1
This infographic is an accompaniment Curation Wall’s “Annual Gender Gap in Digital Marketing Conference Speakers” report. Split into large and smaller events, the report surveys several leading digital marketing conferences, uncovering the gender balance of their speakers. The report also discusses the challenges with achieving a gender balance at the events, with several event organisers explaining the issues they face, and how they are working at overcoming those issues. Gender of conference speakers as percentage - Large conferences Gender Imbalance With Digital Marketing Conference Speakers – An Infographic. Event Organisers Comments Gender of conference speakers as percentage - Small conferences “What is hard, is finding quality female keynote speakers. We look for people with 5-6 years of keynotes, 100k twitter followers, a brand name author, or someone well known from a grade A internet corporation.“ Brett Tabke Pubcon “With our 40% goal, we’re saying that we think gender diversity is super important, but we’re also going to keep flexibility so that ultimately in the end, we’re not going to reject someone solely because they are a man or a woman.“ Danny Sullivan SMX Advanced “State of Search organizers have been concerned in the past by the low numbers of women who submitted pitches to speak. In 2016 this was again evident, with only 19% percent of pitches received coming from women. We want to proactively try to improve this situation, so rather than just relying on speaker pitches (which tend to be predominantly from men), we established a new sub-event at State of Search, to address this. We introduced our audience to the event with this post: Women in Marketing: Elevating the Conversation with Elevation Breakfast and followed up with a wrap-up post here: Lift Each Other Up: Women in the Industry. I'd also ask anyone reading this report to pause for thought before judging conferences too harshly. Drawing conclusions about the intent of conference organizers, based solely on the final composition of a speaking roster can be quite unfair. It's all too easy for the hard work that goes on in the background to go unnoticed. It can be the case that despite a serious and sustained effort by conference organisers to achieve good gender balance, the end result may fall short of what they'd hoped for, often for reasons beyond their control. Speakers may withdraw, there may be far fewer female speakers pitching than hoped for, outreach for speakers can be tough… All these things were factors that led us to create Elevation Breakfast, as we strive to improve year-on-year.“ Sha Menz State of search “Personally, I have been very aware and concerned of the gender inequality existing in the digital marketing scenario since before I even started thinking in creating a conference like The Inbounder. Therefore, when The Inbounder project was born, I tried to be consistent with my belief that female marketers should have that visibility they do not have. However, in the specific case of The Inbounder, I am also interested in another kind of inequality I see (and suffer somehow) in big conferences: the one for which speakers from countries like Italy, Spain and others tend to have very few visibility and opportunity to share an expertise and knowledge that's not at all inferior with respect the most common keynotes from USA and UK. Also for that reason The Inbounder was not able to reach a 50/50 balance in its first edition last May. However, we are getting better. In fact, if we consider the four events we are organizing all over the world as all, the balance is perfect and, if I am lucky with the three speakers I am waiting the answers from about their availability, female keynotes will be even majority.“ Gianluca Fiorelli The Inbounder “We put a lot of effort into our sourcing for SearchLove, and we're actively working to find great new women speakers in particular. We know we have some way to go on this front. We certainly anticipate that our 2017 numbers will be better than 2016. We also launched our code of conduct in 2016 and have been proactively discussing the code with all attendees at the beginning of every event. It's also important to note that gender diversity is only one form of diversity, and we are putting proactive effort into looking for exceptional speakers who are diverse in all kinds of ways. The biggest efforts here have been widening our search, and specifically seeking recommendations from people who move in different circles and who know different people to us. In addition, I am personally trying to mentor up-and-coming speakers from under-represented groups, and trying to help them overcome the challenges they have traditionally faced getting visibility and pitching themselves. We were really pleased to see that although we have some way to go in raw numbers, our efforts are paying off in quality. At our most recent conference - in London last October - when I look down the list of speakers sorted by "outstanding" ratings, there's only one straight white guy in the top 7 sessions. Will Critchlow Search Love “While we were blind to gender imbalance during our first year of running events, it's something we're now deeply passionate about resolving as we scour the globe for speakers. Ultimately, we consider a speaker on a case-by-case basis in terms of the knowledge and experience they can bring, rather than what brand or company they currently work for. While we'll never reject a speaker based on their sex, we try to look past the typical male speakers you generally see present at a lot of conferences, and instead search for upcoming talent we can help to nurture. As a conference organiser, I feel it's our duty to look past the number of ticket sales a "big name" can help generate, but instead, focus on the value-add for both the speaker and audience. Over the past two years, we've noticed that the feedback from our events has greatly improved as we've strived for (or exceeded) a 50/50 balance. This has also led to our audience profile shifting towards a predominately female demographic (65% male during our first year). Going forward, we're also looking into ways to nurture upcoming talent outside of our events in order to give less experienced speakers an opportunity to build their confidence and experience.“ Mark Scully Learn Inbound Of the larger conferencess that have more male than female speaker, the median average differnce was 11 speakers. Statistics Summary Female 37% Male 61% Male 63% Female 47% Male 53% Female 41% Male 59% Female 20% Male 80% Female 62% Male 38% Female 43% Male 57% Female 33% Male 67% Female 47% Male 53% Female 35% Male 65% Female 60% Male 40% Female 50% Male 50% Female 45% Female 39% Male 55% London Boston September April 11 90% Of the larger conferences surveyed, 90% had a gender gap that favours men. if we remove the outlier (Mozcon) this changes to 100%. 100% Smaller conferences performed better (though this was a very small data set), with two thirds of smaller conferences being either even, or having more female speakers than male. 2/3 The statistics highlight that there is indeed a gender gap with regards speakers at digital marketing conferences. However, as we can see from the event organiser’s quotes, many events are making efforts to improve the gender balance at their events, as well as other forms of equality. Perhaps some responsibility also lies with the broader digital marketing industry, for example digital agencies can proactively encourage successful female digital marketers to pitch for speaking slots at events. Nearly 77% (76.92%) of digital marketing conferences surveyed suffer from a speaker gender gap. 77% For the full report visit: http://cwall.co/gender
