Our Conference Report Card: Does Your Conference Make the Grade?
When my kids bring home their report cards, there are no cut-and-dried letter grades. Since they are in elementary school, rather than getting an A in reading or a C in math, their skills in a particular subject area are scored as Beginning, Approaching, or Meeting. Basically, what this tells me is whether they are just at the cusp of demonstrating their knowledge, approaching mastery of the skill, or meeting the expectations of the grade level.
At GenderAvenger, we have a similar approach with our grading system. When someone creates a GA Tally of speaker representation at a conference, we assign it one of the following grades: Thunderstorm of Gender Inequality (Beginning), Cloudy with a Chance of Patriarchy (Approaching), or The Present and Future are Bright (Meeting). As we approach the final four months of the year, we’ve set our sights on a few high profile conferences that are meeting our expectations and a few that are still at the very beginning of approaching gender equality.
If you have any conferences for us to add to our list to watch this fall, let us know in the comments or tweet us @GenderAvenger.
BEGINNING
(needs serious improvement in the speaker gender equality department)
Newsweek Events' Structure Security Conference “highlights the best practices that security professionals are using to protect some of the world's largest companies and institutions, and examines the future of security products, services, and the threats that aim to take them down.”
Business Insider's Ignition: Future of Media “brings together the biggest names and brightest voices from the converging worlds of media, marketing, technology & telecommunications.”
Web Summit is “the largest tech conference in the world.”
Paley Center's International Council Summit is an, “an independent forum dedicated to providing common ground for the global media industries.”
There’s still time to improve the extremely poor gender balance for these events. Come on, folks, we know you can do better than this!
APPROACHING
(getting there but not quite making the gender equality cut yet)
Fast Company's Innovation Festival will “feature more than 150 dynamic events in content tracks ranging from tech to design, leadership to creativity, fashion to healthcare, and more.”
Fast Company just makes the minimum threshold of 40% women speakers. We’d love to see a few more women confirmed!
MEETING
(thumbs up, gold star, doing exactly what they should be)
Inbound 2017 is meant “to provide the inspiration, education, and connections you need to grow and transform your business.”
TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco: Disrupt conferences are “the world’s leading authority in debuting revolutionary startups, introducing game-changing technologies and discussing what’s top of mind for the tech industry’s key innovators.” This ranking is a huge improvement over the Disrupt NY tally earlier this year.
Bravo, Inbound and TechCrunch! These events are on top of their game when it comes to gender balance.
We’ll be keeping an eye on these events and more!
What conferences will you be attending this year? Please let us know in the comments or tweet us @GenderAvenger if you have conferences to add to our fall watch list. You are our best source of leads, so keep them coming. Thank you!