Proportion of women and non-binary speakers at MBAC 2024

I’m not at today’s Melbourne Business Analytics Conference (MBAC) since I’m on holiday this week. But that won’t stop me from calculating the proportion of women and non-binary people who are speaking at this event, as I have since its launch in 2017.

The excellent news is that this year is their highest proportion, with 58% of the folks on stage* being woman or non-binary. Great job MBS!

Bar chart titled, “Percentage of female or non-binary speakers and panelists at #MBSAnalytics”. The chart shows the lowest percentage in the first year, 2017, at 31%. Between 2018 and 2023 the percentage ranged from 39% to 51%. The 2024 percentage is 58%.

In case you’re wondering why I track this, that’s because I don’t attend or speak at conferences with 40% or fewer non-male participants. #NoMoreManels

* I don’t include the welcome speech at the start of the day and the practice prize finalists session at the end of the day.

Melbourne Business Analytics Conference 2022

Almost 1,000 people attended the 2022 Melbourne Business Analytics Conference today, which is really cool. And almost all of those who registered turned up, which is even cooler.

Photo of a very large auditorium that’s almost completely full, with people sitting on many rising rows of chairs. In front of the audience is a stage and a massive, cinema-size projector screen.

One of my favourite things about this conference is the breadth of attendees. You can tell that from how people are dressed: they’re wearing everything from jeans, t-shirts, casual dresses, and denim jackets all the way to formal dresses, formal pants, blouses/dress shirts, and suits.

Importantly, you can’t tell by what people are wearing whether they’re a CEO, middle manager, or specialist data analyst.

You can spot the students and fresh uni grads though. They’re so young and fresh-faced! Also, some of the junior managers stand out — with their sport coats/jumpers and cool but comfy shoes :)

Only 2-3 folks at this year’s conference were wearing ties with their suits, by the way. I think that shows just how much more comfortably people want to dress these days, now that we’ve all had a taste of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Benefit of registering early

One of the benefits of registering early for this conference is that I got a copy of ‘Decisions over Decimals’ by Christopher Frank, Paul Magnone, and Oded Netzer, which I’m really looking forward to reading.

(Professor Netzer was one of the speakers at the conference.)

Photo from the point of view of a seated person looking down at their lap. The photographer is holding a bright yellow hardback book in their hand titled ‘Decisions Over Decimals’. In the photo you can also see a Melbourne Business Analytics Conference badge that they are wearing on a lanyard around their neck.

Proportion of women on the stage

One of my rules for speaking at (and now even attending) conferences is that at least 40% of the people on the stage should be women or non-binary folks. And I track this number at all the conferences I attend.

Since I’ve attended every single Melbourne Business Analytics Conference since 2017, I have the data on how they’ve managed to improve – and, since then, maintain — a decent gender split in their speakers and panellists.

This year, for example, 43% of their speakers were going to be women. But, due to a couple of last-minute cancellations, that dropped to 40% — which is still acceptable. Good job MBS!

Columns chart titled “% female speaker, panellists at #MBAC22”. The chart shows five columns with values above them. The 2017 bar has a value of 31%; 2018 has 39%; 2019 has 51%; 2021 has 42%; and 2022 has 40%.

Gender diversity at Melbourne Business Analytics Conference 2021

The 2021 Melbourne Business Analytics Conference kicked off today. This is a four-day online conference with talks running from 10am-2pm, Monday to Thursday.

Screenshot of a web browser window showing a virtual conference layout, with boxes for speaker video, slides, Q&A, presenter information, and event resources.

42% female speakers

I’ve attended all four #MBSAnalytics conferences since they launched in 2017 [1] and have been constantly impressed with the gender diversity that Melbourne Business School have achieved with their speakers and panellists. This year, for example, 42% of speakers and panellists are women.

Screenshot of a column chart titled ‘% female speakers at #MBSAnalytics conference’. There are four columns on the chart, one each for the years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021. The percentage of female speakers and panellists shows above these columns is: 31%, 39%, 51%, and 42% respectively.

Not a manel in sight

Not just that, but at all four conferences there has never been a single manel (ie all-male panel of speakers and experts) – which I think is hugely impressive.

Screenshot of a webpage showing a grid of head shots. These are some of the speakers at the 2021 Melbourne Business Analytics conference. Half the speakers on the screen are female and two of the eight speakers shown are people of colour.

This is big deal

Tracking and reporting on the proportion of female speakers and panellists is important because (a) that’s not often tracked and (b) a high proportion is rarely achieved at conferences in this field. In fact, none of the business or analytics conferences I’ve attended in the last decade (?) have had more than a third of speakers who aren’t male.

The highest I’ve seen elsewhere was at MeasureCamp Melbourne in 2018 where 31% of the speakers were women. That took a bit of effort too, since the year before that number had been zero!

Photo of two hand drawn graphs on lined paper under the heading ‘Measure Camp Melbourne 24 Feb 2018’. The first chart shows 34% of attendees are women, the second shows 31% of speakers are women. That attendee percentage is an “estimate based on welcome session attendance”.

And it compares well with the industry

This high proportion of female speakers and panellists is particularly great because:

  • ~29% of full time computer science graduates are women and

  • ~35% of 2020 Melbourne Business School graduates were women.

Also, a couple of years ago I did a Professional Certificate in Business Analytics from Melbourne Business School. As part of that I took two subjects that had 17% and 30% female students respectively.

I know these numbers aren’t definitive, but it’s awesome that the proportion of female speakers at the #MBSAnalytics conference is at least higher than the proportion of women typically graduating into this field of work and study.

So kudos to the folks from Melbourne Business School who make this happen every year. This is already my favourite conference and seeing those stats makes it even better.

—

Footnote

[1] Your maths isn’t wrong. They’ve had four conferences in five years because they had to cancel their 2020 event because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FYI

I’ve tweeted about these numbers each year I’ve attended this conference: 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Notes from WebForward 2011 Conference

Last week I attended the WebForward Conference in Sydney (which itself is part of the larger CeBIT Australia Exhibition). It was a really good event during which I got to hear from and meet a lot of interesting people.

The conference had two streams: social media and mobile. I hopped in and out of both streams and here are my notes from the talks that I attended.

Latest trends and techniques in the on-line marketing space and a look into the future

WebForward 1

  • Speaker: Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology - Australia/New Zealand, Google
  • Why is there still a difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ marketing in a corporation’s budget? Why is digital still considered to be “new” media?
  • There’s a huge correlation between offline marketing and online searches
    • For example, if you were to place your ad on a number of city buses you could tell, by analyzing Google search on the relevant phrase (assuming its unique enough), when those buses first hit the streets
  • Predictions for the future:
    • 80% of screen time will be digital
    • Mobile devices will enable two-thirds of purchases and pay for half of them
    • Consumers will have more power and 80% of future engagement will be opt-in and 2-way
    • Real-time will play a big role; already 30% of Australians consumers access the web via their mobile phones while in a physical store
  • Use evidence-based marketing; don’t assume you know what the market wants
  • Don’t be scared to experiment with new things and try new ways of doing things (it’s okay to fail, stop what you were doing, and move on to other ideas)
  • 12% of all Google search queries in December 2010 came from mobile devices
  • Location marketing is key: A third of all searches conducted on mobile devices are location based
  • In the US, a quarter of all searches conducted on mobile devices were voice based
  • Think about doing how-to videos on YouTube
    • 2.4 million search queries per month on YouTube for how-to content
    • 32% of videos watched on YouTube are of how-to content

Integrating a mobile strategy into your marketing plan to cover multiple channels

WebForward 2

  • Speaker: Antonio Addario, Manager - Direct Channels Strategy, Efficiency & Innovation, ING Direct
  • The online magazine Mobile Marketer is a great resource
  • Some of the steps you need to take to figure out your mobile strategy are:
    • Do lots of research (e.g. find out which apps people are willing to pay for in various app stores)
    • Know your customer really well (both the people and the technology they use)
    • Define your success
    • Identify the key capabilities of all your online and mobile offerings; then select the ones you want to offer on your mobile platform
    • Evaluate your development options (i.e. reuse/buy/build)
    • Do plenty of promotion for your new offering
    • Get your mobile offering to upsell for you (e.g. tell people to your other services from within the app)
    • Measure success (KPIs, adoption, etc.)
    • Listen to your customers and make the improvements they want

Utilising mobile marketing to promote your product or service

WebForward 3

  • Speaker: Julian Peterson, Marketing & Online Director, Time Out Sydney
  • Time Out is 40 years old in London but 3 years old in Sydney and 6 months old in Melbourne
  • A branded app can work well if your brands are similar and have the same core target audience (Time Out’s app is cobranded with Smirnoff)
  • Time Out Australia used the app platform already built by London (which, as it happens, was work done by an Australian firm) so that made life easier for them
  • The app does curated content and is really popular with their targeted audience

