I hope everyone reading this is thinking much more about taking action re: diversity and inclusion than they were 12 months ago.

It’s a big topic, but there is one piece from SaaStr data I thought it might be helpful share.

We have a small “list” (our SaaStr Newsletter).  It is “only” 32,000 readers.  But … it’s a high quality list.  How do we know? Well, it will sell almost all of the $5,000,000 in tickets to the 2018 SaaStr Annual.  Our list is almost the only attributable source of ticket sales.  So by definition it’s pretty high quality, and very on point for our industry.  And probably reasonably representative of a material segment of it.

And what we’ve learned, unfortunately, is that both our list and the attendee ratio at the SaaStr Annual will be 81/19 if no action is taken.  81% men, 19% women.

That’s both the organic composition of our list (which is entirely passively generated from the blog — zero names were purchased), and what the earliest tickets are each year at the SaaStr Annual.

It’s not remotely good enough.  Our goal is 50%+ women speakers at the SaaStr Annual this year (we are on track, and will at least come very close), and 30%+ women attendees (we’re behind, but working hard to get there).

The meta-learning though is SaaS isn’t the most gender inclusive industry.  We know this.  So if you do nothing, our guess is the best you are going to end up is with a company that’s 19% women.  That’s what the data from the largest founder/executive community for B2B says.

That’s not good enough.  And you’ll actually almost certainly do worse.  19% is the ‘average’ from our list.  If you are a top female hire or executive, where are you going to go?  I honestly don’t know how it feels to walk into a startup that is 20 men and 1-2 women.  But I know I wouldn’t work there.  You’re going to do worse than 19% if you don’t take action.

Take action.

I don’t have all the answers.  But we’ll adding some great sessions at the SaaStr Annual all about action, and how to do better.

We’ll be there with you, learning how to do better ourselves.

(There’s a lot more to diversity and inclusion than what we are touching on here.  Just sharing the data we have at the moment, from a limited team of 5 folks with almost no systems or data).

 

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