Bloomberg Businessweek (North America)
GIRL TALK
Conference for womens are booming. Do they change anything?
The first sign that one is at a women’s empowerment conference is that there are women on the stage at all—the all-male panel discussion remains an inescapable part of modern life. The second sign is the footwear. Picture a horizontal line of 4-inch stilettos, dangling at the eye level of the audience, as the women wearing them sit perched on stools. It appears that the first thing a successful, liberated woman does is slide her feet into the most gait-inhibiting shoes available, ideally in snakeskin.
Is Tory Burch on the dais, outfitted in her own designs, talking about how women need to believe in themselves more? How about Diane von Furstenberg, saying, “I have never met a woman who is not strong”? Perhaps Jessica Alba, the actress and co-founder of the Honest Company, which markets nontoxic household products, is in a white armchair, asking Gloria Steinem for “tips for how women can excel in the workplace.” Talk of “finding your power,” followed by a discussion on the glass ceiling (or some approximation), “balance” (as if it existed), and securing a mentor (famously easier for men)— these are all indicators, too.
If Tina Brown, the celebrated former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, is there, you know you’ve reached the summit, literally. Her annual Women in the World Summit, a venture she launched in 2010, has done so well that it sold out 2,500-seat venues four years running and expanded overseas, showing that it was possible to monetize female rage. People pay up to $300 per day to attend, and the summit was profitable from its very first year, thanks to sponsorships by such blue chip backers as Toyota Motor, Dove, Google, and Mastercard. October’s inaugural Women in the World London was packed morning to night with activists from around the world reliving their struggles, movie stars sharing life secrets, politicians, and royalty. During breaks, women milled around a crowded lounge, nibbling on popcorn and tweeting. Adding to the Burning-man-for-feminists vibe, a gal in a camel’s hair coat passed out postcards soliciting donations for a Mary Wollstonecraft memorial (“from well before the Suffragettes!”). When asked why she was there, Eddie Harrop, a young handbag designer with a cascade of blond hair, said, “I want to be inspired.” Haseena Latheef, the founder of an ethical online fashion retailer, chimed in that she was also seeking motivation. “You think you’ve got issues in life,” she said, “and then you hear what these women are up against.”
Stefanie Ascherl, an entrepreneur in her early 30s and a women’s conference regular, said these events restore hope. “I think a lot of times, being a woman, we’re expected to do everything—have a family, be productive in business. It’s overwhelming,” Ascherl said, fresh from the Pennsylvania Conference for Women, which attracted 8,000 women to hear Alba, Steinem, and Rachael Ray, among others.
She added that expectations of being thin and perfect-looking only add to the stress. “When I come to these events and see all of these women doing all these amazing things—it’s pushing me and motivating me to go forward,” she said. “I wonder— if men just sat down and let women do things, maybe some amazing things would happen.”
There wasn’t much time to contemplate the question, because as soon as Women in the World wound down, more summits were about to begin. In fact, it was possible to spend almost every single day last fall at a women’s empowerment or networking event of some kind. The Monday following Brown’s event saw the opening evening of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, geared toward high-level women in the corporate world. Before that lavish three-day extravaganza closed, two more competing women’s conferences were vying for social media attention: the Women’s Forum Global Meeting, in Deauville, France (“to strengthen the influence of women throughout the world”), and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, in Houston (hashtag #Ourtimetolead).
On Oct. 23, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski launched her Know Your Value conference in Boston, which was to be the first in a nationwide series. The Women in Policing Conference (“Hear Them Roar!”) was sandwiched in there. Earlier in the month, there was the Inc. Women’s Summit (“Be Inspired, Be Empowered, Get Equipped”), followed by the S.H.E. Summit (“the world’s most accessible women’s empowerment conference”). And that was just October. There’s also Tedwomen, Jump Forum, Leap Conference, Blogher, Watermark, Women Rule Summit, the 3% Conference for women in advertising, Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, a woman’s conference sponsored by nearly every state and industry, including by several investment banks, plus dozens of one-off panels all year long. In what may be a sign that the branding of women’s issues is immune to irony, the National Football League hosts its first-ever Women’s Summit during Super Bowl week on Feb. 4. Coming off a string of player domestic abuse scandals and cheerleader lawsuits over fair pay, it’s called In the Huddle to Advance Women in Sport, and it features Serena Williams and Condoleezza Rice. Having been to many of these events, and having eagerly participated in a few, I can attest that they’re often stirring and, yes, inspirational. It can be galvanizing to be around so many females with superhuman résumés, to hear their tales of surviving corporate battles or even actual wars. You often leave with a rosy glow, a sense of resolve, and a commitment to do more, for other women and for yourself. But then you return to your desk, probably next to a higher-paid male co-worker, and the old, familiar malaise sets in. There was no discussion of changing policies or lobbying members of Congress. No e-mail list to stay in touch and organize. In the end, one wonders if the explosion of these events is a reflection of how far women have come or proof that they haven’t made much progress at all. Why, in spite of all the energy these conferences generate, are women still just … talking?
