Anne Truitt Zelenka

UPDATE 9/2/06 10:50 am: Check out my proposed marketing solution to the where are the women problem.

Everyone knows that with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the number of female Supreme Court justices fell by half. The talk of the court this summer, with the arrival of the new crop of law clerks, is that the number of female clerks has fallen even more sharply.

Just under 50 percent of new law school graduates in 2005 were women. Yet women account for only 7 of the 37 law clerkships for the new term, the first time the number has been in the single digits since 1994, when there were 4,000 fewer women among the country’s new law school graduates than there are today.

There’s no escaping it, is there?

In June, Debbie Landa of Under the Radar asked Where are all the smart women speakers? In the comments, she clarified the criteria:

I still feel like we are heavily weighted on the blogger/media/consumer types (is that because the folks reading are in bloggers?).

I’m trying to find more senior level executive/dealmaker types from companies like MSFT, AOL, NBC/Universal, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, Sun, Intel, MTV, IAC, Newscorp., Apple, Adobe….why is this so hard?

How about Safra Catz, Co-President and CFO of Oracle? Can’t get any higher at Oracle, unless you’re the man himself. I don’t know anything about Catz’ interest in or availability for speaking engagements, and I’ve heard she doesn’t do a whole lot of those. However, last year she spoke at a gathering of the Women’s High-Tech Coalition in Silicon Valley and said this on how women can succeed in the male-dominated technology field:

You have to be better. You have got to work harder, work longer, be louder.

But that’s a huge problem, to have to work harder and longer and be louder when you already face myriad obstacles in trying to climb the ladder at one of the big technology companies. Women face subtle bias when they act in leadership positions because people more often associate leadership qualities with men than with women. Women are less likely to enter tech companies in technical positions, because of their lower numbers in undergraduate engineering programs. This may disadvantage them when it’s time for promotions. Mothers are doubly disadvantaged. Given our society’s emphasis on the idea that mothercare is best, women who choose to have children must either face societal disapproval to keep a high-powered career going or modify their career path to focus more on parenting. Those mothers who do stay on the executive career track may reasonably be unwilling or unable to spend extra time and travel on speaking engagements.

It’s no surprise that you might find more “smart” women speakers elsewhere than in the upper reaches of large tech and media companies. Part of being smart is weighing your options and making tradeoffs. Women face a radically different opportunity landscape than do men. I’m not going to say one or the other landscape is better–they’re different. But if you care about having more women as speakers at your tech conference, you might have to go with someone other than a senior level executive or dealmaker type.

UPDATE 9/1 8:14 am. A few related posts:

• On the Office 2.0 conference, which has just one woman speaker out of 53. Shelley Powers. Tara Hunt. The Head Lemur.
• Christine Herron on the Growing Numbers of Women at FOO Camp.
• Jody at Raising WEG on Privileged Women in the Workforce, tackling the question of women’s private career choices.