In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris tackle the important topic of speaker selection at events, specifically focusing on inclusivity and representation. Discover the challenges and considerations when selecting speakers for events, particularly when catering to a specific audience, like women in a particular industry. Learn valuable strategies for creating a more inclusive and diverse speaker lineup at your events, ensuring all voices are heard and represented. Gain insights from Katie and Chris’s open and honest conversation about their experiences and perspectives on this crucial issue, and find inspiration for positive change in your event planning.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher S. Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, let’s talk about something different for a change and talk about event marketing, conferences, and speaker selection. So recently, I had the opportunity and the privilege to speak about generative AI in the architecture, engineering, construction industry to an event that I didn’t know that I was probably the best fit for, which was the Women in Construction Operations organization—a great organization based in California that is all about supporting and advancing women in the AEC industry. Katie, I know that when this all came through, you had some questions.
Katie Robbert – 00:36
I sure did. I sure did. Well, let me sort of start with the disclaimer that I completely respect your expertise, and I totally understand why events seek you out to be the speaker. And so I just want to sort of make that disclaimer in case anybody thinks that I’m not saying that you’re qualified.
In this example, where it was a women’s event on the subject matter, you are 100% qualified. My question for you is, when they came and said, “Hey, we want you to speak,” because I remember they sought you out specifically and they said, “We’re a women’s organization,” what went through your mind? Did it even occur to you that perhaps you were not the right person?
Christopher S. Penn – 01:26
It did. And we actually had this discussion in our company Slack, which was, “Don’t you need to be a woman to speak there?” Because there’s a parallel organization that you work with, Women in Analytics, where their annual conference essentially has that: if you are a person who identifies as either non-binary or women, you are eligible to speak. If you identify as something else, you are not. This organization did not have that in place.
Katie Robbert – 01:55
That aside, I’m asking you personally. What were your thoughts about being a man speaking at a women’s conference?
Christopher S. Penn – 02:06
My thoughts were, I can talk about the topic, and I know they saw me speak at SMPS, the Society for Market Professional Services, which is a larger AEC organization. That’s how they found us.
My first thought was, okay, I can do the thing and provide them a lot of value and help them do what they want. But at the same time, it was one of those things like, should I be doing this? And obviously, in the fiduciary interests of the company, we just say, yes, we’ll send Chris anywhere that is willing to do business with us at our rates and fees. But it was still one of those things like, that seems odd that they wouldn’t choose a woman to talk to do essentially the same thing. Even if it wasn’t a Trust Insights speaker, there are a lot of very qualified women who could talk about the use of AI. Now, not necessarily in the construction industry, but in general, there are.
Katie Robbert – 03:10
Well, to be fair, you’re not in the construction industry.
Christopher S. Penn – 03:12
I know, I know.
Katie Robbert – 03:14
So what’s interesting is you’re not really answering my question. You’re kind of dodging it a little bit. And I don’t know if this is purposeful. I’m picking on you a bit because I never really get to in these scenarios. But I also think that it’s a helpful conversation because I know that our listeners know that you and I can have an open and respectful conversation about really tough things.
I feel like this is a tough topic because, as a woman in a tech industry, a lot of the stereotypes and biases have only gotten deeper with AI. The fact that we’ve had to spin up women-only conferences or women-speaker-only conferences where men are still invited—the fact that’s a thing kind of breaks my heart a little bit.
I was speaking with someone during one of the networking events at a recent event, and we were talking about these women-speaker-only conferences. This gentleman expressed to me, “Well, I would feel really weird as a man attending.” And I asked him, I was like, “Why?”
He couldn’t really give me a straight answer other than, I think—and I’m making a lot of assumptions—perhaps he felt like it was too unbalanced and unfair towards men to have women only as speakers. And then he proceeded to tell me some very odd story about, in the eighties, men’s-only conferences and how they were big cover-ups for homophobia. And so it got weird.
Christopher S. Penn – 04:55
Yeah, that’s weird.
Katie Robbert – 04:57
The point being is that a lot of people are not comfortable—and I say that’s a personal problem—but a lot of people are not comfortable with the idea of women-only speakers or women taking the stage. I’m not saying that you fall into that category, but what I’m curious about is, yes, in the financial interest of the company you said yes, but at any point in the conversation, did you say to the event coordinators, “Do you want a woman for this instead?”
Christopher S. Penn – 05:30
No, I did not.
Katie Robbert – 05:32
Why not?
Christopher S. Penn – 05:33
Because I wanted us, as a company, to get that contract. If I’m being perfectly blunt and honest, I put us first, and if we can get the business, we will get the business, as long as it’s obviously legal and ethical. I did not ask that question because I wanted us to get that business.
Katie Robbert – 05:53
So, okay, you go to the conference, you show up. What kind of questions do you think are going to be asked? What happens?
