Anyway

The Exec­ut­ive Women’s Forum is a con­fer­ence put on for women involved in inform­a­tion secur­ity at a leadership/executive level, and I had the chance to go for the first time this year. I’ve never been to an all-women con­fer­ence before and although I have mixed feel­ings (it is, after all, inher­ently dis­crim­in­at­ory to exclude men) I found it worth­while. I met some very inter­est­ing people and had a chance to think about some issues that I don’t often run across in my daily pro­ject work, as well as a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive on some issues such as risk man­age­ment that are rel­ev­ant to my daily work. I also got the chance to try out play­ing golf for the first time as part of a net­work­ing event pre-conference, which was an exper­i­ence that left my right upper arm/shoulder sore for a couple of days after­wards! Oh well, all par for the course as a golf new­bie, I expect.

One not­able dif­fer­ence to many other con­fer­ences I’ve atten­ded: the lack of pos­tur­ing. Most people there were genu­inely inter­ested in dis­cuss­ing the issues at hand rather than prov­ing how good they were (yes, there were excep­tions, but they were few). That made the event more valu­able, and a lot more fun.