2020 Market Research Conference Speaker Gender Tracker #MRX #NewMR
This list shows the gender ratio of speakers at marketing research and related conferences during 2020.
These data are not 100% accurate. I am not always able to identify whether a speaker is male or female based on their name and/or photo, and online and printed programs don’t reflect last minute changes to the schedule. However, given that conference organizers want to project the most positive reflection of their conference program, I am assuming the available programs are within a reasonable margin of error. If you are able to provide more accurate numbers, I would be pleased and grateful to make corrections.
And yes, there is far more to diversity than gender. Diversity of age, ethnicity, ability/disability, sexuality, and more also matter. But gender is a start.
Please contribute: If you have a PDF or image of a conference program, even if it’s from 2015, email it to me so I can include the results in the list.
Let’s create the change we want to see.
- MRS Sports, UK, February, 7%
- Insights CEO Summit, USA, January, 23%
- MRMW, Amsterdam, June, 23%
- CX Talks, Dallas, March, 25%
- MRS Data analytics, London, February, 35%
- ESOMAR, Lima, April, 39%
- ARF Audience x Science, New York, April, 41%
- IIeX, Amsterdam, March, 43%
- MRS National Impact, London, March, 45%
- NGCX, USA, March, 46%
- ESOMAR DRIVE, Delhi, March, 48%
- NGCX, California, March, 48%
- ARF+SXSW, Texas, March, 50%
- Insights Double Down, Las Vegas, February , 50%
- Sysomos/Meltwater, London, March, 50%
- Qualtrics experience summit, Salt Lake City, March, 53%
- NewMR Festival, Virtual, March, 50%
- QRCA, Texas , January, 62%
- MRS Kids, UK, January, 68%
- Advancing Research 2020, New York, March, 69%
How To Find Speakers
Be part of the Women in Research 50/50 initiative and take advantage of their speaker database.- Review the speaker lists of other conferences.
- Maybe you don’t need an experienced speaker. Maybe you need to give opportunity to a brand new speaker.
- Use LinkedIn to connect with experts in the city where your conference will take place.
- Use Twitter to connect with experts. I have bookmarked many lists of women who are experts in areas such as artificial intelligence, branding, data science, analytics, cyrpto, neuroscience and much more.
- In addition, you can use the GenderAvenger toolkit to nominate conferences that are succeeding, take the GA Pledge, or call out conferences that need improvement.
Gender Ratios of Years Past:
These data prove I am worth 80% of what my male research colleagues are worth #MRX #NewMR
As a freelance market research writer (my service sheet is here), I regularly check my public profiles to make sure they’re up to date. This time, I checked my profile on Savio, a marketplace connecting market research buyers with research experts, which is maintained by GreenBook.
After clicking around the website for a bit, I realized that every researcher’s hourly rate was completely and easily transparent, not hidden behind multiple clicks and privacy walls. My brain gears sped up….
People don’t talk about salaries which is a problem. Freelancers don’t know if they’re being paid what they deserve. Women don’t know if they’re being paid less than their equivalent male counterparts. So in that regard, I have to thank Savio and Greenbook for opening the black box and helping researchers see a piece of reality.
I had planned to go see the new Solo movie but this lovely little dataset just presented itself to me. Plus, I hear there isn’t any ukulele in this movie so let’s do this.
I downloaded the data and removed the business profiles. That left me with 191 individuals who provided an hourly rate, country, and the types of work they do. I manually gendered all the profiles. Obviously, I may have gotten a few wrong as I am not the gender police (much better said by Effin Birds) – 83 women, 107 men, and 1 unknown.
