This blog post is for education leaders who wish that educator conferences were more equitable. For perspective, if everything was perfectly fair, when you go to an educator conference and looked at who was speaking, the keynote and featured speaker demographics would be representative of the people living in the areas they’re pulling from. You’d also hope that race and gender would not matter when determining how much compensation speakers received. Unfortunately, it isn’t that way in reality. Conferences keynote and featured speakers have historically tended to be very white and very male. You also probably won’t be surprised to know that not every keynote or featured speaker has been paid equally, if they were even paid at all.

If you’re on the same page with me and want to do something about it, then you’re probably wishing that there was an example you could follow or at least share with your conference planning colleagues to give them an idea of what’s possible. Fortunately, there are conferences implementing more equitable practices and I want to share one of them that’s doing great work to ensure better outcomes for everyone: The Wisconsin Math Council (WMC) annual conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin.

To be clear, no conference I’ve ever heard of has it all figured out. So I wanted to highlight their work, not as a finished perfect product, but as an admirable work in progress, because the roads towards equitable practices are never ending.

For the last five years, I’ve been working with organizations to change policies including implementing inclusion riders and equitable pay. Sometimes these conversations have been well received… and sometimes not. But I believe that being transparent about the journey helps us all grow.

I reached out to Maggie Lee McHugh, conference co-chair for the Wisconsin Mathematics Council to learn more about her perspective on implementing these changes and have integrated her thoughts into this blog post below.

 

Representative Lineups
Educator conference speaker lineups are often far from diverse. Unfortunately, we’re all so used to seeing white people, especially men, as keynote and featured speakers that we barely even register that these lineups are not representative of our communities.

For example…

 
You can read the details about what inclusion riders are, but here’s what I’ve experienced when using them. Five years ago, many conferences were not considering diversity at all and picked whichever speakers they wanted to feature. Some would intentionally try to include a few people of color and/or women and non-binary speakers, but it wouldn’t be many.

When I shared my inclusion rider with conference organizers, it was often something new for them. While most accepted it, what I typically found was that most did not continue to implement the rider as an ongoing policy after learning about it. So, what was a first for me with the WMC was that they not only implemented the inclusion rider before anyone asked them to, but they also made it a part of their ongoing conference policy. I hadn’t heard of any education conferences doing something like that.

Here’s what Maggie had to say about it:

Several years ago, a group of prominent mathematics education keynote speakers began including a rider stating that they would speak if the conference keynote line-up included 50% racially diverse speakers and 50% female and/or non-binary speakers. This inclusion rider was met with great acceptance. Since that time, Wisconsin has worked to keep their keynote and featured speaker list balanced in this direction.

 
If you’re wondering about where the 50% number came from, this blog post explains that in more detail. It should also be said that sometimes conferences don’t quite reach that 50% threshold, but simply having goals like this makes people more aware and intentional.

It really impressed me that not only did the Wisconsin Math Council begin to implement this policy without it being in anyone’s contract, but they continue to implement it every year.

Again, no conference is perfect and all will always have work to do, but I admire that this is one of WMC’s public goals they are striving to implement.

 

Equitable Pay
If you’ve never organized a conference or been paid to speak at one, you may not know how pay is determined for conference speakers. From my experience, the vast majority of conference speakers (>95%) don’t get paid anything and very likely are paying to speak at the conference. Featured speakers will very rarely get paid to speak at a conference. And keynote speakers are more likely to be paid at least something. Maybe it’s just their expenses and a small honorarium.

So, when I blogged about requesting equal pay for speakers, I was writing from the perspective of someone who is occasionally one of the speakers getting paid to speak. What motivated me to implement this policy was that once I was at a conference where I was getting paid $4000 plus travel expenses as a featured speaker to speak. Later I found out that another featured speaker, who was a woman of color, was only getting her travel expenses covered and no money at all! I felt horrible at this realization. So maybe you’re wondering why I got paid to speak? It was because I asked for money and she didn’t. And so they paid us each what we asked for.

I was determined to do my best to stop this from happening, so I started asking conferences to pay all featured speakers equally and/or all keynote speakers equally and blogged about the reactions I received. Now you might wonder how the speakers who were getting paid might respond. Maybe some would be upset by the change or feel like they weren’t being compensated enough?

Here’s what Maggie had to say about that:

In terms of the reaction of keynotes/featured speakers, it has been so lovely to get such a positive reaction. The people we asked have been very receptive to this model. This initial group of keynotes/featured have commented how it has been a relief to not have to negotiate or “talk money”. Some have shared it is nice to feel valued for their work as not all conferences pay both keynotes and featured speakers.

 

Additionally, in that blog I wrote “What I think is happening is that conferences probably hate haggling prices as much (or more) than speakers do. They probably would like nothing more than to be able to easily budget by multiplying the number of speakers by the same speaking fee. Maybe they’re just hesitant to implement such a policy because of fear of offending someone.”

I wondered if conferences might actually love implementing a policy like this, and it appears I was right. Here’s what Maggie had to say about that:

An additional benefit is the conference budget proposal. Each year, we estimate how much we would like to spend on keynotes/featured speakers. However, sometimes one speaker’s fees would dominate much of the budget, leaving less money for other speakers. By setting an equal stipend, the budget is much more clear cut. The WMC Annual Conference committee believes we have set a very fair, competitive price where all keynotes receive an equal stipend amount and all featured speakers receive an equal stipend amount. We believe that any potential speaker who feels the price is below them can simply say no. We hope speakers realize that we are a non-profit organization. All of our funds come from conference fees with support from vendors/exhibitors at the conference.

 

Conclusion
My big hope for writing this blog post is that people who dream of more equitable conferences can share it with their colleagues as an example of what’s possible. I hope people take what the Wisconsin Math Council has done and use it as the new minimum we should strive for. Then I hope you’ll come back to this blog post and share what you’ve done or aspire to do in the comments so that we can all learn and grow together with the goal of making education more equitable for everyone.

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