Jill Binder didn’t plan to become a diversity advocate. She was co-organizing a WordCamp in Vancouver when she noticed that only seven of fifty-six speaker applications came from women — and decided to do something about it.
What started as a local fix turned into a five-year journey: a five-hour workshop, run a hundred times, in fifty countries, reaching six hundred people. Along the way, Jill learned that diversity looks completely different depending on where you are in the world, that blind speaker selection doesn’t necessarily solve the problem it’s supposed to, and that being the visible face of a systemic issue in 2020 is a very particular kind of hard.
She took a break. She came back. And now she’s doing public speaking and confidence coaching for everyone at Speak Tech Confidently — not just underrepresented groups, but anyone who’s ever told themselves they don’t have anything worth saying on a stage.
She has a few things to say about that.
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