As all good data people do, I started with a frequency distribution. A few things were immediately apparent. 1) 3% of men and 4% of women VASTLY undervalued themselves. If you have listed an hourly rate under $50 per hour, go to your profile right now and FIX IT. I never want to see an hourly rate less than $50. From any freelancer. For anything. 2) 6% of men and 2% of women listed stunningly high rates, a couple over $1000 per hour. These rates might be for bragging, for negotiating, or for real but if you can command them, more power to you. 3) Women were far more likely to undervalue themselves while men were far more likely to overvalue themselves. [“THAT was a pencil in the neck moment!” -Luke Sklar]
Maybe group averages would paint a different picture but nope. Across all 191 rates, women asked for 81% of what men did – $168 versus $207 per hour.I tried excluding outliers from 12 people whose rates were below $50 or above $500. Women still asked for 81% of what men asked – $153 versus $189 per hour. I then focused on the three countries with at least 8 researchers. In Canada, two women and myself listed rates that were a paltry 40% of what five men listed. Among 123 US researchers, women asked for a somewhat better 80% of what men asked for. I am thrilled, though, to offer a huge hurray to the 14 researchers in the UK where hourly rates listed by men and women were equal. (Okay, women can increase their hourly rates by $5 in the UK.)
Maybe it’s because women do “less valuable” work so I tried grouping by the 25 different type of work people specified they did. Major caveat though – these data do not account for the fact that someone might charge different rates for different types of work.
I’ll pick out two examples from the chart since it’s a little bit complicated and uses two axes. At the left of the graph, among people who offer legal research services, women specified an hourly rate of $169 compared to men at $136. Thus, women listed a rate that was 124% of what men listed. There exist four categories of work where women listed a higher hourly rate than men – Legal Research, Field Services, Recruiting, and Support Services.
Second, at the right of the chart, among researchers who conduct Mystery Shopping, women listed an hourly rate of $138 compared to men at $225. Women listed a rate that was 61% of what men listed. There exist 21 categories of work where men listed a higher hourly rate than women.
I don’t know if these differences are because women undervalue themselves or because men overvalue themselves. I don’t know how much of these differences exist for bargaining or bragging purposes.
But I do know this. As much as I love statistics, t-tests and chi-squares aren’t necessary to determine the likelihood that these results are due to chance. Correlations and Cohen’s D aren’t necessary to determine whether the effect sizes are meaningful.
Women ask for less financial compensation than do men.
Women, my advice to you is simple. Give yourself a raise. Give yourself a giant fucking raise. (I’m channeling my inner Cindy Gallop and I urge you to follow this amazing woman on Twitter or LinkedIn and personally talk about your salary with her here.)
If you’re currently in the $50 to $99 bucket, up your rate to land in the $100 to $149 bucket. If you’re in the $200 to $249 bucket, give yourself a raise into the $250 to $299 bucket. Don’t think twice, it’s all right.
If you’re curious, I may have started my day claiming my worth to be 80% of what my male research colleagues felt they were worth.
It sure didn’t end that way.
You might wish to look at:
Happy International Women’s Day! Let’s meet some #MRX women who are flying under the radar #IWD #WIRe #NewMR #WIREheroes
Happy International Women’s Day!
The market research industry is lucky to benefit from a diverse range of people. Indeed, unlike some industries that are vastly male or vastly female, about half of us are women.
I know many women within our industry who regularly take the stage or sit on association boards or have roles on leadership teams. You probably know them too. Don’t you think it’s time to get to know some other fabulous women who keep the cogs or our industry turning? Let me start with two of those fabulous women!
I first met Kim Wong when she interviewed for a researcher position at Conversition, a social media research company. It was quickly apparent that she was a perfect choice. She figured out our business super fast, even though it was a strange concept at the time. She soon became a wizard at sentiment analysis, content analysis, and data quality of social media data. We could trust her to turn any set of random data into exactly what we needed. You know how amazing it is to find a colleague who can take a task and run with it independently? Yup, that’s Kim. Kim, cheers to you, your awesome contribution to our research team, and to the market research industry. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Meredith Morino is another quietly awesome researcher who deserves a big round of applause. I love your dedication to and passion for qualitative research. I love your openness to try new things even when they seem outside your usual way of doing things. I love that you’re a team player who works hard to ensure that you and your colleagues at Sklar Wilton & Associates do well. Meredith, I look forward to many more intriguing blog posts from you, and even seeing you present on stage. You’ll be awesome, I know it. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Do you know Kim or Meredith? It would be awesome if quiet people could stand on stage and get the huge applause that thought leaders/speakers get all the time so let’s do it here. If you appreciate the work that Kim or Meredith do, leave a note for them here. Even better, send them an email and tell them just how much you appreciate their work.
