The Web Summit is to give €250,000 worth of free tickets to women in tech.
“For the last number of years we’ve been focused on bringing in more female developers and this year we’re broadening our giveaway to include designers, founders and developers. We want to make the Web Summit more accessible and open,” chief community officer Eamon Leonard said.
He said the technology festival’s organisers have been successful in scaling the conference each year.
“What we have not been successful at is recognising the responsibility we bear in addressing diversity, both at our own conference, and in the wider industry. We want, and need, to be better at that. This kind of change doesn’t happen overnight, and when you run events a handful of times a year, it can take time for that change to kick in”.
He said 15 per cent of the event's confirmed speakers are women, from 25 countries. They include Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior, Google VP of Engineering Anna Patterson, Actress Eva Longoria, model Lily Cole, Newscorp chief data scientist Rachel Schutt and Equinox president Sarah Robb O'Hagan.
This year’s event has been expanded to include a food summit, a film summit, a music summit and a sport summit.
More than 20,000 people from 100 countries are expected to attend the event, which is Europe’s largest technology festival. A press corps of more than 1000 international journalists will also be in Dublin to cover the event. This represents the largest international business and technology press corps ever assembled in Ireland, with more journalists covering the event than Queen Elizabeth’s visit in 2011.
