Diversity statement
We want to be welcoming to all people. That means any gender, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, religion or culture. People that embrace and express publicly racist or sexist beliefs and views, or promote intolerance in any way, can not attend Frontend United as speaker or as attendee.
Our doors are open to all forms of developers, from the Flash-educated generation to JavaScript-oriented gurus, from vegans to carnists and introvert to extrovert people. We like you just as much if you write code listening to metal or to reggae, in comfy pants at home or all dressed up at work. We embrace all frontend-people and we read somewhere that backend-people aren’t as bad as we thought they were. :)
We also realise that diversity is not something that only extends to gender, but to every underrepresented group. That's why we think we can improve on last year by more pro-actively motivating people that identify themselves as part of an underrepresented group to give a talk at Frontend United 2019.
In case we start a Call for Papers, people can optionally fill in if you identify yourself as part of a underrepresented group. We will then do our best to supply an extra effort in any form you might need. The extra effort could be financial (travel expenses, speaker fees), legal (letter of invitation, help with a visa), social (change how we have our social events around the conf), logistical (accessibility in any form).
If your submission for a talk doesn’t get picked afterwards, we would still love the bigger diversity of attendees by offering you a free ticket to the conference. This way we hope to have a more multicultural and inclusive range of speakers and attendees.
We will be adding the possibility for social and logistical requests from our attendees too, through our ticketing process. But this being our second tryout on actively acting on the issue of diversity and tolerance in tech-conferences, we are not sure how well we will be able to accommodate every request. As a non-profit we depend heavily on sponsorship and have quite limited resources.
Some stats from last years
- Our 2016-edition in Ghent had 15% female speakers and 13% female attendees.
- Our 2017-edition in Athens had 23% female speakers and 21% female attendees.
- Our 2018-edition in Utrecht had 34,5% female speakers and 20,3% female attendees.
- Our 2019-edition in Utrecht had 36% female speakers (including Lea's baby) and 22,1% female attendees.
So we are making progress! There are of course way more stats that are relevant, but that are a bit more difficult to keep track of. We hope we can continue this trend and we aim to keep these numbers as high as possible.