The China Australia Millennial Project (CAMP) has something very compelling going for it.
You see the summit organisers have managed to do something very few conference organisers are able to do.
They have ‘found the women’ — to appear as 50% of speakers and attend as 55% of delegates. It’s a feat that has proven particularly challenging for many event organisers. Unless of course they happen to be developing a female-focused event, in which case it’s suddenly very easy.
The organisers of the CAMP Summit, kicking off today in Sydney, have not created a conference about women’s issues, nor even an event about diversity and wellbeing, and yet they’ve still managed to attract a 50/50 speaker lineup and delegate split.
This particular event is about uniting young leaders (aged 18-35) from China with their Australian peers for a bilateral business incubator across a broad range of industries.
The gender equity split was deliberate and intentional. The CAMP organisers wanted to bring a snapshot of the future to the five day summit, and so a diverse representation of gender and of Asian Australian talent in leadership was vital.
“We just thought that’s no longer good enough,” CAMP CEO Andrea Myles tells Women’s Agenda on male dominated conferences and events.
“It’s not acceptable anymore to draw in a large audience of increasing numbers of professional young women and then show them no role models on stage in whom they can see themselves. And now gender imbalanced conferences risk brand damage as there are now apps to protest and highlight the discrepancy and a platform like twitter for women and men to voice very publicly their dissatisfaction.”
So how did they do it?
Myles says they established their values on diversity from the outset, and then worked at creating strategy to achieve the goal.
“What we did was promote very clearly that we were a gender inclusive project, that we were looking for a 50% female participation and were not shy about promoting the female-lead management and lo and behold….brilliant application after brilliant application started rolling in, from both males and females.”
Still, she concedes getting a gender equity split of delegates wasn’t the hard part.
Finding an equal representation of speakers required more work.
“As we know, there is a plethora of young female talent out there. The issue is that the opportunities taper off significantly as women progress through their careers. Between the gender pay gap and the fact that there are more CEO’s named John than there are female CEO’s of ASX 200 companies, finding female leadership to speak at our conference was much harder. But we knew it would be from the beginning. Female leaders are working harder, being paid less and are additionally being asked to speak quite a bit!”
So the CAMP organisers got in early, as they knew many of the speakers they wanted would be busy. The result? They found the women.
“In this day and age, it’s no longer acceptable to have a gender imbalanced conference. Your audience will let you know this.”
Looking for women? Check out some of the below speakers, kindly provided by Myles: