August 4th, 2009
The Speakers Group: 'Women will be better represented'
The last couple of weeks begot a bit of brouhaha when The Speakers Group posted a “top 10 list” of social media speakers that included only men. The Internet backlash was severe from a social media community up in arms, questioning why the speakers bureau couldn’t find at least one woman to include on its list of ten. The situation was made slightly worse when complaints surfaced that The Speakers Group was moderating its blog post and only allowing certain comments through for publication.
While the list has since been renamed a “10 to know” the issue, and concern, remains the same. I come at it from a unique perspective — I am represented by The Speaker’s Group. I was introduced to the bureau a few months ago and have since been offered several social media speaking opportunities. Was I angry that I wasn’t on the list? Heck yes. However, I was more upset by the overall lack of women having been represented in general.
I went through several different thought processes — many of which were talked out with my Technically Women community (an amazing group of female speakers, by the way). Should I continue working with The Speakers Group? Should I walk away and continue to work on my speaking portfolio alone? In the end, it was counseled and decided that I could do more of a service to the social media community by continuing to work with The Speakers Group and help bring more women into the fold. Why turn my back on an opportunity for myself and for multiple other women, especially when they are willing to address their mistake and correct the deficit of women speakers on their roster?
All that said, I did a bit of a Q&A with Shawn Ellis, founder of The Speakers Group and author of the blog post in question, to find out his side of the story. While I am not here to defend The Speakers Group (I don’t agree with the comment moderation, for one), I am a believer in finding solutions for problems and moving forward rather than going on witch hunts. I’ll let the Q&A speak for itself:
Q. [Jennifer] Why weren’t there more women on the list? Why did you not include women who were already affiliated with The Speakers Group?
A. [Shawn] There is an obvious deficiency in women under the social media topic on our roster. We’re in the early stages of developing this topic as a point of emphasis at The Speakers Group and it just so happens that most of the speakers we’ve gotten to know so far are men. That’s been purely unintentional - and I suppose the lesson is that we should have been intentional about seeking out speakers of both genders. Not recognizing that there is an existing problem of women being overlooked as authorities in technology and social media, though, we just set out to find outstanding speakers capable of addressing social media in a way that is relevant to our client base - primarily corporations, associations, government and health care organizations - and our search led us to these men (one of whom was recommended to us by a woman, for what it’s worth).
As for women already affiliated with TSG, at the time we published the list, the only woman we had come to know well enough to include was you. You were qualified to be included except we weren’t able to gather some necessary materials before our deadline. We weren’t thrilled that we had a list with no women on it, but we were - and are - very confident in the 10 speakers we featured and went with it, knowing that we would have other opportunities to feature more social media speakers - including women - in the future.
Next: How will they fix this? –>
Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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