Amelia Greenhall

July 16, 2013

I’ve been organizing Quantified Self Meetup groups since 2011. After every meetup, another woman says something to me like:

I wish we could talk about [  women’s specific health topic  ].

I’d like to give a talk about [ … ] , but it doesn’t feel like it would fit in.

My tracking isn’t quantitative enough to give a talk.

If it were just women, I could give a really interesting talk about [ … ].

There are 500 Show & Tell talk videos online. I couldn’t find any on periods, yet women have probably been self-tracking this for, oh, somewhere around 100,000 years.

So now we’re creating a space for some of the conversations that have been notably missing from the QS community as a whole.

The first Quantified Self Women’s Meetup will take place in San Francisco this Wednesday. The group is for women and people who identify as non-male. True Ventures is graciously hosting our first meeting, and Square will host the second gathering. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to have you join us!

The intention of a women’s meetup is to create space where we, as women, feel comfortable talking about things – ideas and devices and experiments – that wouldn’t otherwise be talked about. What are we tracking? How are we tracking it? What are we learning?

Let’s make QS a community where women’s voices are heard and valued. I’m excited to see what a gathering of smart, geeky, talented, self-quantifying women talks about. There are sensor hackers, circuit designers, ux designers, and developers coming. Will new companies form, new products be designed, new experiments be sparked? Will someone finally talk about periods?

Join us! Start a women’s meetup in your city, go out for dinner or drinks and talk! Or just stay tuned – we’ll publish a write up of our event.