I heard Lyn Heward speak this morning at the World Business Forum. I didn’t know much about Lyn before attending. The truth is that with limited time to attend much of the two-day conference, I went to this morning’s session purely because Lyn is a woman.
We just don’t get to hear from a lot of women at large business events. Unless, of course, the event is a ‘women’s event’.
Lyn Heward is the former director of creation at Cirque du Soleil — quite the job title in one of the world’s most innovative companies, managing performers, designers and technicians to put on mind-boggling and seriously breathtaking performances all over the world. This morning she spoke about creativity, and how we all have it — we just need to know how to tap into it.
She’s one of just two women speaking at the two-day event featuring a total of nine industry ‘gurus’, including former PM John Howard, business ‘thinker’ Gary Hamel and strategy expert Michael Porter. The other female participant is Randi Zuckerberg, speaking tomorrow on the power of social media.
Cracking the 20% mark for female speaker representation is not actually a bad effort for the World Business Forum, not when you consider the difficulties many conference organisers claim to have in ‘finding the women’, particularly for business events. There were 2000 delegates at WBF today, and I’d estimate around 20% were female.
It’s notable that at the upcoming Australia in China’s Century Conference, on in Melbourne later this week, just four of the 26 speakers involved are women, and two of those are speaking on the same panel. Perhaps Australian women aren’t expected to play a particularly big part in ‘China’s Century’ after all.
Meanwhile, this morning I received a press release on Australian entrepreneur Renee Welsh who has been selected as the first ever Australian woman to demonstrate her product at a global travel event in LA. Well done to Welsh, the CEO of travel software business Booking Boss who is obviously getting great international attention with her business. But it’s a sad state of affairs when many large conferences and summits around the world are still celebrating ‘firsts’ for having women speak, let again getting anywhere near to a fair representation of women’s participation.
When women are speaking at events, I’m much more likely to attend. Indeed, as this morning’s session demonstrates, I’m also more likely to attend the sessions in which women are involved.
Of course it helps that I’m the editor of a site called Women’s Agenda and part of my job is to report back on what inspiring women have to say. But I know I’m not alone in wanting to learn from prominent and inspiring women about issues beyond what it means to be female in today’s business environment. We need to see what we believe we can be, and without visible female role models in business it’s difficult to believe leadership aspirations are possible.
As Catherine Fox writes today the underlying need for networking groups and women-only initiatives stems from the fact women are grossly underrepresented when it comes to ‘gender neutral’ panel sessions, forums and conferences. While there are plenty of excuses conference organisers can and will make for the lack of female representation, the fact remains that by choosing to ignore half the population, they may not only be ignoring a good chunk of the audience, but a good portion of potential ticket sales too.
Recently, my colleague Bronwen Clune over on our sister publication StartupSmart shared with The Guardian four steps for putting an end to male-dominated conferences. While most of the work is with the conference organisers, part of it is also involves women. When asked, ‘say yes’.