Where Are the Women in the Streaming Media Industry?

As (hopefully) many readers will know Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Tim Siglin, and I have been strong vocal supporters of Women in Streaming Media and .
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
Where Are the Women in the Streaming Media Industry?
As (hopefully) many readers will know Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Tim Siglin, and I have been strong vocal supporters of Women in Streaming Media and more broadly of our ‘sisters-in-streaming’ for many years.
In programming conference sessions and panel discussions, webinars, and more we always proactively try hard to reach out to those women we know in the industry to ensure there is frequent representation for women in public events.
Photo above: Speakers on the "Future of Monetization" panel at Streaming Media West Connect earlier this month. Top row, L to R: Nadine Krefetz, Consultant, Reality Software and Contributing Editor, Streaming Media; Damian Pelliccione, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Revry TV; Elizabeth Parks, President, Parks Associates. Middle row, L to R: Mike Woods, SVP - Ad Products, Amagi; Daniel Schneider, SVP, Revenue, Cinedigm; Gene Pao, Senior Vice President, Digital Enterprises, Shout! Factory. Bottom: Chris Yates, General Manager, Redbox On Demand
We attended the launch of Women in Streaming Media at IBC in 2018 as invitees of Alicia Pritchett, Diane Strutner, and Peggy Dau (who drive the initiative). We have always held one of two guest seats for them in SMAdvancedForum.com—our monthly catchup with ‘characters’ from the industry, and we traditionally try to hand over the reins of the show to an all-woman crew specifically for International Women’s Day each March. When interviewing for articles, we keep our ears out for opportunities for womansplaining to take the priority over mansplaining, and (unknown to you all) we have protocols for keeping an eye out for when women are getting squeezed out in panel discussions where we are moderators, to ensure their voices are heard.
And if you think it is bad across the streaming sector as a whole, once you dive into the CDN sub-sector, the situation is seriously dire. In fact, no event has even been more painful for me to programme than the Content Delivery Summit, the latest iteration of which ran earlier this month.
Just look at the agenda. Great topics with really engaging speakers, and a dense day of exciting engagement across the sector. But we had only two women on the program—kudos Elsa Pine from EdgeConnex and Nino Doijashvili from Tulix).
On publication of the agenda, this issue was raised directly with me by both Ian Wagdin from the BBC (whose PR department raised it on a ‘non-discrimination’ concern) and by active support of Vanessa Vigar, who is a member of Women in Streaming Media and has pointed out the issue in events beyond Streaming Media and SMAF.
And absolutely rightly so. But I had to clarify the back story, which I want to share a little with you all here.
We initially worked with sponsors to place their participants. Elsa has been a frequent panelist at CDS, and so she and her company were very much involved from the outset of this event.
And while a couple of the other sponsors initially did put forward women speakers, in both cases they switched them out for male representatives before the programme was finalised.
We don’t really have much control over who sponsors put forward to speak, so at that stage we took that on the chin, and decided to focus on the panels and non-sponsor placements in the event. So we put out the call for speakers in August/September, and we had about 3 dozen responses.
The respondents were 100% from men.
Not a single woman replied—and that call was distributed on StreamingMedia.com and its associated feeds with no (known of) bias.
This is the first time that has happened, and it ties up strongly with evidence I have seen in SMAdvancedForum (SMAF) too; while up until this summer we have never had any issue reaching out for and finding f...