What do Kim and Meredith need to do now? Recognize another woman in research who is making a difference! Tell us which women researchers are your unsung heroes! You could leave their names in the comments below, tweet their name and why they are awesome, mention why they’re awesome on LinkedIn or, even better, email them and let them know why you think they’re awesome. Don’t forget to tag it #WIREheroes so we can clap for all these awesome people!
What should YOU do? If you’ve been named, and even if you’ve not, it’s your turn to name a woman in research who is flying under the radar. Let’s see how many unsung heroes we have! Don’t forget to tag it #WIREheroes!
2018 Market Research Conference Speaker Gender Tracker #MRX #NewMR
This list shows the gender ratio of speakers at marketing research and related conferences during 2018.
These data are not 100% accurate. I am not always able to identify whether a speaker is male or female based on their name. Online programs aren’t always up to date, and printed programs often change at the last minute and don’t reflect who was actually on stage. If you are able to correct my numbers, I would be grateful for the help.
And yes, there is far more to diversity than gender. Diversity of age, ethnicity, ability/disability, sexuality, and more also matter. But let’s at least measure what we can from conference programs.
Please contribute: If you have a PDF or image of a conference program, email it to me so I can include it in this list.
FYI, I put a ⭐ beside any conference between 45% and 55% and a 👎🏻 beside any conference under 30% or over 70%.
- QRCA, Arizona, January: 19 female, 7 male=73% female (Qual research has more female than male specialists)
- Qual Worldwide, Spain, May: 20 female, 9 male = 69% female
- Qual360, Washington, March: 17 female, 11 male speakers = 61% female
- ESOMAR World, Amsterdam, March: 15 female, 11 male = 58% female
- Customer Experience Strategies Summit, April: 15 female, 12 male=56% female
- ⭐ NewMR Festival, online, February: 16 female, 13 male=55% female
- ⭐ TTRA, June, 49 female, 41 male=54% female
- ⭐ IMPACT MRS Annual, March: 45 female, 42 male = 52% female
- ⭐ Market Research Summit, London, May, 18 female, 18 male = 50% female
- ⭐ ConsumerXscience, The ARF, March, New York, 24 female, 25 male= 49% female
- ⭐ Africa Forum 2018 AMRA, Nairobi, February: 19 female, 20 male=49% female
- ⭐ MRMW APAC, June: 9 female, 10 male = 47% female
- ⭐ MRMW NA, April: 21 female, 24 male = 47% female
- ⭐ MRIA, Vancouver, May: 25 female, 30 male=45% female
- ⭐ Sentiment Analysis Symposium, New York March, 9 female, 10 male=45% female
- The Insights Show, London, March: 19 female, 25 male= 43% female
- CX Next, Boston, April: 10 female, 13 male = 43% female
- TMRE IN FOCUS, Chicago, May: 10 female, 13 male = 43% female
- Quirks LA, January: 45 female, 63 male=42% female
- Insights NEXT, April, New York: 28 female, 38 male=42% female
- Customer Experience & Digital Innovation, San Francisco, April: 5 female, 7 male = 42% female
- ESOMAR MAIN FEST Latam, Buenos Aires, April: 23 female, 33 male = 41% female
- Quirks Brooklyn, February: 55 female, 81 male=40% female
- FUSE Brand & Packaging, New York, April: 19 female, 28 male = 40% female
- SampleCon, February, Texas: 13 female, 25 male = 39% female
- IIEX, Amsterdam, February: 50 female, 84 male=37% female
- Qualtrics experience summit, March, Utah, 32 female, 57 male = 36% female
- IIEX, Atlanta, June: 44 female, 85 male speakers = 34% female
- Sysomos Summit, February, New York: 6 female, 12 male=33% female
- Sysomos Summit, London, April: 4 female, 10 male = 29% female
- 👎🏻 Insights CEO Summit, January, Florida: 4 female, 13 male = 24% female
- Insights50, May 2, New York: 1 female, 4 male=20% female
- 👎🏻 Sawtooth conference, March, Florida, 12 female, 58 male= 17% female
—————————————————————————————————————–
- MRMW Europe, September: female, male = % female
- PMRC : female, male=% female
- AMAART Forum, June: female, male=% female
- AMSRS, September: female , male =% female
- Big Data & Analytics for Retail Summit, June: female, male=% female
