My professional interpretation?  No significant changes in diversity, although the manufacturers have brought roughly the same number of women, but far fewer overall attendees. This year's overall attendance is particularly concerning to me.  The economy has caused significant retrenchment in attendance, although NAED needs to ensure they've not lost ground to the competition from the buying groups.  Overall attendance dropped 49% from 2008. Distributors' attendance dropped by 60% and manufacturers' by 36%.  From a pure business rationale it makes logical sense to me that the 'sellers' would try to get in front of as many 'buyers' as possible and the buyers would sit this one out.  It appears to me that the economy forced every business to cut back large expenditures such as the National NAED.

NAED as an organization has largely ignored the issues of attracting and retaining talent; and diversity hiring is a rarity in any NAED agenda.  The number 1 challenge for the electrical industry for the past 5+ years has been the availability of quality talent.  The ability to attract talent in this economy is actually better than in boom times, but the topic is ignored.  The 2009 agenda is similar to past conferences with no sessions devoted to attracting talent, keeping talent or developing a heterogeneous organization. Bluntly put, diversity hiring is essential for no other reason than the current labor pool isn't predominantly white guys any more... it's women and minorities and old and young, all selling to customers who are just as diverse as America.

In short, do you want to grow and become more profitable? Then start to mirror your customer base or differentiate your business into minority-owned companies.

As the inimitable Peter Drucker so eloquently says: "the ability to make good decisions about people represents one of the last reliable sources of competitive advantage, since very few organizations are very good at it".

*The results for 2009 are reported using a few rules that have been maintained since the inception of the survey;  I simply count the first names of every female attendee who is listed as a distributor or a manufacturer/VAR.  For every name I find that is non-generic specific (Chris or Pat, etc), and I don't personally know of them, then I accumulate those names into a total and assign 70% as male and 30% as female.  For the 2009 survey, I had a total pool of uncertain names of only 3 (so 2 were considered male and 1 female); not enough to hugely impact the statistics.