Going Digital Has Been Good For Women, But a Hybrid Future Can Be Even Better
We are all experiencing “Zoom fatigue” and learning how to balance working from home, living with other people who never leave the house, and possibly even caretaking and homeschooling on top of everything else! Despite some of the major drawbacks of the new world order, there is a bright spot when it comes to how the pandemic is opening up opportunities for women to access professional development content that will continue into the post-pandemic future of hybrid events.
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When in-person events ground to a halt in late March, events like WorkHuman, with a ticket price of well over $1,000 (not including accommodation), are free this year in October. The 3% Conference offered a single ticket price of $99 for their annual conference that moved to July this year even though their tickets are normally a few hundred dollars. These are just two examples in a sea of content that has now been brought online. Denise Pines, president of the Medical Board of California and founder of WisePause, who regularly attends conferences in the medical field and beyond, said “In the early COVID-19 months, I filled two notebooks from webinars offered free that normally cost me $5000 (including registration fees and travel).”
In-person conferences have not been equitable for women. As Denise mentioned, one of the biggest barriers for women is the cost, because between the ticket and travel, events are expensive. Women are less likely to receive stipends from their companies to cover travel and ticket prices, and 81% of women would like their companies to provide a stipend. One could also argue that time is a secondary factor. Many events are multiple days, plus travel. Time away from work being the most pressing, followed by time away from home, can also be major factors for mothers and caretakers.
Author, speaker, and consultant Elisa Camahort Page said, “I’ve been struck by how, as our physical worlds grew incredibly small due to worldwide lockdowns, there were opportunities to expand our intellectual worlds if we were privileged enough to have the time, equipment, and health to pursue all the amazing live online content being produced by organizations, candidates, and media outlets.” Going 100% digital with on-demand options removes two of the main obstacles that prevent women from attending in-person conferences across almost every industry. “Never has there been a time where the general public had access to content sometimes reserved for exclusive circles where money, title or expertise is the separator,” said Pines. This also touches on the invisible barrier that is how content is marketed to women. In-person conferences often market specific learning opportunities or content tracks “for women.” These opportunities are more likely to focus on soft skills, like mentorship, despite women reporting that they prefer to see more content focused on case studies and general industry insights. Women need access to a range of thought leadership topics just as much as men do.
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Mothers are also reporting higher attendance at events because they are online. Charmaine Fuller Cooper, South Region Field Manager, Campaigns at AARP and mother of a 4 year-old son, is a perfect example of this: “I continue to try to find the small blessings such as more mothers having the ability to reconnect with life in different ways from free virtual concerts, online book clubs, zoom family reunions and attending my favorite but now online seminars that I wouldn’t be able to previously attend with a little one unless a sliding board and swing were present.”
From a networking perspective, however, digital events are still lacking. In-person conferences offer a sense of serendipity when it comes to meeting new people and forging new relationships, and, in addition, it allows connection with people we don’t see often, like potential clients and partners. In the digital space, networking is limited to chat streams that are not an elegant solution to encourage deeper connections, because comments are in a single thread.
Having said that, physical forms of sexual harassment that are prevalent at events, especially during networking time, have been eliminated by going digital. That absolutely has an impact on women’s ability to learn and engage at in-person conferences, but, while this format offers a sense of anonymity not otherwise available at in-person events, instances of verbal harassment during digital events remain to be studied.
Although many strides have been made, there is still more conference organizers can do. The other side of this coin that impacts women’s equitable access to professional development content are the speakers selected to deliver that content. Event organizers have a long way to go when it comes to achieving gender parity and diverse representation across age, race, and professional background.
Much like before the pandemic, women are still struggling for equal time, space, and pay on digital stages: “Of course the same expansion should and could have been applied to who gets to speak and be heard, given the lack of physical constraint,” said Camahort Page, who is also a former conference organizer, “...but I haven’t seen it to be as consistently the case as I would have liked.” Pines has noticed a shift, though: “After the George Floyd protest demonstrations, I noticed more people of color being included on the speaker rosters of these events.” Further, Pines believes “an inclusive mindset is taking hold of many event organizers, and that’s a good thing,” and this trend will continue with a collective effort to hold event organizers accountable.
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Live events will come back — an Eventbrite survey from late spring showed that 71% of women and men surveyed say they will continue attending online events — so we should all be planning for a hybrid future. “It’s strange that even in this remote normal that I now feel more connected to the world but I also recognize that societal barriers prevent us all from feeling that same sense of connection,” said Fuller Cooper. She is right. Disability advocates and professionals with chronic illnesses have been advocating for hybrid events and advancing digital content for over a decade, and very few conference organizers saw the upside of this approach. It’s time conferences organizers pay disability advocates for their knowledge and expertise here, because we all need to think bigger about what true equity looks like going forward.
In this hybrid future, it remains critical that, as attendees and potential speakers, we continue to demand stages look like the diverse array of professionals who participate in these events and those who are underrepresented or entirely absent because of their race, age, and economic background. With layoffs becoming more regular and millions of people across this country continuing to file for unemployment, equitable access to professional development is needed now more than ever to reshape the future of work as we know it.
Brady Hahn is the founder of The Noodle Collective, a holistic strategy firm advising clients on how to engage women through impactful programs and activations. She is the co-author of The Women's Professional Conference Experience & Impact Study and the creator of the Insight Collective, advocating for better practices in speaker selection and connecting over 100 women experts to event organizers. Follow her on Twitter at @bradyhahn.