- CRC, October: female, male=% female
- CX Talks, October: female, male= % female
- ESOMAR Big Data World, November: female, male=%female
- ESOMAR Congress, Berlin, September: female speakers, male speakers =% female
- ESOMAR Global Qual, November: female, male=% female
- ILC Insights Leadership Conference (Insights Association), September, female, male=% female
- Insights Corporate Researchers Conference, October, Florida: female, male=% female
- Insights Leadership Conference, November, San Diego: female, male=% female
- MRIA Net Gain, November, Toronto: female, male=% female
- MRMW Europe, November: female, male=% female
- MRS Driving Transformation Through Insight, October: female, male= % female
- MRS, Customer Summit , November: female, male= % female
- MRS, Financial, November: female, male=% female
- MRS, Methodology in Context, November: female, male=% female
- Omnishopper International, November, female, male =% female
- Qual360 APAC, Singapore, October: female, male=% female
- Sentiment, Emotional & Behavioral Analytics, July: female, male=% female
- Sysomos Summit, September: female, male=% female
- TMRE, October, female, male=% female
Gender Ratios of Years Past:
- The gender split in #MRX conferences: 2017 edition
- The gender split in #MRX conferences: 2016 edition
- The gender split in #MRX conferences: 2015 edition
- Note: 2014 ratios were done in individual posts
How many women do you follow on Twitter? #MRX #NewMR
One of the best ways to identify lots of diverse people to speak at conferences is to follow lots of diverse people on social media. But do we?
With that question in mind, I turned to https://www.proporti.onl/, a website that says…
“Estimate the gender distribution of your followers and those you follow, based on their profile descriptions or first names. Many tech leaders follow mostly men, but I want to follow a diverse group of people. Twitter Analytics doesn’t tell me the gender distribution of those I follow, and it doesn’t try to identify gender-nonbinary people. So I built this tool for myself and put it on GitHub. It’s inaccurate and it undercounts nonbinary folk, but it’s better than making no effort at all. I want you to be able to do this, too. Estimate the distribution of those you follow and see if there’s room to improve!”
I’m cool with that so I turned to this tweet by Antonio Santos as a good place to start within the market research industry. I entered each one of these accounts (excluding @MRXblogs which is a bot that follows no one but me), in order to see how we’re doing.
On average, about 36% of the people these market research influencers follow are women.
Sadly, only 3 people follow roughly equal numbers of men and women, and only 2 people follow more women than men (you can guess who!). I’m one of them, but that’s only because I actively follow women and I’ve been using proporti.onl to monitor my status. Unfortunately, for about 43% of us, one third or fewer of the people we follow are women. The curve is far from expected and could use a lot of improvement.
Fortunately, it’s easy to change that proportion. Lots of people have created lists of women on Twitter who specialize in different areas including marketing research, data science, analytics, STEM, and more. I keep a nice selection of those lists on my twitter account right here. However, here are some of my favourite lists.
- Women in Data Science: I love this list. Search through the 1200 members and you’ll find tons of women who specialize in data visualization, statistics, neuroscience, RStats, business intelligence, artificial intelligence, and more.
- Women Game Developers: 100 women who know AI, storytelling, games, user experience, digital marketing, customer relationship management.
- BioInfo Women: 600 women who know about EEGs, fMRIs, neuroscience, computer science.
- STEM women: 500 women who know data, engineering, cybersecurity.
- Women in VR: So, um, these 150 experts know VR.
Now it’s your turn. Go check how many women you follow on Twitter, and then head on over to these lists to make some additions! Expand your world!
