You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this is 77. I'm your host Thomas Smith.

All right, today I'm going to be speaking with Stephanie's Van.

We'll do a little bit in the intro. She'll introduce herself, but she was in kind of on the ground floor of trying to get harassment policies, anti-harassment policies, I guess you'd call them, in atheist and skeptic conferences.

And you'd be surprised, it would seem like a straightforward thing but unfortunately it

wasn't I talked to her about that feminism related things really interesting

conversation so without further ado let's get right over to my interview by Stephanie's Van, whose name I've had wrong in my mind for a while. Thanks for correcting me on.

Not Stephanie Zvonne, which is what I would have said.

Thank you for joining me, Stephanie.

Thanks for having me on.

I read your piece that you wrote in response to, I guess David Smalley did a talk that was kind of like the article that he already wrote that we, I think we both kind of responded to, but at any rate, it was a really excellent piece and you talked about the fact that you've tried to get anti harassment policies into these skeptic conferences and I just realized I don't really know much about that and I'm a little

worried like to find out what has happened with that because it seems like a pretty straightforward thing right you would just write up a policy and everybody would be happy right is that how it went?

Oh I wish. So it's not really surprising you haven't heard about all of this.

The at least most recent wave of feminist activists working on the movement itself really dates back to about 2009

when we were talking about the fact that almost all the speakers at every conference were male and white incidentally, but we hadn't

identified nearly as many black atheists at that point or ex-Muslims at that point to make that as much of an issue.

There were plenty of women around.

It was a couple of years after the start of the new atheist boom, but women weren't being put on stage and so we worked on that for a couple of years with varying degrees of success a lot of argument because these things always come with argument. And then in 2012

Melody Hensley organized the Women and Secularism Conference for the Center

for Inquiry in DC and a a lot of amazing speakers put on stage. There were everybody from Susan Jacoby who, how can you not put her on stage anytime you get a chance to young, called an internet

atheists like Jen McChryde of the old blog Blackhead. And there was a panel about

feminism in atheism because of course it had been a

mildly controversial topic for a couple of years and really ramped up the year

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