Walking the Talk: Event Diversity & #NI13

Fifty-four percent. That's how many female speakers - of almost 350 - we currently have booked for the 2013 Net Impact Conference. Twenty-three percent of speakers are people of color. As the Content Fellow at Net Impact, I track speaker diversity for #NI13, so when my Twitter feed blew up in the wake of a recent controversy around this issue, I knew this conversation deserved more than 140 characters. Less than two weeks away from San Jose, I sat down with members of the #NI13 conference team - Jessica Fleuti, Meredith Bell, and Patrick Martin-Tuite - to have a candid conversation about delivering a conference fueled by diverse perspectives. By sharing our successes and learning from our challenges, I hope to spark discussion and move this conversation forward.Below is an excerpt of the highlights of our conversation.

Kathara: Why talk about this now?

Jessica: We haven't talked very publicly about our diversity efforts before, but it's kind of a hot topic. Right now, 54% of NI13 speakers are women and a quarter are ethnic minorities, which reflects our membership pretty consistently. So it seems like a great time to talk about how we got here.Patrick: I agree, especially because of our location this year. Right now, Silicon Valley is part of this larger conversation about the role of women and female leadership yet it's not reflected at the tech conferences. It's important for us, as we look at San Jose and focus on what's so innovative and special about this place, we're also asking How do we really get all the right voices around the table?Jessica: Part of me is held back from having this discussion because I so don't want it to be an issue. I wish that we were past this as a culture. But we're not.Meredith: And wishing it was something that every conference naturally does. I think the whole reason we're having this conversation is because we've seen it come up about other conferences and when we see other speaker lists, we're really struck by how incredibly diverse our own speaker list is.

Why is diversity important at #NI13?

Patrick: We have 40,000 Net Impact members across the world from Ghana to Hawaii. And it's important that the nearly 3,000 people who come to our conference can look at the stage and say, Oh, I can see myself as that person in ten years, making that kind of impact.Jessica: It also just makes for more interesting content, whether we're talking about diversity of sector, or opinion, or ethnic background, or gender. There's nothing more boring than a conversation where three people who look the same and come from the same background and have similar job titles all agree about whatever the question is before them. The only way that you're actually going to push a conversation forward is by having people challenge each other's positions, so deliberately bringing diverse points of view together makes for a more interesting, really more fruitful discussion.

How do you guys address diversity when building out the conference content?

Jessica: We develop content very heavily through an internal process. We start with a topic, and then we try to identify what positions or points of view, or sectors, or different kinds of experience are out there. We start with that, and then we look for people to match. Hopefully we're starting from a place of diversity - not necessarily strictly gender or ethnic, but people with diverse points of view who can really explore all sides of an issue when they get in a room together -Meredith: - and having candid conversations with our friends in our network and saying this is who we're looking for, this is why it's important for us. I was actually planning a session with an external partner who had a lot of great speaker recommendations, but I explained to him, You know, these are all the same demographic we're talking about. Can you maybe recommend some women who could speak about this?And he stopped and paused for a while and responded with, Actually no, you've got me. I cannot think of any women right now that I've seen speaking at other conferences. So instead of focusing on who he normally sees speaking about the issue, we asked him to look at his own contact pool - was there anyone in his LinkedIn connections, for example, who might have a valuable perspective? He ended up coming back with this huge list of highly qualified women that he's worked with in his day job and just hasn't seen on the stage. Now, there are two incredible female panelists on this session. And it's not that he didn't want to include them initially, he was just stuck thinking only about those speakers he's already seen.Patrick: Exactly. I often found that my role was to reflect the speaker composition back to partners and say, I'm looking at the composition of this session, and I don't think it reflects the full range of perspectives.

So what does success look like?

Jessica: Ultimately, the emphasis is on the overall diversity and quality of the whole program over the course of the weekend. Because there are a lot of ways to encourage diverse viewpoints in addition to gender and ethnic diversity - by including people with different career paths, for example, or of different ages.Patrick: There are also several sessions that reappear every year that we consider our signature panels, like Not Your Grandma's CEO and Balancing Work and Family. For years there have been sincere attempts to reflect diverse families and diverse couples onstage. This is the first year we've actually succeeded in placing a same sex couple on the stage, and we're really proud of that.

What's next for diversity and gender at the Net Impact Conference?

Patrick: Well, we want this conversation to continue. It's important that we never become complacent.Jessica: Yeah, we need to keep evolving our practices.Meredith: The thing I explain to people and to our team is that so much of our mission for the conference is to inspire new leaders to use their careers for impact. We want people going into these roles to be diverse, so it's really important to have the speakers they're learning from and being inspired by reflect the diversity we want in the future impact space.

The 2013 Net Impact Conference is this Oct. 24-26 in Silicon Valley, CA. Register today to join nearly 3,000 thinkers and doers from all walks of life who are committed to using their careers to transform their lives, their organizations, and the world.