Last year in one of my conference talks, I mentioned that I have kids. After my talk, a woman came up to me and asked me how I do it. How I have a full-time job and do conferences and write and be a mom. She was interested in this because she was planning to start a family soon and wanted to know how other working moms in our industry manage it.
This got me thinking about moms in web design and development. And I realized that out of the 40-ish conferences I have spoken at over the last 8 years, there has been only one other speaker at a conference with me who was a mom. Maybe two. In both cases, their kids were grown or nearly grown, not babies or little kids that can’t fend for themselves for a couple days while mom is away.
It’s not that I haven’t spoken with lots of great women. I’ve been fortunate that most of the conferences I’ve spoken at have had women well represented in the speaker line-up. But all of these women, bar one or two, are not mothers. I’m sure there are other mom speakers out there like me, but the point is that they’re very rare.
