Diversity on stage: why your next event needs more female speakers

The best events are the ones where no single perspective dominates the room; where there is diversity and debate. Our research, however, shows that one perspective continues to dominate most events: the male perspective. 

At Pomona Partners, we set out to ensure that our roster is always made up of at least 50% women so that we can help event organisers find the best speakers, whatever the topic.

Our research shows that men continue to dominate industry stages despite steady progress in recent years: For example, looking at prominent marketing events, the findings show that of 2,323 speakers, 57% of speakers were male, compared with 43% female. In pharma the numbers are 37% women speakers and in tech it’s 32.6% women speakers.

This means that it’s the same voices dominate the agenda. We hear the same voices, saying similar things, from the same perspectives. We often hear organisers saying that they simply can’t find the female speakers to book for the line up. And we can help with that. Because there’s a cost to limiting the expertise available to audiences; the conversation is smaller, which means the ideas it can spark, the audience’s takeaways, and the business value all become smaller too. 

The Business Case for Wider Perspectives

When a lineup includes a range of backgrounds, industries, and experiences, it instantly elevates the value for the audience. Diversity on stage changes the substance of what gets discussed. Ideas get tested against different assumptions, while strategies get challenged from angles a homogenous panel would never think to raise. No one needs to attend an event to sit in an echo chamber and hear ideas they’ve heard before and get bombarded with information they already know. Surely we’re all too busy for that! 

Different ideas, new ways of looking at things, and perspectives we haven’t considered make up the backbone of innovation and inspiration. Friction between different ways of seeing a problem ensures that we don’t simply cruise through familiar topics thinking we’re getting it right. A stage full of similar voices misses the opportunity to generate the very friction that pushes us to think harder.

Businesses that build diverse leadership teams tend to spot blind spots earlier, understand unintended consequences more clearly, adapt faster to change and make stronger decisions. Events should reflect this reality whether it’s a team training day or a massive conference. Platforming a narrow slice of the possible expertise out there, instantly dilutes the possible impact. 

Expertise First, Not Just Empowerment

There’s a really obvious way that we can see that industries are getting this wrong. We’ll field a bunch of enquiries about female speakers when it’s coming up to International Women’s Day. Depressingly these are also often accompanied with the insulting line ‘oh, we didn’t realise we’d have to pay’. 

We also manage frequent requests for women to talk about empowerment, or diversity of representation. 

Obviously these are worthwhile and necessary conversations. But they aren’t the only conversations to be had and treating them like the only context in which women should get booked sends a loud and damaging message; that men can be the experts on every topic under the sun, whereas women should be limited to talking about women to women.

The women on our roster are not there to fill a diversity slot once a year, and they’re especially not there to fill the diversity slot for exposure and to help companies tick a box. They're leading conversations and research on leadership, sustainability, design, marketing, communications, change management, politics, the legal landscape, finance, setting up and running companies and PR to name a small snapshot. Their value on stage comes from their expertise in their subject. Osrganiser only ever think to call on female keynote speakers for one type of panel, miss the majority of what those speakers actually know and the value they can have for the audience. 

Proactive, Not Passive

Representation doesn't improve by accident or with vague good intentions. It takes active work, both on our part, and on the part of the bookers we work with. We don't just wait for requests to come in and hope the numbers work out. We proactively put the expertise of our female keynote speakers in front of event organisers, making sure they're front of mind for the sessions that match their specialism, not sidelined into a single category.

We also run targeted campaigns in industries where the gap of the sexes on stage has historically been widest, including marketing, pharma, tech and finance. These are sectors where brilliant, highly qualified women are doing exceptional work while conference agendas lag behind in reflecting that. Our campaigns work to highlight that gap, and then to help close it. We connect bookers directly with diverse speakers who bring genuine subject-matter authority, and make the case that a stronger split in representation shouldn’t be a compromise or a tick box exercise, but helps to strengthen and upgrade the event. 

What This Means for Your Next Event

If you're planning an event, the speakers you choose do more than shape the day's schedule. They also have an impact on what your audience believes is possible, who they picture as an expert, and what kind of thinking gets rewarded with a microphone and a spotlight. Lineups that lean heavily on one type of voice miss the opportunity for better ideas and wider thinking. Pretending this is only about “representation” only perpetuates a narrow lens through which to view the conference topics and pushes that narrow thinking onto the audiences too. 

Bringing in more female speakers, across every topic and every industry is about building agendas that fully reflect the breadth of expertise driving businesses and industries forward. 

Working with Pomona Partners, an agency that treats diverse representation as an important standing commitment rather than an afterthought, you get access to speakers who are booked for what they know and not just for who they are.

That's the standard we hold ourselves to on every roster we build. We'd love to help you find the right voices for your event.