AllThingsD has gotten a lot of requests for the full interviews from the ninth D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.
It was indeed a crackerjack series of tech and media top players on stage, as well as a handful of amazing demos (more grilled cheese please!).
And, as promised, we’ll start posting them in their entirety, starting some time next week. We already posted one I did with Alibaba Group CEO and co-founder Jack Ma over the weekend, to get those interested in our upcoming AsiaD conference in October in Hong Kong familiar with our style.
As readers of mine know, I write a semi-ranty post now and again about the lack of women in high-level tech jobs and on the boards of its major companies.
While things are a lot better in the digital industry than, say, in meat-packing, it is still a slow slog to equality in both power and influence, even with ever more enlightened male tech leaders.
While most of them have women as a majority of their customers, they could not seem to find even one qualified woman for any of their boards.
This makes it a struggle even in programming our D: All Things Digital conferences. We have featured almost every significant female tech exec we could — from eBay’s Meg Whitman to Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina to Yahoo’s Sue Decker and, later, Carol Bartz to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to this year’s amazing DARPA head Dr. Regina Dugan.
But it is still definitely not enough and a failing we think about improving all the time.
I could go on — and I am going to go on even more this fall in the pages of Glamour magazine, which has asked me to write an essay on where all the women in tech are and what is their status today and in the future.
I will also be part of what I hope will be a provocative panel, moderated by Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive, in New York City on October 11.
The panel, said Glamour, “will ask where all the women are and why don’t we see more of them — and tell why the next Mark Zuckerberg should be a ‘Marcia.’”
I am not so sanguine that that will occur anytime soon, but it will be good to talk about this important issue. Diversity is at the heart of true innovation and more of it is needed for tech to thrive in the coming years.
I will also be helping select the panelists for the Glamour event and would welcome any suggestions, especially some ideas that are not typical.
Until then, here’s the impressive Dugan at D9 last week, as well as a video of the movie trailer for 1995′s “Hackers,” in which Angelina Jolie plays a hard-charging techie who is her mostly dude colleagues’ equal.
Earlier this year, I moderated a panel of tech leaders from the U.S. and Europe, at the opening of the DLD conference in Munich.
To get things going, I used that old trick of word association, channeling a technique perfected –aptly, for the location — by Sigmund Freud.
The panelists — who included Google’s Nikesh Arora, LinkedIn Chairman and investor Reid Hoffman and Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer — had to give lightning observations on Facebook, Google, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Nokia, New Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and smartphones.
The results were very interesting and very different, as you will see here below in a chart of it, posted recently by DLD on its Facebook page (click on the image to make it larger):
And here is a digital version of its whole DLD book that the chart was in:
