Action Alert | Shaking Our Heads at Ashford University's Forbes School of Business & Technology Thought Leader Summit

Here’s one for the SMH category.

Last week, we showed you the faces of the Forbes School of Business & Technology Thought Leader Summit. The webpage promoting the event (which has since been changed) showed white guys, white guys and more white guys, so we created a snappy graphic to call them out. That got the attention of the organizers:

They told us to look at their Board of Advisors and the complete speaker list, so we did… and, wouldn’t you know, they do have women, but none are among the “spotlight” speakers.

Their Board of Advisors is made up of 60% men and 40% women (17% of whom are women of color). The speaker list for this summit is made up of 71% men and 29% women (20% women of color).

So, they’re right, they do have women as part of this event, but not the “three out of four panel discussions being led by women” that they claim (btw as far as we can see, men and women have equal billing on panels with no women listed as leaders). It's more like “5 out of 17 speakers are women, but they won’t draw attendees like white guys, so we’re not going to include them on our promotional materials.” Nice try, Ashford University, but we’re not buying your excuses.

The @Forbes School of Business Thought Leader Summit does feature women, just not enough of them and not on any promotional materials. If you’re going to stand by your women, @AshfordU, promote them proudly. #genderavenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/action-alert-ashford-university-forbes-thought-leader-summit