Diversity, Minus the Tokenism

It has been described as “the ultimate brain spa,” and indeed, my multitasking, working-mother brain feasted on its first TED conference last week. Among intriguing facts learned: •Body language does not just reflect our mood but chemically affects it: Power-posing in the bathroom for a few minutes when you’re feeling anxious and insecure lowers stress levels and raises self-confidence. •Reputation is a currency that may become as powerful as credit history in the 21st-century collaborative economy: Watch your overdrafts, but also keep an eye on your online rating on sites like eBay, Amazon and TaskRabbit. •Teenagers aren’t so much rebellious as neurologically less capable of seeing things from another’s side (like why clean up a room?). Underdeveloped perspective-taking and excessive risk-taking — are symptoms of dramatic changes in the prefrontal cortex during adolescence. Another fact: The speakers who massaged my own brain with the above all happened to be women. Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist at Harvard Business School; Rachel Botsman is the author of the best-selling “What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live”; and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London who looks almost young enough still to be a teenager herself. Often, conferences get irritating — fast — through the sheer preponderance of male speakers and participants. During the decade I have covered the World Economic Forum, female participation has risen from less than 10 percent to 17 percent. At a European University Institute conference on the future of Europe this past May, 4 of 61 speakers were women. Just before leaving London for Edinburgh, where the TEDGlobal conference took place last week, Chatham House organized a two-day event mulling how to kick-start the European economy. Of the 27 speakers, 5 were women. We could all go on ... At TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design), it took about a day to realize that I wasn’t getting the usual pangs of irritation. I had not wasted a minute pondering the gender of the speakers. Women did not account for half of the 100 speakers, and that is not the point. The point is that at a total of 42, there were enough of them to forget about their gender — some people call this critical mass, which usually kicks in somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. Why does this matter? For the same reason that it matters to have diversity in terms of age, ethnicity, cultural background and occupation: To attract the best ideas, you cannot afford to deprive yourself of any part of the idea-generating population. This is tougher than it might seem. “It’s actually very complex to have a gender-balanced program even if you really care,” said June Cohen, executive producer of TED. For starters, the established speaker circuit is overwhelmingly male. Most technology and science labs are still run by men, and most idea-generating books are still written by men, Ms. Cohen pointed out, adding that 85 percent of speakers recommended on TED.com are men (even though the recommenders are split evenly by gender): “The path of least resistance would be to go with male speakers.” Another problem is that when you invite a woman, she is less likely to accept and more likely to cancel at the last minute, Ms. Cohen said. In her experience, women feel less entitled than men to get up on stage and tend to have more commitments at home and at work, complicating speaking engagements. Perhaps it helps that four of the seven most senior TED managers are women — and, according to Ms. Cohen, all four have a special antenna “to smoke out” interesting women. Perhaps it helps even more that Bruno Giussani, curator of TEDGlobal, spends his time combing campuses, the latest literature and the Twitter universe in search of nonmainstream sources of ideas. “If you ask me whether I have a Post-it in front of me, reminding me to get more women speakers, then absolutely not,” said Mr. Giussani, who believes in “affirmative search” rather than affirmative action. Indeed, when women outnumbered men at two recent TED events in London, Mr. Giussani said he had not noticed until someone pointed it out to him. “No woman on the TED stage is a token,” he said. Apropos: Perhaps the only moment of irritation last week occurred, ironically, at the lone “women’s event.” A dinner touted as a debate about female entrepreneurs felt very much like a public relations stunt for Vodafone, one of TED’s sponsors. Serpil Timuray, the female C.E.O. of Vodafone Turkey, was being asked one easy question after another about everything the company was doing for female customers. Maybe there was too little diversity in the room? Irony aside, organizers — slightly embarrassed — said it was a way for sponsors to be heard on the margins of the official TED program. Maybe. But it was in stark contrast to the rest of the proceedings.