{"id":620,"date":"2016-06-28T15:16:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T19:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/?p=620"},"modified":"2018-09-04T15:25:46","modified_gmt":"2018-09-04T19:25:46","slug":"genderavenger-highlights-the-importance-of-womens-voices-being-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/2016\/06\/28\/genderavenger-highlights-the-importance-of-womens-voices-being-heard\/","title":{"rendered":"GenderAvenger Highlights Importance of Women’s Voices Being Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"

We enjoyed reading Ron Fournier\u2019s recent column<\/a> in The Atlantic about GenderAvenger<\/a>, and the need for better representation of women on panels at conferences. It was great to see the work of GenderAvenger highlighted, especially when this is an issue important to us. We\u2019ve held an annual conference the past two years where every speaker\u2014more than 30\u2014is a woman, with not a single man on a dais or at a podium.<\/p>\n

GenderAvenger strives to ensure women are always part of the public conversation, whether that\u2019s on a panel at a conference, legislative hearing, an anthology, top ten list\u2026anywhere that women would have something to say as surely as men (I mean, where would that not<\/em> be?).<\/p>\n

GenderAvenger.com<\/a> was started by Gina Glantz, with Susan Askew<\/a>, as \u201can idea born out of frustration and<\/em> in hope\u201d after Glantz wrote about too few women on panels for Huffington Post and started a Facebook fan page<\/a>. The GA website has a hall of shame (as well as hall of fame) and also brands tweets<\/a> with #allmalepanel to call out offenders.<\/p>\n

Fournier was the latest to write about GenderAvenger, saying he has taken GA\u2019s pledge<\/a> to not serve as a panelist at a public conference when there are no women on the panel. But Fournier took the pledge with one caveat: that his job as a journalist requires him to appear on panels on TV shows where he has no control over the panels\u2019 makeup. Even well-intentioned TV bookers can try to have women represented on a panel on their show, but have a guest drop out. Instead, Fournier said he\u2019d write a column about taking the pledge \u2013 and disclose his caveat \u2013 which is how GenderAvenger came onto our radar.<\/p>\n

When we started our annual event, Women Entrepreneurship Week, in 2014<\/a>, it might have seemed like a no-brainer to have all the speakers be women. But the all-women roster didn\u2019t happen automatically\u2014it took our board of advisors<\/a>, which is more than 80 percent female, to make us see the light. Our staff presented to the board an agenda for our 2014 WEW Conference, the biggest event of the week, which had one male speaker listed. Immediately, the board\u2014including the one male member\u2014started commenting, \u201cSurely there is a woman who can speak on this topic,\u201d and \u201cHave you tried to identify a woman to present this workshop?\u201d Even though our center has a special mission to nurture and encourage women entrepreneurs, we had done what so many people do while creating a panel: we thought immediately of someone already in our network, and he happened to be male. But it took almost no time to identify a woman to fill the spot. From that conversation, our staff resolved that every speaker during the Women Entrepreneurship Week events at the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship at Montclair State University would be a woman. We have kept that commitment the past two years, and expect to achieve it again this year for the third annual Women Entrepreneurship Week Oct. 17-22, 2016. In fact, at the Feliciano Center, our challenge isn\u2019t identifying women to be on panels and at the podium, but quite the opposite\u2014winnowing through a list that is pages long of excellent women entrepreneurs who have been suggested to us as speakers and panelists.<\/p>\n

In 2015, we made WEW a statewide celebration with 20 universities and nonprofits holding events all over the Garden State. In 2016, we will be making Women Entrepreneurship Week a national and international celebration\u2014we already have commitments from organizations planning to hold WEW events as far away as India, China and Australia. We give each WEW site the flexibility to design its own women entrepreneurship event so we can\u2019t ensure those overseas WEW events will only have women speakers\u2014although we strongly encourage it. But what we can guarantee is that many women entrepreneurs\u2019 voices will be heard, all over the globe, during the week of Oct. 17, 2016.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: it should not be difficult to have at least one woman on every panel, and we are glad that GenderAvenger is drawing attention to the importance of having women\u2019s voices heard in all areas of public discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We enjoyed reading Ron Fournier\u2019s recent column in The Atlantic about GenderAvenger, and the need for better representation of women on panels at conferences. It was great to see the work of GenderAvenger highlighted, especially when this is an issue important to us. We\u2019ve held an annual conference the past two years where every speaker\u2014more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[72,73,135,149,171],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women-entrepreneurs","tag-genderavenger","tag-gina-glantz","tag-ron-fournier","tag-susan-askew","tag-women-entrepreneurship-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207285,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions\/207285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/entrepreneur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}