“Women are constantly being exhorted to lean in, to push the corporate envelope, to push their careers higher. And they want to. So the good news is they’re taking it on themselves to organize these sorts of events,” says Michael Kimmel, the author of Angry White Men and a rare male speaker at such events. “But the bad news is, they have to go outside of their companies to get it. Why? Because they can’t get the real support and understanding they need in such consistently maledominated companies.”
Most political activity around women’s issues in the U.S. has been consumed for decades
with a war just to keep abortion legal, a right that was supposed to have been won in the 1970s. Members of Congress spend thousands of taxpayer hours fighting over whether Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of health care to women, should even be allowed to exist. While all the oxygen is sucked up re-litigating these old questions, issues such as family leave, affordable child care, equal pay, and the persistent lack of women decision-makers get neglected. The women’s empowerment business has risen up to fill the void—for a fee.
“I don’t think there’s much link between the growth of women’s conferences and the advancement of women,” says Anne-marie Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation and author of Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family, who’s in constant demand as a speaker. “As long as we talk about all these issues as ‘women’s issues,’ we’ll never get there. If the point is advancement of women, this is not the way to go.”
Slaughter points out that many of the conferences serve a valuable business purpose, giving women the chance to network and schmooze the way men have always done on golf trips and in skyboxes. “I enjoy them because I meet lots of fantastic women doing fantastic stuff,” she says. “But I don’t think you should confuse that with increasing the number of women in the workplace. I don’t think the chief cause of not advancing women is lack of contact.”
While the phenomenon is everywhere now, when Brown
started Women in the World six years ago, she says, “it was like pulling teeth to get a sponsor.” The first year the summit was held in a “tiny” theater with 350 seats, and Hewlett-packard was persuaded to provide about $600,000 in seed money. Brown, who’d launched Talk magazine (which closed in 2002) and the Daily Beast (later folded into Newsweek), was in the midst of her own professional reinvention. This time, her talent for sniffing out the Next Big Thing didn’t fail. Toward the end of the Aughts, she says, she could see the beginning of a “global women’s movement” and wanted to create a newsy live event around it.
“It took off like a bucking bronco,” she says, sitting in her bright corner office in the headquarters of the New York Times, which recently formed a partnership with Women in the World and provided office space. “By the third year the response and the demand was so intense, we realized we could move to a much bigger sponsorship.” She and her senior executive producer, Kyle Gibson, who spent years as a producer with ABC News, intentionally search out fresh, heart-twisting stories, and barely let the speakers rehearse to ensure that the discussions are as raw and tear-jerking as possible—“you can’t be squeamish about the content,” Brown says. Toyota signed up as a top, seven-figure sponsor, providing cars to shepherd conference delegates and backing a contest for female entrepreneurs who are featured onstage. After its expansion to London, the summit made its first appearance in India in November. “That is really the concept that I crave,” Brown says. “To make this into a global platform.”
When she started, the only real competitor—although the two are very different—was Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, which has been around since 1999. The summit is aimed at the true cream of Xx-factor American business—chief executive officers, chief marketing officers, board members, and senior VPS. The inaugural conference had one sponsor, Women & Co., a unit of Citigroup offering money management for women. Since then the franchise has exploded, with more companies interested in sponsoring than it can accommodate—other consulting firms are lined up in wait in case Deloitte decides not to renew.
The major sponsors last year included Citigroup and Zurich Insurance, and contracts are estimated by others in the industry to be in the low seven figures, although Pattie Sellers, an assistant managing editor at Fortune who’s shepherded Most Powerful Women since its infancy, won’t confirm this. Registration for the main summit and four related events clocks in at $10,000, up from $8,900 last year. Women relish the opportunity to troll for clients and share survival stories while gliding through the carpeted hallways between events. “You know, we raise the price and the wait list gets longer,” Sellers says. “It’s a good business.” She pauses. “It’s a very good business.”
Once they get going, conferences can be highly profitable, which is vital for print magazines that have watched advertising revenue evaporate. (The company that owns this publication has embraced that strategy.) It’s so lucrative that Fortune created a handful of spinoffs, including Most Powerful Women Next Gen, for younger women leaders. The bound conference agenda booklet is fat with ads for Cadillac and Johnson & Johnson.
In 1999 there were two women running Fortune 500 companies. Today there are 20. It’s a gain, but still a very long way from parity. Women’s representation in Congress has inched up, from 11 percent in 2001 to 19 percent. Women make up only 24 percent of senior executive positions at the largest companies and 19 percent of corporate board seats. Privately, women from such industries as finance and consumer goods lament that the number of women moving up at their companies has hardly improved from when they started 25 years ago.
"When i come to these events and see all of these women doing all these amazing things— it’s pushing me and motivating me”