2017 Market Research Conference Speaker Gender Tracker #MRX #NewMR
This list shows the gender ratio of speakers at marketing research and related conferences during 2017.
These data are not 100% accurate. I am not always able to identify whether a speaker is male or female based on their name. Online programs aren’t always up to date, and printed programs often change at the last minute and don’t reflect who was actually on stage. If you are able to correct my numbers, I would be grateful for the help.
Please contribute: Some conferences remove their information immediately afterwards. If you have a PDF or image of a conference program, email it to me so I can include it in this list. If you have a paper program, mail it me or do the counts and simply send me the final numbers.
- ESOMAR Global Qual, Porto, November: 25 female, 17 male=60% female
- MRS Driving Transformation Through Insight, London, October: 15 female, 12 male= 56% female
- ⭐️ AMSRS, Sydney, September: 3 female keynotes, 3 male keynotes, 1 female invited, 1 male invited, 28 female speakers, 19 male speakers=53% female
- ⭐️ MRS, Financial, London, November: 11 female, 12 male=48% female
- ⭐️ Qual360 APAC, Singapore, October: 16 female, 17 male=48% female
- ⭐️ TMRE, Orlando, October, 79 female, 88 male=47% female
- ⭐️ MR and CI Exchange, St Louis, May: 13 female, 16 male speakers=45% female
- MRIA, Toronto, May: 25 female speakers, 33 male speakers, 6 female panelists, 4 male panelists, 1 female keynote, 4 male keynotes=44% female
- CRC, Chicago, October: 37 female, 55 male=40% female
- Market Research Summit, London, May, 22 female, 29 male=43% female
- ESOMAR Congress, Amsterdam, September: 62 female speakers, 83 male speakers =43% female
- MRS, Customer Summit 2017, November, London: 6 female, 8 male=43 % female
- MRMW Europe, Berlin, November: female, male=43% female
- IIEX, Amsterdam, February: 52 female, 76 male=41% female
- MRS, Methodology in Context, London, November: 40 female, 6 male=40% female
- Customer Experience Strategies Summit, April, Toronto: 12 female, 18 male=40% female
- Sysomos Summit, February, North Carolina: 16 female, 25 male=39% female
- Sysomos Summit, September , NYC: 6 female, 10 male=38% female
- MRIA Net Gain, November, Toronto: 6 female, 10 male=38% female
- ILC Insights Leadership Conference (Insights Association) Chicago, September, 13 female, 24 male=35% female
- IIEX, Atlanta, June: 58 female, 108 male speakers=35% female
- 👎🏻ESOMAR Big Data World, New York, November: 10 female, 24 male=29%female
- 👎🏻Sentiment Analysis Symposium, New York, June, 14 female, 35 male=29% female
- 👎🏻Omnishopper International, Spain, November, 4 female, 13 male =24% female
- 👎🏻CX Talks, Atlanta, October: 7 female, 25 male=22 % female
- 👎🏻Big Data & Analytics for Retail Summit, Chicago, June: 5 female, 19 male=21% female
- 👎🏻 Sysomos Summit, June, London: 3 female, 14 male=18% female
- 👎🏻 Insights50 (Insights Association), Chicago, October: 1 female, 7 male=13% female
- 👎🏻 AMAART Forum, Seattle, June: 4 female, 32 male=11% female
- 👎🏻Sentiment, Emotional & Behavioral Analytics, July, San Francisco: 4 female, 36 male=10% female
- .
- PMRC Speakers not available online
Gender Ratios of Years Past:
- The gender split in #MRX conferences: 2016 edition
- The gender split in #MRX conferences: 2015 edition
- Note: 2014 ratios were done in individual posts
I thought we had this single-gender #speaker thing sorted out in #MRX #NewMR
Some of you might remember a long-running and regularly updated post I created last year listing the gender ratios at marketing research conferences around the world. I stopped doing it because an entire year of data is sufficient for an industry that depends on data to see what’s happening. The data showed that women were vastly underrepresented as speakers at conferences. Conference organizers could see that this was an industry issue, not a “just them” issue. The data gave us the perfect opportunity to make great progress in how we source speakers.
I’ll admit it can be difficult to see the problem but Twitter and Facebook make the job of spotting single gender panels much easier. Now, I truly don’t care about single gender, or single race, or all young, all old, all differently abled, or whatever the panel bias is. I DO care when the only type of biased panel I ever see is middle-aged, white, male panels. Has any #MRX conference ever had an all black panel not talking about black issues in #MRX ? Or an all woman panel not talking about women’s issues in #MRX? That’s the problem. That’s the statistically improbable problem.
So that’s why posts like this are so disappointing.
There are literally hundreds of Twitter lists labeled as #WomenIn_________, insert industry category. (Some of the relevant lists are on my twitter account.) There are hundreds of websites listing #WomenIn_________. There are Facebook groups, google plus groups (yeah, tons of techies there!), Reddit groups, you name the digital channel, they have #WomenIn___________ groups. There’s #WomenAlsoKnow. There are thousands of lists of women experts if you look for them. You don’t even need to ask a woman/black person/differently abled person if they know another woman/black person/differently abled person who is an expert on a topic. You just need to know how to use the google. Or the internet explorer if you work for a company that still operates in the dark ages.
But with that tweet, and the emails that came my way to complain, I guess I ought to do the counts again. I hope that while we may have not reached peak equality, e.g., at least 45% of one gender, we at least have shown improvement. I hope that instead of 35% of speakers being women, that at least 40% of speakers are women.
Please do send me PDFs of any market research conference agendas you have saved. I’d appreciate the help. So would your friends and colleagues. My gmail address is anniepettit.
Fingers crossed!
In which I rant about “we only choose the best conference proposals and we can’t help it if they’re mostly from men” #NewMR #MRX
I’ve had this post on my mind for many months now but I’ve been hesitant to write it. It seems today is the day.
If you’ve been following my speaker gender ratio post, you’ll see that I keep adding to the list conferences where fewer than 40% of speakers are women. Today, I added several to that bucket. On top of that, Ray Poynter just pointed out that the nine new and genuinely deserving fellows of the MRS are all, you guessed it, men. Have women not made any important contributions? I highly doubt it. So today is the day.
There are many different reasons for conferences to over index on male speakers but I’d like to address one reason in particular. Conference organizers regularly say they choose the abstracts that will be the most interesting and intriguing for their audience. If that means that most of the speakers are men, then so be it. Quality wins. As it rightly should.
But.
Men do not propose better topics than women. Men do not have better ideas than women. Men do not propose more innovative nor more important ideas than women. This is truth.
How do I know? I’m lucky that I get to go to a lot of conferences. I’ve been in the audience for literally hundreds of talks. I’ve seen lots of men give horrible talks. But, as expected, the vast majority of talks given by men are fine. Not horrible, not great, just fine. Most male speakers are awkward or forget what they were going to say or don’t speak loud enough or rush or go over or under time. Most men are basically acceptable speakers. Such is the law of averages.
To be clear, most women are also basically acceptable speakers. I, for one, know I’m an awkward speaker who regularly forgets what I want to say. If the goal of conference organizers is to choose great speakers, well, I’m not seeing it. They could have randomly selected speakers by putting submissions in a hat and the quality of speakers wouldn’t decrease very much. It could even increase because the gems who keep submitting awkward proposals might actually get chosen.
And when it comes to the topics of the talks, most talks that men give are fairly ordinary. People like to think that THEIR talk is unique and innovative and offers a previously undiscovered point of view in their field but that’s usually not the case. The vast majority of talks given by men cover material that has already been addressed in twenty other talks at twenty other conferences and in twenty other white papers and fifty other blog posts. New material is exceedingly rare. Our industry simply doesn’t move very fast.
To be clear, most women also cover material that has been addressed in twenty other talks at twenty other conferences. Again, the topics I present are rarely truly new and innovative. If the goal was to choose innovative topics, I’m not seeing that either. Once again, we could randomly choose talks with a magician’s top hat and the degree of innovation would… Well, actually, the talks might be more innovative simply because people who stink at bragging would finally have their papers chosen.
Even better, random choosing based on top hats would increase the demographic diversity of speakers, and ensure speakers better reflect the diversity of submissions.
My point is that men and women are similarly generally ok speakers. Men and women give similarly ordinary talks. If submission acceptances for men outweigh acceptances for women, something is terribly wrong with how organizers identity “greatness.”
Maybe it’s time to completely rethink how conference proposals are reviewed. Maybe it’s time to use only blind submissions where names and companies are removed. Maybe it’s time to find a way to remove writing style gender cues that unconsciously affect our perceptions. Maybe it’s time to consciously review proposals with the mindset that some people brag and exaggerate the importance of their work whereas other people stick to the facts and discuss their findings within the confines of appropriate generalizations. Maybe it’s time to give the magician’s hat a chance – remove the obviously horrid submissions and then put every submission in the hat.
It could only improve things. Rant done.
(By reading this far, you hearby commit to submitting to at least one conference this year. Thank you for being part of the solution. )
Insight: a force for good #MRSlive @TweetMRS #MRX
Live blogged at MRS in London. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.
Moving more with cancer by Emily Fu and Justin Webb
- 77% of people with cancer are not active to recommended levels which reduces consequences of treatment, reduces comorbigiteis, reduces disease progression, decreases mortality
- Imagine you have cancer and what would keep you from being more active, physical abilities are not as influential as you think, people have a huge knock to their confidence, feel depressed and vulnerable and frightened
- Social support and social pressures are influential on behaviour, family is all about sit down and rest be safe, they fear injury or psychological damage
- There is social stigma around cancer, around scars, and being self conscious, cancer is invisible for many people
- For some types of cancer, finding a bathroom is a huge problem for getting enough activity, physical symptoms of cancer and surgery are problematic
- People who were active planned it around treatment cycles, built things up slowly, didn’t get disheartened if they couldn’t do as much as they wanted
- Need to reeducate via media – don’t take it easy if you’ve got cancer, get moving! Let people know exercise is safe. Created a ‘Get Active Feel Good’ pack for people and families
Creating a buzz around gender equality by Philly Desai and Nasir Nansir
- Gender discrimination in Nigeria – violence, leadership, decision making
- Five year program working directly with young people, empower through self-esteem, increase positive attitudes, change the rules by securing laws and budgets that respond to women’s needs
- Must influence wider society through marketing communications types of activities
- Quant study to explore attitudes and social norms, what do I believe, what do others believe, what attitudes and behaviora do not match up
- Violence against women is widely condemned but common in practice
- Younger people support women’s having more leadership but they expect resistance from society
- Needed to create a brand identify which appealed to young people but does not alienate men
- [by the way, these notes are being written as my friend and diversity advocate @RayPoynter sits on an #AllMalePanel in the next room. He must be horrified. 😦 ]
- Created a radio drama, created posters and billboards promoting diversity and 50/50
- Www.iampurple.ng – website targeting young people on mobile [bet this site is truly mobile friendly!]
- Site has 1 million visitors and 30 000 registered, have celebrities and popular people driving engagement
- Men must be seen as partners, need to message to appeal to men, ‘our strength is not for hurting’
- Craft messages that appeal to subconscious of target audience
Learning for tomorrow by Jackie Hughes and Catriona Ferris
- It’s hard for big brands to “do good”
- #Lifebouy campaign is about washing your hands more often to stay healthy which means buying more soap
- It has to be at the heart of the brand purpose, functionality is no longer enough, brands with a purpose are growing faster, need to create a purpose
- We learn by doing and experiencing, context, role playing
- Let’s create a classroom, students, and bring experts to spark inspiration, bring insight in, get creative work going
- Did one in London and one in Mumbai, brought in typical experts from India and Vietnam
- What is the meaning of education? More blackboards? More books? More kids?
