#binderconla

[minotivaishnav]

Fantastic panel at Bindercon with some fantastic people! Women writers rule!

[fiftyshadesor]

@robinnelee "So great participating in #binderconla these last couple of days! A shot from this morning's How to be a Media Hybrid panel, with Marisa Echeverria and Lucia Brawley. Love this community of smart, passionate, creative women! #bindercon #womenwriters #TheIdeaOfYou" #FiftyShadesDarker #FiftyShadesFreed #RosBailey

[reciperenovator]

Gorgeous morning in LA! Happy Sunday! #binderconla

[bitch-media]

Claudia Rankine (with mic) and author Tisa Bryant at Out of the Binders. All photos by Rebecca Aranda.

Often at journalism conferences, I’m lucky to find one measly panel on “women writers.” That sad reality was reversed this weekend at Out of the Binders, a symposium for female and gender non-conforming media-makers that descended on the UCLA campus. Instead of being the odd one out, I was excited to be surrounded by roughly 400 women journalists, writers, producers, and filmmakers.

LA’s Out of the Binders was the first West Coast conference for BinderCon, a group of feminist-minded writers whose name harkens back to Mitt Romney’s unfortunate comment about having “binders full of women” during the 2008 presidential race. Fueled by the underrepresentation of women in media, BinderCon is a burgeoning community bent on supporting women who work in all facets of journalism, film, and TV. The two-day conference pulled in some big supporters, including the Harnisch Foundation, TinyLetter, and the Knight Foundation. Keynote speakers included poet Claudia Rankine (be still, my heart) and OpEd Project founder Katie Orenstein, whose talk on the gender disparity of editorial pages hit home a main theme of the conference: What goes down in our cultural memory as significant depends on who is writing our history.

Keep reading about our trip to BinderCon at BitchMedia.org.

[bindercon]

Hey ‪binders! At our inaugural ‪BinderCon, we dominated social media and, by the second day of the conference were the NUMBER ONE trending Twitter topic. Of course we're keen to do this again. So help our friendly live-tweeter out by joining in - just be sure to use the hashtag ‪#‎BinderCon!