My first linux.conf.au was 2003 and it was absolutely fantastic and I’ve been to every one since. Since I like this radical idea of equality and the LCA2015 organizers said there were 20% female speakers this year, I thought I’d look through the history.

So, since there isn’t M or F on the conference program, I have to guess. This probably means I get things wrong and have a bias. But, heck, I’ll have a go and this is my best guess (and mostly excludes miniconfs as I don’t have programmes for them)

• 2003: 34 speakers: 5.8% women.
• 2004: 46 speakers: 4.3% women.
• 2005: 44 speakers: 4.5% women
• 2006: 66 speakers: 0% women (somebody please correct me, there’s some non gender specific names without gender pronouns in bios)
• 2007: 173 speakers: 12.1% women (and an order of magnitude more than previously). Includes miniconfs
  (didn’t have just a list of speakers, so this is numbers of talks and talks given by… plus some talks had multiple presenters)
• 2008: 72 speakers: 16.6% women
• 2009: 177 speakers (includes miniconfs): 12.4% women
• 2010: 207 speakers (includes miniconfs): 14.5% women
• 2011: 194 speakers (includes miniconfs): 14.4% women
• 2012: (for some reason site isn’t responding…)
• 2013: 188 speakers (includes most miniconfs), 14.4% women
• 2014: 162 speakers (some miniconfs included): 19.1% women
• 2015: As announced at the opening: 20% women.

Or, in graph form:

Sources:

• the historical schedules up on linux.org.au.
• my brain guessing the gender of names. This is no doubt sometimes flawed.

Update/correction: lca2012 had around 20% women speakers at main conference (organizers gave numbers at opening) and 2006 had 3 at sysadmin miniconf and 1 in main conference.