Our Beginnings
In June 2016, I was at one of the big accounting industry conferences, when I stumbled into some bullshit. I was chatting with some colleagues, waiting for a breakout session to begin, and the conversation turned to the absence of women speakers at the event, despite the fact that the majority of the conference attendees attendance were female. Workplace sexism and casual misogyny is, unfortunately, par for the course in this industry, but the imbalance was too obvious to ignore. Another woman, who worked for the conference organizer, overheard our conversation and helpfully chimed in, insisting that the the imbalance was due to that fact that it is “so hard to find women of mainstage caliber.”
This might have swayed me a bit, were I not standing in a circle of decidedly mainstage caliber women. I was frustrated in the moment, but after the moment passed, I moved on and all but forgot out about it.
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Fast forward to May of 2019. My Twitter DMs are blowing up with women outraged that yet another prominent industry conference hosting and promoting panels featuring exclusively white, cis men discussing topics as grandiose and impactful as the future of the profession. A lot had changed in the three years since the conference organizer told me they couldn’t find any mainstage caliber women to speak at their conference. Despite the Women’s March and the #metoo era, feminism had not made it to accounting conference programming.
I thought back to that moment in 2016, and realized that nothing was going to unless someone did something about it, something more than calling out any one conference out or sparking a heated debate on Twitter. I wanted to take meaningful action.
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After reflecting on this particular problem, I believe that the path to more equitable gender representation requires a two-pronged approach. We need to work from the bottom up and top down.
Solving it from the bottom up means addressing the pipeline problem by nurturing and encouraging more women to speak up and own the conference stage. This approach has inspired classes and an upcoming workshop to help women get comfortable with speaking about our areas of expertise and sharing their stories. Public speaking takes practice, and sometimes women who are experienced experts in their field simply have not had the opportunities to practice public speaking that their male counterparts have had.
From the top down, we are going to make sure that event organizers can never again say that they do not have access to women speakers by building a directory for them. It was from this idea that Womxn Talk Money was born. The Womxn Talk Money directory is a comprehensive list of qualified and confident female speakers. Your move, conference organizers.
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We have compiled a list of over one hundred talented, experienced speakers from around the world that are experts in areas of accounting, personal finance, and fintech. We were hugely inspired by the work of Christina Wodtke, Danielle Barnes, and their team at Women Talk Design. It is our sincere belief that by creating this resource, we will dispel the idea that speakers that aren’t men are hard to find, uplift and encourage women and non-binary folks to share their stories, and change the conversation about whose voice matters in the world of finance.