Recognising the benefits of mobile marketing to drive innovation and growth

WebForward 5

  • Speaker: Nandor Locher, Manager e-commerce, Virgin Australia
  • A lot of the time, when you’re doing mobile marketing, you’re not really being ‘innovative’ in the true sense of the word
  • It’s critical to focus your efforts on the unique advantages offered by mobile technology
  • Mobile offerings are becoming part of a company’s larger product offering and are not just another marketing channel (e.g. like being able to check-in to your flight from the web, being able to do travel stuff on your mobile is now part of the broader travel services product offered by airlines)
  • Mobile is becoming a ‘hygiene factor’ in the travel industry; i.e. if it’s not there, people will go to your competitor
  • The ROI from the mobile offering is low so, for Virgin, their offering is largely a medium- to long-term brand and product augmentation investment
  • It’s important to have a brand presence in the various app stores
  • Integrating mobile with social media is important; particularly since social media is used so heavily in the travel industry
  • Thanks to mobile devices, downtime has become the new uptime (e.g. Virgin increased sales by 150% by moving their happy hour sales to a downtime period for the target market)
  • Depending on your offering, the usage and usefulness of mobile websites is sometimes greater than that of native phone apps (which many people download and then never use)

Understanding how to drive your brand via mobile

WebForward 4

  • Speaker: Stephanie Carrick, Senior Producer, Triple J Unearthed
  • Triple J Unearthed is one of the largest online communities in Australia (250k registered users)
  • They had to had a mobile presence (18-35 is their target market, after all)
  • Their app focuses on users listening to music (i.e. they focus on their core value proposition)
  • All their music content is available for downloading (for free)
  • The app is a huge success, with over 420k downloads in 18 months
  • Because of the app, they’ve seen a 50% sustained rise in traffic to their website (i.e. they’ve tapped a whole new audience that was inaccessible via radio)
  • It’s crucial to have app maintenance budget because you will need to update it regularly from now on

Using Augmented Reality Technology to promote your business

WebForward 6

  • Speaker: Glenn Cooper, Executive Chairman, Coopers' Brewery
  • Brand and brand history plays a huge role in the decisions companies make (particularly in family owned businesses like Cooper’s)
  • Doing a mobile app – that too, an augmented reality app – was a huge change for the business
  • This worked well for them because they used it to promote their low carb beer which itself was a huge change for the business (as they are known for their dark beers)
  • The app helped their marketing promotion be completely under their control (i.e. not under the control of the physical store retailers)

Joining the social media conversation about your company

WebForward 7

  • Speaker: Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra
  • There are different types of social media programs (i.e. they have different objectives); for example:
    • Listening
    • Customer Care
    • Thought Leadership
    • Marketing & Sales
  • The most important part of a listening program is to actually listen (and not jump in every time you’re mentioned or talked about)
  • A key phrase to remember in social media engagements is “What’s the gift?” (looked at from another angle, that’s the answer to a customer who wants to know “What’s in it for me?”)
  • Social media is an ecosystem: you must treat it with respect (i.e. don’t pollute it)
  • In order to get stuff done, you need to have a burning platform
  • Social media has worked really well for Telstra: 31% of all their online conversations now happen on Twitter
  • All employees at Telstra have to take and pass their online social media course (yes, all 40k existing employees had to do this)
  • Sentiment tracking is good, but make sure you provision for human coding in your budget because algorithms don’t understand sarcasm (of which there’s a lot online)

Developing social marketing strategies to transform your organisation

WebForward 8

  • Speaker: Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
  • 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook per month (globally)
  • Australians spend an average of 7.5hrs on Facebook per month
  • Facebook in Australia
    • 10 million active users (i.e. use the site once in 30 days)
      • 68% return daily, 86% return weekly
    • 53% of users are female
    • The age spread is about even (approximately 17-25% for each of the five major age brackets)
  • Facebook lets people connect across borders really easily
  • Facebook is about reorganizing the web around people
    • In the 80s, the web was all about browsing
    • In the 90s, it was all about search
    • Now, it’s all about people
  • Even gaming is reorganizing around people
  • 43% of all news sharing now occurs in social media
  • Businesses are reorganizing around people as well; this includes new product development, customer service, and marketing
  • There are three types of marketing:
    • Paid (e.g. newspaper ads)
    • Owned (e.g. websites)
    • Earned (e.g. word of mouth)
  • Earned is the hardest to get, but is also the most powerful
  • Facebook lets you do Earned marketing at scale
  • ‘Fans’ are the new popular metric to quote (like ‘Hits’ was popular in the 80s and 90s)
  • ‘Social’ is not the salt in the fries, it needs to be baked into the product

Panel Discussion: Maximising the opportunities given by social media strategies

  • Speaker: Joe Millward, Innovation Manager - Social Media, Gloria Jeans International; Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra; Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
  • Ask yourself: What is it that the social media platform can do for you that other platforms can’t?
  • Telstra has three rules for new social media ventures:
    • You need a six month content plan
    • You need someone to run the conversation (interacting at least twice daily)
    • You have to have a back-end system to deal with questions, complaints, etc.
  • Remember there are two kinds of social media interactions:
    • Individual (e.g. my bill is wrong)
    • Institutional (e.g. your billing system is wrong)
  • These need to be handled differently (e.g. you need to be prepared to have individual interactions after hours as well as during work hours)

Introducing location-based mobile applications into your marketing strategy

WebForward 9

  • Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia
  • Surf Life Saving needed to get the beach safely message across to high risk beachgoers (specifically, males aged 16-35)
  • Their app has two messages:
    • Primary: be safe
    • Secondary: get involved/donate (they are a non-profit that is run by volunteers and relies on donations to function)
  • The app uses the phone’s GPS location to deliver targeted messages
  • They use web services in the back-end to collect all the information that gets presented (e.g. they get weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology and beach data from their internal Surfcom system)
  • Build into your app the ability to collect feedback – this will be vital to future app development
  • A good mobile site is more cost effective than creating an app because the latter needs to be constantly updated

Panel Discussion: Keeping up with latest techniques and trends to gain competitive advantage

  • Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia; Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology, Google AU/NZ; Andy Ridley, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Earth Hour
  • Google’s big bet is mobile (hence Android and Wallet and all their other mobile related services)
  • Three key elements for location based services:
    • Local
    • Social
    • Mobile
  • Evidence based marketing is very important
  • It’s important to go where you users are (e.g. websites, devices, platforms, etc.)
    • This includes following their usage-time patterns; e.g. mobile web usage drops at 9am, spikes during lunch, then drops again till 5pm

Concluding Thoughts

The conference was well organized, well executed, and quite valuable in terms of what I got form it (both information and contacts). I look forward to attending it again next year.

NOTE: All speaker photos were taken from the WebForward website.

ConnectNow 2010 – Thoughts & Notes (Part 1)

connectnow logoLast week, on 6 & 7 April, I attended the ConnectNow conference in Sydney.

ConnectNow is a spin-off from the MarketingNow conference and it focuses on social media as a business, marketing, and communications tool.

I was fortunate to be sponsored by Melbourne Water to attend the event. Though, even if I hadn’t been, I would have gone there on my own anyway.

Photo from ConnectNow 2010 How Was It?

The conference was excellent and definitely worth the attendance.

The Good Bits

  • Excellent speakers from around the world, all of whom are considered to be thought leaders or, at the very least, major successes in their own particular areas. 
  • Excellent talks and presentations that excited, inspired, and seeded discussion. I particularly liked the talks given by Gavin Heaton, Tara Hunt, Darren Rowse, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Deb Schultz. More on all the talks in Part 2.
  • Great attendees, all with their own social media experience that they could share.
  • Great conference organization.

The Not-So-Good Bits

  • Some talks could have been shorter or structured better. As someone who loves making presentations (and thinks he makes pretty decent ones) it irks me when people don’t make excellent presentations, particularly at events such as this. There were a few times during a 3-4 presentations when I caught myself thinking: “Okay…so you’ve made five great points in succession but you haven’t linked them together (at all) and, even after re-reading the notes I just took, I don’t see how they logically follow each other”. In most of these cases the presentations would have been drastically improved if the speaker had either (a) told a story to string the ideas together or (b) simply grouped and named logical content sections, summarized thoughts at the end of each logical content section, or simply written better slide headings.
  • I wasn’t able to socialize/network as much as I wanted to because I was recovering from a bad cough and would induce a coughing fit if I talked for more than a couple of sentences at a time.

New Berocca bottles advertized at ConnectNow 2010 For More

I’ll be writing my thoughts (based on my notes) on each of the talks in Part 2.

Meanwhile, check out: