Women In UX Workshop (Melbourne)

Attention women UX practitioners and leaders!

In the last year, the UX Australia team uncovered a disturbing pattern; more men than women were proposing talks for UX Australia and Design Leadership. For example, the Design Leadership conference had submissions of 11 men to 1 woman.

We don’t know exactly why; it could be inexperience presenting, lack of confidence speaking publicly, or women thinking they don’t have something to say. No matter what, we want to address these issues. 

This year we will run a series of workshops to grow the number of women speakers, increasing diversity, and ensuring new voices and ideas are heard at UX conferences.

The workshops will focus on:

• Creating proposals
• Writing presentations
• Practising presentations

As our first step, Mags Hanley will run two ½ day workshops in Melbourne and Sydney. In 4 hours, each attendee will have a proposal that is ready for submission to a conference.

Together we will:

• Generate ideas and topics, working out which ideas have potential to become talks
• Write two abstracts from the ideas
• Create one proposal including peer review, iteration, and copy editing it so it is ready for submission

This will be an intensely collaborative process, with a group of supportive women who will help each other to hone their ideas.