Women in WP Podcast

Last December, I attended WordCamp US, held in Nashville, Tennessee. As Nashville is just a little over five hours away, it didn’t make sense to fly there (actually, it would have taken longer to fly – I live an hour from the airport and Indy doesn’t fly to Nashville nonstop) so I drove. In preparation for my drive, I loaded my phone with podcasts to entertain me during the drive. Many of these were podcasts from people I love in my industry – WordPress specific podcasts.

But I noticed that as I was listening to these, that they were primarily hosted by men. That there wasn’t much representation for women in the field and I wondered why that was. When I got to WordCamp, I mentioned that to a few people, suggested that someone who actually knows something about podcasting should take up this cause and create a Women in WordPress podcast.

I found zero takers. People seemed intrigued by the idea, but not super enthusiastic about it. Definitely not enough to start the podcast. After I got home, I posted this on Twitter.

And, well, there was a response. Probably for most people 142 likes, 31 retweets, and 54 responses is not a big deal, but for me it was very overwhelming.

So I guess there was some interested in this idea. After the lukewarm reception I got with this idea at WordCamp, I assumed I’d put this tweet out, nobody would care, and I could drop it and go on with my life. No such luck.

Turns out, two of my online friends, Tracy Apps and Angela Bowman, had actually already had this idea many years before I did, and had discussed the idea at LoopConf in 2015. In fact, the discussion went so far that Angela had even bought domains for the website for it. But that’s where it ended.

They responded to my tweet, said they would love to help and get this off the ground, and since it turned out that my idea wasn’t original, I just reinvented their idea as my own, I reached back out to see what could be done.

So this is a very long way of introducing my readers to my new podcast, called Women in WordPress. Hosted by three women who work in WordPress every day, we’ll bring in other women in the WordPress community to talk about what they’re doing in the field.

Our initial episode is just the three of us, answering the question, “How did we get here?” and talking about our own journeys to WordPress. If you are interested in WordPress, in learning more about the women who are using it for their jobs or hobbies, I invite you to listen along.

You can find us at womeninwp.com, at Spotify, Stitcher, and hopefully soon on Google Play and iTunes. You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and join our Facebook Group. And you can of course, sign up to be on the show on our website. We’re still a work in progress, but progress is always the goal.

Here is our first episode. Be kind!