Another year, same speakers?
In 2017, we looked at more than 380 debates with over 1,700 speakers and found that 33.8% of speakers were women, compared to 34% in 2016.
Here’s the thing: Brussels panels are full of buzzwords like “smart solutions”, “the future is now”, and “harnessing opportunities”, but many still fail to innovate speaker line-ups and provide a platform for women to share their expertise in a broad range of fields, such as technology, energy, climate change, health, finance and sustainable growth. Can we afford to talk about the future of Europe without women?
While we wait for the future, political debates at the heart of Europe continue to tell women that they live in a man’s world. Men are still considered to be the leaders and experts in Brussels when we look at panel events. Some sectors in particular appear to refuse to embrace diversity.
Brussels needs to wake up to the fact that women, especially minority women and women of colour, face multiple challenges: biases in hiring and career advancement practices, gender pay gap, politics of maternity and paternity leave, organisational or company culture, online misogyny, and cultural double standards. All of these help to make it easier to pass over women as thinkers, change-makers, and ultimately, panellists.
EU Panel Watch is a campaign that draws attention to the lack of speaker diversity at EU events. A core activity is collecting the numbers that allow us to understand where we stand. Every June, a team of dedicated panel watchers and helpful volunteers undertake Monitoring Month to take a closer look at gender representation and diversity on panels and in debates taking place in Brussels across a number of EU policy sectors.
Every year, our data helps us understand how far we have come and how far we still have to go. Here is what we found in 2017:
