TED (Technology Entertainment and Design), the organization that curates conferences to promote "ideas worth spreading," has announced a separate conference for "women-centered ideas." The TEDWomen conference finally puts women and women's ideas in their proper place: at the margin.
TED, the digital world's most prominent aggregator of big ideas, thinks it can resolve complaints that its programs are male-dominated by creating a one-off conference, TEDWomen, that focuses on ideas by and about women. From an organization that claims to be all about cutting-edge ideas, TED's decision displays simplistic, outdated, and unenlightened thinking. Despite its good intentions, TED's Women conference demonstrates the very discrimination it is supposed to address.
Creating a special conference just for women demonstrates that TED organizers think that "women-centered ideas," whatever these might be, are somehow less interesting and less important than other ideas. Rather than adding more women presenters and more of women's interests directly to TED's center stage, organizers have created a Women's conference to serve as arm candy for the conference about real ideas --the ideas presented by and centered on those who are not women, a group otherwise known as men.
That TED has chosen to segregate women's ideas into a conference of their own is important, because TED is an overwhelmingly influential arbiter of the global conversation about which ideas really do matter. TED styles itself as a clearinghouse of knowledge that links "the world's most inspired thinkers" with a "community of curious souls." TED has built its global influence by curating conferences where "big thinkers" present provocative, often previously unheralded ideas to well-heeled and highly influential live audience. TED's reach extends beyond the conferences through online videos of TED Talks, which have been viewed over 290 million times. For the chosen group of thinkers, visionaries and teachers, presenting at a TED conference propels their ideas into a powerful global network, exponentially expanding who and what these ideas can influence.
Since women have been significantly under-represented on the TED stage, accounting for a mere 17% of presenters, big thinkers who are women have had very limited access to this powerful network. Thus, when the separate conference for Women was announced, some responded enthusiastically. Others, more thoughtfully, recognize that TED's separate Women's conference is an uncritical, temporary, superficial fix that does nothing to address the ongoing sexism at TED's core.
Once upon a time, it made sense to create separate conferences for women. Women thinkers and activists were so marginal, so subordinated, and so far from the public platform that separate conferences were virtually the only way to create space for women to present, discuss and promote their ideas. These days there are only two situations where separate conferences for women are politically, socially, and intellectually legitimate. The first situation is when the topic touches on women alone, such as a conference on menopause. The second situation is when the purpose of the conference is to bring women together to address women's own, self-determined needs.
The TED Women conference meets neither of these criteria. The topics announced for the conference are not about or for women alone. Both women and men are interested in topics like "the world leader bringing peace to her conflict-ridden nation." Nor is TEDWomen designed for women participants to address women's own self-determined needs. Instead, TEDWomen is designed to separate "women centered ideas" from other ideas. TEDWomen demonstrates the belief that ideas generated by women, focused on women, and relevant to women don't belong on TED's main stage. Instead, at TEDWomen, women-centered ideas will be presented as niche content in the otherwise male world of worthy ideas.
Would it be better for TED to immediately balance the number of men and women presenters at TED's next main conference? Maybe as a first step, but a superficial gender balancing of next year's presenters won't get at the real problem of sexism buried deep inside TED's mission and values. Only a critical, thoughtful revision of the processes TED uses to choose which ideas are worth sharing will eliminate the latent sexism that marginalizes ideas about women while suggesting that ideas worth spreading are limited to men.
TED would do well to heed the big idea of one of its own speakers, the women's rights crusader Sheryl WuDunn, who was one of the 17 women in a slate of 58 speakers at last week's TED Global conference in Oxford. WuDunn described gender inequality as the greatest moral challenge of the 21st century, and reminded the TED audience that material, political and intellectual gender equality is important to both women and men.
If gender equality is an idea worth sharing, isn't it also an idea worth putting into practice?
Linda Tarr-Whelan: TEDWomen: Proving That Gender Does Not Determine Great Ideas
TEDTalks: Hillary Rodham Clinton Speaks at TEDWomen (VIDEO)
Do we need more women speakers and role models, and more focus on issues that impact women and girls? Yes!
(My website http://www.amazingwomenrock.com/ moves agenda forward.)
Is TEDWomen the best way for TED to support this agenda? In my opinion, NO.
I've been on the more-women-speakers-at-TED bandwagon for some time. My first blog post is here: http://www.amazingwomenrock.com/myblog/speak-up-speak-out-take-the-stage-the-world-needs-more-ted-women.html
My comments on an interview with Chris Anderson in which he said it's hard to find women speakers are here (http://features.bizmore.com/interview/how-to-present-like-a-ted-presenter).
I attended TED Global 2010 in Oxford - it was mind-blowingly awesome. The TED team does a wonderful job.
However, I question the statistic of 30 - 40% women speakers at TED conferences.
By my count, less than 20% of the speakers at TED 2008 were women; that increased to 36% at TED 2009, then DECLINED to 25% in 2010. There were 20% and 29% women speakers at TEDIndia and TEDGlobal 2010 respectively.
Yes, they were amazing, but still significantly fewer in number than the men.
If enough women speakers can be found for TEDWomen, why can't more be found to speak at TED and TEDGlobal?
Finally, there 170+ TED Talks by amazing TED women on my website: http://www.amazingwomenrock.com/ted-talks/index.html
TED Women implies that TED curators don't believe more than 17% of innovative ideas out there come from women - it's like saying, "look, women's ideas can all be clustered into one conference!"
And since when do women only think about "women's issues," whatever those may be? You can bet Peggy Whitson, biochemist, first female space station commander, who holds the American record for cumulative days in space, has some unique insights into human psychology, science and technology. For example.
I also agree with some of the other comments here that when we're confronted with a "women's" resource or rule, we should ask how we'd feel if it were an "african americans'" rule or resource. By that measure, a racialized TED conference doesn't look so good, does it?
Thanks for bringing a very interesting problem to light!
Is peace a women's issue? I would hope that it's a human issue. To suggest otherwise, however subtly, is also to suggest that war is a men's issue. That is simply not so.
I hope there will soon come a time when a woman in a role of political leadership will no longer be a novelty.
I have a similar problem with The Teaching Company, which records and sells courses by "the top 2% of professors," putting them on sale several times a year at very reasonable prices that I can afford. I own a lot of their courses and have enjoyed them very much, but I notice every time I look through their catalogs that something like 90% of "the top 2%" are white males.
I have more mixed reactions, especially not being a member of the group, to the separate African-American fiction sections in my local library and at least one bookstore. On the one hand, it bothers me - seems like more "separate but equal" and it seems like whites who don't go to that section specifically are probably missing out on some good fiction. On the other hand, I don't know how A/A readers feel about it - maybe they (or at least a lot of them) like having books that address their specific concerns all together so they don't have to go through a lot of things that wouldn't interest them - something like the mystery or sci-fi/fantasy section - and they're certainly going to be exposed to the views of other groups since that's the majority of what's in the store.
Same thing happened to the "Summer of Love" .... (Yeah, baby ~ it's FREE! Yeah, oh, yeah...here, let me show you)
First the stats: You wrote that only 17% of TED speakers are women; this is misleading. It's true that 17% of speakers on TED.com are women; however, those talks cover TED's full 27year archive, dating back to the 80s, when the conference was tech-oriented and yes, male-dominated. TED is a different organization today. For the past several years, we've had ~30-40% women speakers at each TED event. This isn't ideal, but it's respectable & improving.
You state here that TED is marginalizing women, and I want to be clear: We didn't launch TEDWomen to segregate women attendees or speakers, nor did we launch it as an alternative to a balanced speaker lineup at other events (which was already a priority for us). This is an enthusiastic "yes/and" not an "either/or."
We launched TEDWomen to take a deep dive into a subject we find fascinating, timely and important. A slew of new data shows women are a vital link to economic growth, public health, political stability. There are many stories looking at women through this lens -- as change agents -- and we're looking forward to exploring them in depth.
A longer comment here: http://bit.ly/do4NVh
Happy to continue the conversation. Email us at tedwomen@ted.com Twitter: @tedwomen
Wowsers ~ really bad choice of words there ('deep dive, indeed) ~ I'm sure you can find all the info you need in women's history courses over the last 30 years.
This is a very mixed and not very welcome message to a woman who's been involved in computing since I punched the 'cards' for the UNIVAC (it took up a whole building).
And who's "we" , Kemo Sabe? You're a woman, right?
One of the failings of feminism, to my mind, has been the inconsistent view that female voices should be added to the discourse because all voices are valuable but that male voices are not valuable in many cases.