I was very pleased today to see that there are so many female presenters at my conference. Last year, there was about 2 or 3 out of about 30 but so far, 4 of the 10 presentations have been carried out by women. I am often surprised to see that despite a good portion of the authors on conference papers are women, it is most often (in my subjective impression) men who present them. I have to say that (unfortunately ;-), the fact that a woman presents a paper does not necessarily make it a better presentation. My own little qualitative, participatory-observation study shows that the quality of a presentation is correlated to how much the presenter have practiced, how interesting and relevant the study is and how relaxed and confident the presenter is. There is absolutely no correlation between quality and gender or quality and age. But bear in mind that these results are purely my own little subjective observations, recorded in my head, not on paper and analyzed by way of thinking, not some kind of conversational analysis or categorization. In other words, it is not very scientific, (fortunately) unlike most of the research presented here at Mobile HCI.
Posted by Louise at September 14, 2004 04:52 PM