Thanks for including FEI’s CFRI in your roundup of major conferences in the finance circuit (and for ref. to FEI blog!)

Although, according to your statistics, the relative percent of women speakers at FEI CFRI (18%) is slightly lower than at MACPA’s most recent conference (21%), and relative to Compliance Week conference (26%) and the CFO Rising conference lineup so far (30%), one factor driving the speakers at FEI CFRI specifically is related to who holds the top slots at SEC, FASB, IASB and senior staff positions like SEC Chief Accountant, Dir. of Div. of Corp Fin, etc. (For example, last year, the SEC, FASB and IASB Chairmen, as well as SEC Chief Accountant and SEC Dir. of Div. of Corp Fin, were all men; as we know the male/female makeup of that group has changed this year.)

Another point of interest is that the position of chair of the planning committee for FEI’s CFRI conference has more frequently been a woman finance executive than a man, during the past 5 years that I have been at FEI.

We have historical photos hanging in the FEI office taken at some of the earliest FEI conferences from the 1930s, when entire ballrooms were filled almost exclusively with men, except for some spouses who attended certain dinner functions or other ’spouse’ events.

Fast forward to June of this year, when FEI leaders participated in a dinner sponsored by the SEC Historical Society honoring the SEC’s 75th anniversary. In seeing the photo of the FEI attendees at the SEC program (all women) http://bit.ly/14wXIp a commenter named Claire noted: “Interesting that all the folks in the FEI picture are women. Quite a change from 75 years ago….”

It’s great to see your writing expanding into new venues like Technically Women, which looks like a really interesting publication, good luck to the team behind this publication!