- There was playtime, colouring, books just like a real classroom
- Spoke to moms and kids, spoke about real concerns about attending schools, fear of violence and rape, conflicts with kids working schedule, teenage pregnancy, as well as their hopes and dreams
- Sending kids to school is like setting them free
- They wanted to activate the first day of school
- Led to unicef campaign about the first day of school, first day of school means they are so grown up, one of the most important days of their lives, it’s on their way to their profession in life, it’s giving them a beautiful future, these are the first steps
- Persia is helping 10 million children get a quality education. #FirstDayOfSchool
A behind the scenes look at choosing speakers for the Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research, by Susan Abbott #MRX #Diversity
Hi readers,
This is a guest post from my colleague Susan Abbot who was on the speaker selection committee for the Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research. After reading an earlier blog post of mine about diversity of speakers, Susan decided to run the numbers on the conference and see how the conference did. These numbers can be seen in context with others on my conference comparison post. I would be thrilled if other conferences followed suit because this type of transparency is how we can really determine where any problems may lie.
Overall
We received multiple proposals from the same speakers, in varying combinations. Any given name was only counted once, and counted in the place first recorded, which would have been in the order received.
Some proposals had more than one speaker. We counted only primary and secondary speakers.
Our keynote speaker is female. We did a search, and invited this individual to speak, we did not solicit proposals. Factors considered: wanted an expert on futures, wanted an expert based in Europe, wanted someone who would connect with our audience, wanted to be within our budget. We looked at three speakers from one organization as finalists, two males and a female, and felt the woman would connect better because she had some qualitative research background. She is not included in the numbers shown below.
Proposals received from:
| Primary speaker gender | Secondary speaker gender | Totals | ||
| Total count female | 33 | 12 | 45 | 57% |
| Total count male | 26 | 8 | 34 | 43% |
| Totals | 59 | 20 | 79 | 100% |
Program
The final program line-up is as follows.
I would note here that some people who were offered a speaking slot (including both males and females) declined the offer, for a variety of reasons.
As well, I believe one male secondary speaker was added after the session was accepted, and I didn’t try to take that into account.
| Primary speaker gender | Secondary speaker gender | Totals | ||
| Final Program Female | 19 | 6 | 25 | 58% |
| Final Program Male | 13 | 5 | 18 | 42% |
| Totals | 32 | 11 | 43 | 100% |
Process
We have a speaker committee of three people who have done a lot of conference planning work over the years.
In addition, I was involved in the initial discussions with the committee, and Kendall Nash, my co-chair, also participated in some of the final selections.
A consideration in forming the committee was to have at least one European (which we did, from the UK).
We did actively solicit speaker proposals through social media, through e-mail announcements with partner organizations, and so forth. The committee also invited noteworthy individuals to submit, and we made announcements at other industry events. Basically, looking for the best and brightest.
The initial review of proposals was blinded as to name and organization. It is difficult to do that entirely, because you see trademark phrases and styles in the proposal content that make it easy to guess, however I would say we worked hard NOT to guess. Where people recognized the content, or had close friends or associates with a proposal, they disclosed this and/or recused themselves from discussions.
I have to say that we didn’t really give gender a lot of consideration in discussions.
After an initial independent rating of each proposal by the committee members, any session rated below a cut-off was not given significant further consideration.
We DID give region/country quite a bit of consideration, as we wanted to have a truly global program, which we do. Since we had many more proposals of merit than we had speaking slots, we did not have to sacrifice anything to get this global mix.
In our final deliberations, we considered our collective knowledge of the individual’s skills at presenting, as well as how often we had seen them on a conference platform recently. We also tried to ensure that the same people are not on the podium every year, even if they are really good speakers, because they already get a lot of air time for their ideas.
So, I am pretty thrilled to see that gender does not appear to have been a factor in our deliberations.
Gender is clearly a factor in how people choose to engage with QRCA – our volunteers tend to skew female, and I think that chapter meeting attendance also skews female. I’m not sure about overall membership, and there is really no way to know about participation in the workforce, as there are a lot of people who do qualitative and other marketing research that are not members of any organization. My hypothesis is that conference speaking is a more appealing way for males to participate in the industry than volunteering is.
Insight and Innovation
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