This blog post made me wonder if it would really be that unlikely to meet women at LIFT08, and so I took 5 minutes to do some interesting and less interesting stats on the 541 participants who are set to attend at this point.

Let's start with the interesting stats.

Gender of attendees.

We have 412 men and... 129 women. Good for 24% of all attendees.

^{(sorry I couldn't resist the cheap color code ;)}

24% is of course not enough, but on the other side I think we are 1) getting better 2) above the average of other tech conferences. I very seriously toyed with the idea of giving women a discount like they do in French nightclubs (you see where I get my ideas from ;) but at the end of the day I thought if might sound a bit too... desperate? And as much as I think we need to care about this issue (especially in the conference program, i.e. the part we control) I believe womens' under-representation is more a global than a LIFT issue. We are doing our part, but society needs to evolve a bit too.

Countries of attendees.

We have 30 different nationalities registered, a figure that is actually lower than the truth. I always say that LIFT is 60% locals, 40% foreigners, but only 40% Swiss and 60% foreigners. That is because Geneva is such an international city. We have many attendees living in Geneva (and therefore reporting "Switzerland" as their country) but coming from abroad, so the number of countries is always a bit under evaluated.

This year we welcome new countries like Israel, Singapore, Costa Rica, Serbia, Romania, Malta, Slovakia or Mexico!

Job titles

The most used job title is "journalist" (we gave 60 passes to the press and bloggers, 30 more than what was planned, and we could not accept all demands, sorry about that), barely beating CEO (what else!)

In our system the job title is an optional and free field, so this data set is not very relevant, but still funny.

Most used last names

That's for the stupid part: the most used last names. And we have some clear winners with the Smith, the Favre, the Jones and the Richard! 2 English names in the top 4, we are an international community. At LIFT Asia this stat will be very interesting, and I am ready to bet a lot of money that Lee, Kim and Park will top this list VERY easily.