How thick is the glass ceiling?
Monitoring women’s representation and speaker diversity on EU policy panels in Brussels
Every year EU Panel Watch collects data on how many men and women are contributing at policy conferences in Brussels. The aim of our annual research is more than a data gathering exercise — we also analyse the results and provide recommendations for improvement.
After 3 years of conducting Monitoring Month in the month of June, November 2018 was chosen due to its busy event schedule. By conducting Monitoring Month at a different time in the year, we have had an opportunity to assess the reliability of our results.
In 2018, we expanded the scope of our research by looking at events with at least two speakers. In addition to recording who spoke on panels, we included keynote speakers, presenters, opening remarks and closing statements. Since event organisers are using new formats for their events, we wanted to remain flexible enough to capture evolving realities, beyond the traditional three-to-five-participant panel.
As in previous years, we kept track of who is moderating, but we did not count moderators as speakers, as their role is not to give opinions or arguments, but instead keep the debate flowing, ensure speakers are on time, and the audience is engaged.
Data on gender, race and ethnicity were collected based on third-party visual identification. Aware of the challenges in collecting equality data ⎼ such as the definition of categories, doing justice to the complexity of identity, and data protection⎼ our researchers were encouraged to contact speakers via email to allow them to self-identify if they wished to do so or to use the category ‘Not applicable’ where third-party identification was not possible or relevant. As we do not name any individual speakers, the anonymisation of speakers’ personal data is ensured.
We collected the data by using Twitter and EU event websites, downloading conference agendas, and attending or live streaming events. Although we did not select the events using a strict methodology, we made sure to include conferences from a range of event organisers, hosted by organisations from different sectors, and covering a range of topics. As event attendees often change at the last minute, we also encouraged volunteers to double-check that panellists were correctly identified.
The figures were compiled by volunteers in their spare time with a common understanding of the task but without supervision. As a result, there may be some minor errors ⎼ we make no claims of perfection.
