Women Don't Hold Up Half The Mobile World: They Hold Up 9.5%

Today, we review the Mobile World Congress. While everyone else was oohing and ahhing over the latest VR, robotics, IoT, and other mobile technologies, I've been taking a critical look at the Mobile World Congress event itself, particularly at the marketing on its website, as well as its speaker lineup.

First of all, I took a look at the Mobile World Congress preview video. And while there were so many people in it that I couldn't quite count them all, two things were starkly apparent: The video was largely dominated by men, with an average of less than 20% women shown in background shots, and not a single speaker in the video was a woman.

Then I took a look at the keynote speakers page. Out of 42 keynote speakers, there are only 4 women. Women may hold up half the world, but apparently they only hold up 9.5% of the mobile world.

And taking a look at the full conference agenda, it doesn't get much better. There are 14 non-keynote sessions, only 2 of which (14%) are even moderated by a woman.

The picture gets even worse when you look at the panel participants listed in the agenda. There is only one panel which has more than one woman panelist (2 out of 8 panelists), five panels where there is only one woman, and eight panels where there are NO women at all. Overall, there are 73 panel speakers, 7 of which are women, at 9.6%, eerily mirroring the keynote speaker situation.

Overall grade for this conference: D.