Naomi by pushing your own #agenda you are hurting the #WomensAgenda

I like Naomi Simson. She’s achieved a lot- her record goes without saying; she was founder & CEO of Redballoon for over a decade. She’s one of the sharks on Shark Tank. She’s highly personable and gregarious.

In real life, she’s never one to be taciturn. This extends to the online world- she’s a prolific blogger with over 870,000 followers on Linkedin.

It was thus of no surprise that my team working on the speaker lineup approached Naomi Simson to speak back in June. We didn’t approach her because she was female, we approached her because she’s an exceptional entrepreneur:

On 11 Jun 2015, at 7:55 am, Alaister Low <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi Naomi,

I hope you are going well. I've been watching SharkTank each Sunday and you're doing an amazing job in growing the Australian startup scene!

[...]

Late last year we acquired the startup conference SydStart. We have been working on planning our SydStart event for 2015 which will the largest startup and growth event in Australia.

We are looking to hold the event over 2 days on October 29th and 30th 2015 at Town Hall in Sydney, Australia. We would love to potentially have you speak for about 30 minutes at our event. You'll be speaking alongside world class entrepreneurs like Matt Barrie, from Freelancer.com, Sean Ellis from GrowthHackers & Qualaroo, Oli Gardner from Unbounce and many more. We're aiming for about 2000 attendees on each day.

Let us know if this is something you would be interested in.

--

Kind Regards,
Alaister

We were understandably disappointed when Naomi referred us to her speaker’s agency.

For the last five years, under Peter Cooper’s stewardship, SydStart has been run as a community effort and has never paid a fee to a speaker. However, to put on Australia’s largest startup conference, with 1,500+ attendees does require a substantial financial commitment. Pete is to be highly commended for carrying the can all these years, because the conference hasn’t always been profitable.

We took over custodianship of SydStart in 2015, and part of our goal was to make it bigger and better, and to bring in a higher level of world class speakers. We had previously debated on the topic of whether we should offer speaker’s fees to attract top tier talent to come all the way to Australia and decided that perhaps, for the right speaker, we should consider it. We decided that at a minimum we should probably pay for travel and accommodation costs, because that is fairly customary for top tier international speakers. For the record, none of the speakers announced have asked for a fee.

For domestic speakers we didn’t think that was reasonable. I personally have a speaker’s agency which I use for corporate events, but for startup events I’ve never heard of someone charging a fee.

Of course, it’s Naomi’s prerogative to ask.

No big deal, we thought, we’ll just try a few other people.

My team was pretty surprised, when a month later we saw this:

Fair enough, Naomi is pretty popular these days, maybe she forgot we invited her.

A day later:

Wow. The SydStart team is over half female.

She really seems to have it in for us. We have no idea why.

Then this:

By now, after her tweet storm and tagging local tech blogs, a couple of journalists had written about the fact that the first ten speakers announced didn’t have any women.

Well, it wasn’t through any lack of trying.

No, we didn’t have a deliberate program of gender diversity. But we didn’t have a deliberate program of ethnic, religious or socio-economic diversity either. We also didn’t have any Africans in the initial ten, any Scientologists (admittedly, we haven’t checked) or anyone from Western Sydney.

We were looking for exceptional speakers who had done something exceptional recently in certain topic areas. And initially, we were focusing on the internationals, because they would be the hardest to attract, and the conference isn’t until the end of October so there is plenty of time to get the right domestic speakers. Nothing less, nothing more.

In the process of doing so, we had reached out to a heap of women. Originally there were two in the starting lineup; one pulled out, and one we’re hopeful will still make it- they just have a conflict they are working through.

Luckily by this stage we had attracted and announced two other exceptional female speakers, who had both done exceptional things recently and met the high bar of quality that we had set for the conference. We hope to have many more.

So after Naomi’s continued tweeting, my team came to me understandably upset. So I thought I would give her a call.

I woke up this morning to this blog post from Naomi which completely mischaracterised the discussion.

Far from yelling at Naomi, we simply discussed that the team working on SydStart were quite upset. Far from being a ‘guys’ club, as she had been making out, over half the team was female. I also said that her posts misrepresenting and inflaming the situation were not helping the case for attracting exceptional female speakers to the conference.

I also told her that her tweets specifically were quite disingenuous given she knew very well that we had been approaching female speakers from the beginning, as she herself was approached back in June, but instead chose to send us to her speaker's agency.

She said that he does a lot of pro-bono speaking and is in high demand and that understandably she now has to unfortunately use an agency.

I said that of course she had the right to do so.

But in very plain terms I told her that she was being part of the problem, not the solution.

I said I would appreciate it if she didn’t inflame the issue more because by this stage the team had approached twice as many female speakers as male. They had told me they were now feeling under pressure to rush the process or lower the quality of the speakers just to meet a quota.

But more importantly that all this unnecessary attention was going to set back the #WomensAgenda because it was going to hurt our prospects in attracting great female speakers because of the intense focus that was now going to be placed on them, just because of their gender.

As for Naomi’s comments that women “are often busier than their male counterparts” because they are “more likely to also be juggling family responsibilities” and that the SydStart team needs to make the startup conference a “safer place for women” by providing nannies and restricting the interviewers to “safe” (female) interviewers.

I’ll leave those comments to stand for themselves.

For the record, here’s the breakdown of reasons the team tells me they’ve received from exceptional female speaker's they've invited: