistake and take the steps to fix it …