AOL/PBS-Backed Makers, Focused on Women Leaders, Jumps From Digital to Analog With New Conference

Next month, the successful online and television video initiative — a partnership of AOL and PBS and headed by well-regarded filmmaker Dyllan McGee — will be putting on a live version of its project to feature prominent female leaders across many sectors.

Those include many in tech, which is one of the many reasons why I agreed to MC the event for Makers Conference, which is being held in Southern California on February 10 to 12.

There are many Makers videos of women in tech, but some of those onstage will include Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Harvey Mudd College’s Maria Klawe (who is also a Microsoft board member).

Also up: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who is an obvious dude, but will be interviewing a rocking nine-year-old football playing girl named Sam Gordon (see below).

To me, the big draw is Gloria Steinem — McGee really started the Makers effort off with a great documentary of the feminist icon many years ago — who will appear to talk about the strides (and non-strides) women have made in the last decades.

Here’s a good roundup of Makers in Elle magazine, with an interview with McGee, in which she notes how important the Web has been for it:

“We set out to make Makers a digital platform. It’s been our north star. We call it the documentary in reverse: We did the website first, then the long-form documentary, and now we’re having a conference. You could say we’re going backwards, but I think we’re pushing it forward.”

Here is video about the Makers Conference on its website:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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