Last week, the international payments company PayPal was attacked for organising an all-male panel to discuss "gender equality and inclusion in the workplace" .
One of the five Australian speakers to boycott all-male panels, Dr Adam Fraser, said he had seen similar panels in Australia.
"We often see full male panels at conferences. In general, there is a lack of diversity, and sometimes we see those male panels talk about issues around women." In one case, he said a local financial institution hosted a similar discussion to PayPal's on work and family issues without including women.
"So you have privileged white males talking about the challenges that women face. It's insane," said Dr Fraser, who has presented his research on managing change and improving results to top businesses in Australia and New Zealand over the past five years.
The five speakers, who specialise in leadership, change and motivational behaviour, had discussed the lack of female speakers and panellists for some time.
Now it was time to force the issue and change the game, said Dr Dan Gregory, a behavioral researcher, a regular panellist on The Gruen Transfer and chief executive of The Impossible Institute.
"The five of us are arguably the most booked speakers in the conference industry," said Dr Gregory, "and that gives us a certain amount of power in the conversation," he said.
From now on, the group would no longer agree to speak on or moderate a panel unless there was diversity, he said.
Melbourne-based motivational scientist and popular speaker, Dr Jason Fox, often responds to requests for him to speak by asking who else will be appearing on the panel. If it appears that women have not been included, he refers the organisers of the conference to "female conference bingo" – a game mocking the usual excuses, such as "both women we called were booked" – and to a site documenting all-male panels on Tumblr.
He said choosing all-male panels was "utterly lazy, utterly ridiculous and was hobbing the quality of conversations that will occur."
Dr Fox said while the boycott may be attacked as tokenism, it was better to have a token female than none at all. "The gesture is important, and the conversation needs to be on the table."
Lucy Perry, the Australian chief executive of the Sunrise Cambodia orphanage, has been on the speaker's circuit for almost a decade but unless it's a women's conference, she was often the only woman.
"I'm often the only woman in the program. The notion that a panel or speaker line-up would be adequate if it were chock full of men, makes no sense to me or any of the other 3.2 billion women on this planet."
"There are plenty of talented speakers who don't have a dick. I'm one of them," she said.
Dr James Fox often refers conference organisers to female conference bingo, when he asks for women to be included on panels with him. Photo: www.feministe.us
Ms Perry has been such as vocal critic of the lack of female representation at events that she was threatened with legal action last year. Speaking from Fiji, where she had just delivered a keynote address for Allianz Insurance's annual sales conference, she said that while the audience was tipped towards men they still chose a woman to deliver a challenging, funny, diverse keynote.
Recently, the ABC's Q and A program admitted it had trouble recruiting female panellists: Many were afraid of being trolled, while others were more modest than men about their abilities, said series producer Amanda Collinge.
Dr Fox said that at a recent conference he had organised, they worked hard to get a 50/50 balance of men and women. "It was too important for us not too. And it is too easy to default to having a bunch of dudes and having a dude fest," he said.
In addition to Dr Gregory, Dr Fraser and Dr Fox, the other speakers who have boycotted all-male panels are Matt Church and Darren Hill. The group is urging their peers on the professional speaking circuit to follow their lead.
"There are plenty of women who are experts in their field and highly talented speakers," said Dr Gregory. "And, to steal a line from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 'it's 2016'. The thing is, research tells us diversity makes groups smarter, so why are we dumbing panels down?" Dr Gregory said.
Other groups have also taken the #panelpledge.
The executive director of the U.N. Global Compact, Lise Kingo, said that the organisation's 80 employees will no longer participate in or host all-male panel discussions, reported the Huffington Post in March 2016.
"Too often I've been the only woman on a panel. It is time that we challenge the status quo and stop making excuses — there is no shortage of qualified women," Kingo said in opening remarks at the Women's Empowerment Principles annual event in New York.
