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Post by Bridget

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A couple months ago we launched out first major travel grant initiative with a pledge to help send at least ten women to Skepticon 5 in Springfield, Missouri this November 9-11. We all felt that Skepticon was a natural partner for Secular Woman’s first disbursement of travel grants. Kim, the President of Secular Woman was excited that “we’ll be able to help more women atheists and skeptics experience a major secular event, thanks to Skepticon’s free registration and its track record of high attendance and engaging speakers.”

It’s been noted that many conferences and conventions sponsored by secular identity organizations have attracted criticism for male-dominated speaker rosters and other gender-related problems. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Skepticon 5. Women speaking include, among others, student activist Jessica Ahlquist, blogger-author Greta Christina, podcaster Julia Galef, and Skeptic magazine editor-in-chief Deborah Hyde. With 1,200 attendees in 2011, Skepticon was the second largest skeptic/atheist conference in the United States.

Secular Woman is an educational non-profit organization whose mission is to amplify the voice, presence, and influence of non-religious women. In addition to conference travel grants, we will offer our members achievement awards, a registry of secular groups’ anti-harassment policies and other programming designed to add gender diversity to secular events and bring more nonbelieving women out of the closet and into active roles in the secular movement. Since our public debut June 28, we have expanded from a four-person Board of Directors to hundreds of members in five countries.

Grant applications will be submitted through the Skepticon website and Secular Woman is accepting contributions at http://www.secularwoman.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=3

See you at Skepticon 5!

Secular Woman