How to Get More Women on TEDx Stages

Just over a year ago, I spoke at a TEDx event outside of Boston, where John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple, headlined. It had been a dream of mine for a few years to speak on a TEDx stage. But it was one of those “back-of-the-mind” dreams that I wasn't doing anything about. Maybe you’ve had these, too.

Needless to say, I was very excited about this opportunity.

Shortly after I had been accepted as a TEDx speaker, I had a phone call meeting with the organizer of the event. On that call, I asked him about the other speakers to get a sense of the line-up. This included a specific questions about how many other women speakers there would be. He told me two. That meant, including me, there would be just three women, out of 11 speakers!

When he shared this information, I swallowed hard. I was surprised to see this level of gender disparity at a TEDx event. Really? Only a quarter of the speakers were women?

But I held my tongue. I didn’t want to “rock the boat.” More to the point, I didn’t want to upset the organizer and lose my spot as a speaker. I realized, probably like many women, that I could be replaced by a male speaker at the drop of a hat, or by a woman who was more “likeable” than me — one who wouldn’t challenge male authority.

The irony did not escape me. Here I was, intending to carve a new pathway for women and the female voice through my TEDx talk, yet I didn’t want to upset the organizational male leadership for fear of losing my spot.

After getting wind of this massive gender imbalance on the speaker list, I began to get curious about the gender breakdown at other TEDx events.

So, I did some research, asked around, and here is what I found:

There is glaring gender disparity on TEDx stages.

At TEDGlobal in 2013 in a workshop for TEDx organizers, TED producer June Cohen posed a question that had her stumped: Where are the women speakers?

According to June, only about 20 percent of the short-listed TEDx talks that came to her for consideration on TED.com were by women. Worse than this, only 15 percent of the recommendations that came in to speak at main stage TED were women.

That means that less than 20 percent of our ideas are being heard on the TED and TEDx stages (and 80 percent of men’s voices are being heard).

The TED organization, with their tagline "ideas worth spreading," is about people connecting around the power of ideas. If women's voices are missing on these stages, our ideas are not being represented and the truth of our lives is also missing.

Law, public policy and cultural consciousness, therefore, never reflect the truth of our lives. As a result, women suffer tremendously physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually.

This underrepresentation of women on a prominent global speaking platform, like TED, concerns me.

Today in the United States, one-third of women live in poverty or on the brink of poverty, and worldwide, one in three women will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or abused in some way (without recourse to the perpetrators in many cases).

On the flip side — according to the latest studies, when more women are leaders, companies and communities have been found to be more productive, innovative and successful. As the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College has said:

When more women are leaders, we change society’s understanding of what a leader looks like, how they operate, and how they respond to social, political and and economic needs. When more women are leaders, we raise the aspirations of women and girls around the world.

I have come to believe that simply stepping onto the TEDx stage as a woman is an “idea worth spreading.”

In her talk at TEDGlobal, June Cohen said she observed that when it comes to inviting speakers, women are 1) harder to find; 2) more likely to say no; and 3) slightly more likely to cancel than men.

She asserted that the reason we see fewer women speakers is because individual women make consistent personal decisions to decline public speaking.

While this may on occasion be true, I don’t buy this as the whole truth.

In my research, I spoke to a variety of women who had applied to be a speaker at a TEDx event, but never heard anything back from the organizer. In some cases, they had applied to two or three events. The door never opened for a conversation.

Lauren Bacon said it well in her October 2015 article in the The Atlantic entitled “The Odds That a Panel Would ‘Randomly’ be All Men is Astronomical”:

The underrepresentation of women on speakers’ lists doesn’t ‘just happen,’ despite many conference organizers’ claims that it does.

So, how do we turn this gender disparity on TEDx stages around?

Longtime TEDster, TEDx speaker and gender parity advocate Susan Macaulay suggests these three simple steps to start:

1. If you are TEDx organizer, invite more women speakers. If at first they seem reluctant to speak, don’t give up! Encourage them, offer support and help them with their talks. Get public speaking coaching for them; tell them that their voice is important, their knowledge and expertise should be shared, and perhaps most important, that they are valued.
2. If you are a potential TEDx attendee, talk to your TEDx organizers about gender parity, and suggest women speakers. When Susan saw that only 30 percent of the speaker nominees for TEDxRamallah were women, she enlisted the help of a friend, and together they proposed an additional 14 women speakers.
3. If you are a woman, start speaking and sharing your ideas. If you already speak, speak more. We need more women speaking up, speaking out and taking the stage at conferences worldwide — not just at TED. Your voice deserves to be heard. Sharing your ideas will help create a better world for everybody — women, men and children. Aspire to speak at a TEDx event, and take steps to make it happen. Organize your own TEDx event, and make the speaker line-up inclusive and diverse.

Let this be the year TEDx organizers hear a resounding “YES!” from women speakers everywhere. The world is waiting.

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Tabby Biddle, M.S. Ed., is a celebrated women's leadership coach, women's rights advocate, and Leadership Ambassador with Take The Lead, a non-profit organization dedicated to preparing, developing, inspiring and propelling women to take their fair and equal share of leadership across all sectors by 2025. She is the bestselling author of Find Your Voice: A Woman's Call to Action, and a recognized TEDx speaker and TEDx coach for her unique approach to activating women's leadership. 

On May 3rd, Tabby is offering a FREE 60-minute training call on "How to Give a TEDx Talk." Sign up here.