Why You Need to Demand Women Speakers and Panelists

I already feel like defending myself and I’ve barely started to write. So to get it out of the way I want you to know that I have two sons, a husband, a brother, a father and no daddy issues (anymore at least). I’ve worked in politics and finance—two fields where vaginas are still relatively rare at the top levels—and I’ve played well in those male dominated sandboxes. I have no beef with men. In fact, I love men! So I myself am astonished that I have a visceral reaction to being in the audience at “women’s events” and having men as the featured presenters. It takes absolutely every ounce of self-control to remain seated when it happens or scream in to the auditorium, “Could you really not find one single equally qualified woman? Really? Truly?” I’ve literally sat in a work related women’s event that didn’t include even one woman. After the third guy took the stage all I could think was that as an organization we had a real problem if we didn’t have one single woman in a leadership position. But the need to feed my family kept me silently seething in my seat.

Last week I realized that I may be holding the minority opinion here. I was on a conference call as part of a finance industry women’s conference committee. The other women on this committee are the adult equivalent of the cool kids in high school. I aspire to be as awesome as each of them are. Then we got to the topic of speakers and one of the women started off her list of recommendations with the name of a man. I couldn’t even tell you who it was because I went into a state of shock. Before I could formulate a diplomatic way to position how important it is to me to include, promote and raise awareness of female speakers I blurted out, “I don’t know if anyone else feels this way but it sends me over the edge when I am at women’s events and they feature male speakers.” Dead silence. For like ten very long seconds. Then all the other committee members said in as nice a way as possible they really didn’t feel that way at all. One woman made the point that sometimes the best speaker is a man.

The problem I have with this argument is that I believe to the core of my soul that there is always an amazing and qualified woman out there who can do the job just as well as any man. And I’ll take that one step further. I believe it is our duty as women in leadership positions to share our platform with women. To raise each other up. Because the narrative has been so long that men are leaders that it’s burned into our unconscious bias. Until we women start demanding that we see ourselves reflected in leadership and speakership positions those arenas are going to remain stale, male and pale.

I would challenge all of us to recognize how male dominated panels and keynote speakers are. If you don’t believe me just ask Greg Martin, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia, who devised a statistical probability analysis that demonstrated how significantly male line-ups cannot be random. It’s a mathematical impossibility that bias doesn’t play a part in it. I f****ng love math.

As someone who has been on many conference committees I know how easy it is to rely on engaging speakers and panelists we’ve seen and heard already. We have an automatic comfort level because we’ve seen them in action. Also these committee members are usually taking on so much work that it is easy to go with a known quantity to ease that workload somewhat. The problem is that most of us are seeing male presenters because they are the current majority. Then we turn around and just perpetuate the cycle—not even realizing we are doing it.

This is a big octopus of a problem with no silver bullet-solution. But like all challenges in life I believe in chunking the solution down into bite-sized pieces that can be tackled realistically. So I’m asking, begging, pleading that if you are in a position to influence panelists or speakers for any event just ask one question of yourself: Is there an equally qualified woman who could fill this role? Speaking from experience I know how uncomfortable and scary asking this question is going to be. But your bravery will level the playing field and be the catalyst for necessary change. So one day your daughters and our sons will roll their eyes when we talk about such antiquated things as gender-bias.