From Financial Post authored by Kara Alaimo:
“Last month, Goldman Sachs hosted a conference in London on disruptive technology. Out of 76 speakers at the event, five were women. That was hardly an anomaly: At last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, for example, all of the speakers on a panel about helping women thrive were male. (The moderator was female.) Similarly, one count of events at six leading think tanks in Washington D.C. found that 65 per cent of their panels were all-male.
Denying women opportunities to present at professional conferences prevents them from gaining visibility in their fields, and it deprives their colleagues of valuable perspectives. So in 2013, Rebecca J. Rosen proposed a solution in the Atlantic: Men should refuse to speak on all-male panels. If all men did this, of course, it would immediately solve the problem.
The idea is slowly taking off: A pledge posted online by a development economist in London now has over 1,100 signatures from male academics, researchers and NGO representatives, and nearly 100 men who work on peace and security issues at high-profile organizations have signed a similar pledge on the website manpanels.org. And last year, high-profile digital media expert Sree Sreenivasan made waves when he made the pledge to not participate in all-male panels. Then he upped the ante and announced he wouldn’t attend them, either.
But how should women respond to all-male panels?”
Read the full story by FOLLOWING THIS LINK.
