Mikkel Marius Winther is interested in the way the Internet is changing the way we communicate and the consequences it has on society and everyday life. He loves Twitter, Red Bull and writing about himself in the third person.
When we set out to create this year’s installment of TEDxCopenhagen we had a short meeting where we discussed what we wanted to do this year. We brainstormed about the theme, possible speakers, venue etc. One of the things we talked about was that we wanted to have a reasonably equal amount of men and women both as speakers and participants. Not because of any sense of political correctness but because we think diversity is the foundation of a great TEDxCopenhagen event. Simply put I think the discourse will be more interesting if we can get a diverse group of speakers and participants; young and old, rich and poor, experienced and enthusiastic (and both, hopefully!) – and, yes, men and women.
TEDxCopenhagen 2010 is in just over two weeks and we’re looking at 3 female speakers out of 11 sessions (not counting music) and I estimate that about 35 percent of the tickets we’ve sold so far have been to women. So what went wrong?
First of all, speakers. Why weren’t we able to find more female speakers who fit this year’s TEDxCopenhagen theme? Well we were, actually; we’ve had a few female potential speakers turn us down. But I’m pretty sure that looking back at all our notes would reveal that we (and the big group of people we’ve involved in finding speakers) have been able to come up with far more potential speakers who are men.
Why is this? Are there fewer women who do TEDx-worthy things? Do we have a tendency to ignore women who do these things? Or are men simply better at self-promotion?
And what are we to do as organizers? We can’t have different standards for men and women (or rather, we could but I don’t think we should). Our highest priority must be to have the greatest speakers, an equal amount of men and women is surely a secondary concern.
This seems to be a general problem, at least from where I’m standing. All the latest conferences and community events I’ve been to have had more male speakers than female ones. So it seems like we’re not the only ones with this problem.
Then there’s participants. I haven’t done a fine-count but I guesstimate that about 35 percent of the tickets sold are to women. The applications seem to fall into about the same distribution: Maybe 30 percent female, 70 percent male. (I could look further into this and I might but it would require me to go through all the applications to count them based on names as we don’t ask about gender in the registration form.)
So my guess is that it has been relatively easier for women to get invited but only a very little bit. I blogged about our selection procedure over at the TEDxCopenhagen website. For diversity’s sake we try to invite relatively more people who fall outside the demographic that we see most invitations from which is 30-something men. But we also can’t ignore that demographics aren’t our primary concern when sending out invitations. First of all we just want awesome, inspiring people.
Why do we attract so many more men than women? Is it because most of the speakers are men? Is it because of the registration procedure where you have to write an application (and thus promote yourself)? Do women just not like these kinds of events?
Please help us improve! As I said we’ve been very aware of the issue during the whole process and still we haven’t been able to get near a 50-50 split between men and women as speakers or participants. How do we improve this for next year? Do you have any examples of conferences who deal with this in a manner we should be inspired by? I’d love to hear from you in the comments or, if you’d rather reply in private, at mikkelmarius@wemind.dk.
