How to get men at women-focused events - Women's Agenda

How to get men at women-focused events

It’s amazing that leadership conferences with a female focus can almost fill an entire program (often running for two or more days) with great female talent.

When so many organisers of so many non-gendered business conferences claim they struggle to find any women at all, one wonders how the producers of events like Macquarie University’s annual Women Management Work, manage to create a schedule of speakers that’s majority female.

Where do they find these women? How to they encourage them to say yes when so many women, apparently, continue to say no to such opportunities?

Yes, it’s amazing what happens when you actually ask.

What would be even more amazing is if we could go one step further, and get more men attending women-focused events and training.

Last week I attended a roundtable discussion of speakers who’ll be presenting at the upcoming Women Management Work event in November.

They included Male Champion of Change and Non-executive Director Glen Boreham, Redkit CEO Jenni Seton, former NSW premier Kristina Keneally, Golden Cross Resources chairman Jingmin Qian, Macquarie Associate Dean Philomena Leung, and conference MCs Mariette Rups-Donnelly and Donna Meredith.

One of the topics we discussed was how we could attract more men to the event.

Indeed, those of us in the room couldn’t see why a large cohort of men wouldn’t want to participate. It’s a great program, offering excellent tools and techniques for improving your management style and getting more out of your employees. There are no sessions discussing anything specific to ‘female leadership’ or even attempting to answer the ‘can you have it all?’ debate.

The theme of the event is, ‘the power of inclusive leadership through collaboration’ – offering management lessons that would certainly benefit from having both genders participating.

Every speaker at the roundtable, both male and female, had positive things to say about how collaboration had benefitted their leadership careers, as well as the organisations they’ve worked for.

Boreham discovered the power of collaboration and the need for diversity early on in his tenure as chief executive of IBM Australia and New Zealand. Managing a business of 15,000 staff and $4,5 billion in annual revenue, he learned they couldn’t meet their mandate of solving customer programs if everybody looked the same.

“If we’d all come from the same school, and the same age and the same background, we’d come back with the same idea,” he said. “The spark of creativity is diversity. So I then became a champion within IBM for making sure we had diverse team.”

Of course Boreham’s participation in the push for workplace diversity extended far beyond IBM. He became a founding member of Liz Broderick’s Male Champions of Change, and an advocate for pushing the business case for diversity in supporting the Australian economy.

In recent years, we’ve seen a plethora of female-focused conferences, events and training seminars emerge on the market. There’s big business in supporting the professional development of women, especially as women look to take more control of their choices around how and when they work.

This business is emerging due to a ‘market of failure’ – that is, a failure to not only see more women included on the programs of non-gendered business events, but many other issues affecting the progression of women: the gender pay gap, the still too few number of women in leadership, as well as bias and discrimination.

It’s the same ‘market of failure’ that drives initiatives like the Male Champions of Change (a point that Boreham noted) and even publications like Women’s Agenda. We exist because progress for women is still far too slow. In many cases, it’s actually stagnated or even gone backward.

As one roundtable participant noted, we may have reached the new mediocrity on diversity. We’ve achieved some progress, but the rate of change has slowed. This could be our new normal. 

The next step is to engage in more dialogue and collaborative thinking: to get men and women talking together, rather than across each other.

Events like Women Management Work would provide a great forum for such discussions. But how do we inspire men to attend a program that, by its own title, is aimed at women?

Some of the roundtable’s suggestions included:

* Tapping personal networks to encourage men to come along. Donna Meredith recalled inviting a male executive to attend last year’s event and watching him write “copious amounts of notes”.
* Putting male faces on conference marketing materials, to make it appear more inclusive to men
* Watching general assumptions made about men – especially regarding masculinity and what we believe a men should and should not be interested in
* Eventually removing the word ‘women’ from conference titles, to put the emphasis on gender, rather than women.

These would all provide an excellent start. The ultimate aim is that we’ll no longer need ‘women’s conferences’ or ‘female-focused events’, we’ll simply all work together to improve our working lives.

Check out more on the Women Management Work conference here

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