Christopher S. Penn – 06:03
They gave me a long list. In fact, I asked in advance, “What kinds of questions do people have?” They were all questions about, “How do we use this?” First, very specific processes, like, “Here is a report that a construction firm is supposed to submit at the end of every day. How do we use generative AI to implement this because it’s a huge time suck? How do we do this? How do we do this?” It’s all questions of how do we do very specific things that were unique, really, not even just to the construction industry, but to the companies—the several companies—that were hosting this thing. So their questions were all around, “Tell me how to take the shiny object and turn it into something that will make my life easier.”
Katie Robbert – 06:51
And I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, one of the questions was around empowering women.
Christopher S. Penn – 07:03
Yes, about empowering women and how to advance them. Now, what was interesting is once we started going through the material, that question never came up at all. It was all about how do we even use this thing? Even though I spent a fair amount of time on the operation side—like going through the Trust Insights’ 5P framework, for example—it was very much a discussion that was all very tactical.
Katie Robbert – 07:41
So as someone who often gets asked to speak at events, is there anything you’ll take from this experience and apply it moving forward in terms of speaker selection, alignment with the audience, or anything else that came out of this experience?
Christopher S. Penn – 08:02
Well, the number one thing is for any organization that is a women’s organization, the first question would be, “Wouldn’t you prefer to have Katie, who is equally expert, particularly in the operational side of things, who also happens to be a woman?” That strikes me as just a basic, standard operating procedure that we can implement ourselves, to say, “This is what you want.”
Also asking, “What are the very specific questions?” Because the questions we were given upfront were not the questions that were asked in the session. The questions upfront were about empowering women and advancing women within construction. The women who asked questions in the session asked, “All I need is to make my life easier about this specific task. How do I do it? Can AI do X?”
Katie Robbert – 08:51
So I don’t know if you will be able to answer this question, but how do we empower women in the AI industry moving forward?
Christopher S. Penn – 09:04
So we have to take AI out of it because this is, as you will famously say, this is a people problem. This is not a technology problem. Part of it has to be on our side—mine in particular—saying, “This is not an opportunity that is ideally suited for me. I am technically qualified to do this talk. I am not representative of the audience that should be on stage.”
So making sure that the best-qualified person overall would have been you for this particular event. Second is enabling any marginalized population—women, minorities, people who are not heterosexual—to have more airtime, whether it’s on stage, but also in podcasts, in live streams, and guest articles. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but if you look at the way we share content as a company, we try to highlight you as much as possible because I have—I can create plenty of noise on my own personal properties.
We also don’t need to have me being the all-Chris-all-the-time show on the company property either because it’s not representative of the company as a whole. We have multiple sides of our company. So those are some of the bare basics. What would you add to that list?
Katie Robbert – 10:37
Well, first and foremost, I would say it’s hard as a woman, as women in general—and I’m sort of speaking in generalizations—women have been taught, especially women of a certain generation, to not speak up, to not use their voice. It’s too aggressive. It’s too this, it’s too much.
As a woman of that generation, especially from a very young age, I was told I was too much, and it’s been difficult to move past that emotionally. Logically, I totally recognize that I’m not too much, that I’m not too aggressive, that I’m not too bossy, that I’m not too anything. Emotionally, it’s a harder conversation with myself.
Even simple things, I was talking with someone last week about social media and the women that I talk to. We find it difficult to self-promote because it’s too aggressive. It’s too, “Look at me! Look at me!” Even though we have been hired to speak at an event, there’s still that fear of being too much if we then also post it and promote it on social media.
Finding organizations like Women in Analytics, like Women in Data, that empower and put women first takes a bit of that anxiety and insecurity out of it because that’s all it is. It’s literally just you and other women in the same situation, and you’re not competing for airtime.
I think that some events have done a better job of balancing male and female speakers. Some events have not. I’m not going to call out any specific events. I will make reference to—and this is something that’s still kind of rubs me the wrong way—is organizations that alter people’s headshots.
For example, I did a podcast, I was a guest on a podcast, and when they sent me over the promotional materials, they had altered my headshot to include very heavy makeup on the headshot. Chris, I sent it to you, and you noticed it immediately. I responded back to the organization—and I wasn’t rude about it, I asked, I was like, “Hey, I noticed”—and the response I got back was very unsatisfactory. It was, “Oh, well, our post-production team did it. We were trying to do it for image resolution.”
And I pointed out, “There’s a big difference between clarifying an image for better resolution and putting makeup on someone without their consent.”
Christopher S. Penn – 13:50
Yeah. If you put my photo through, I would have had bright red lipstick and long lashes, which, granted, my eyelashes need some work, but they would not do that to—probably would not do that to—my photo.
Katie Robbert – 14:02
Well, and that’s the point. As women, we unfortunately still have to fight twice as hard to get the same, to even get up to the same level. Now, there’s definitely men who have to fight just as hard—men of color, minorities, different protected classes. So I’m not saying that there aren’t men who struggle with the same thing.
Historically and even now, presently, women just have to fight that much harder, especially without taking it to a political place. In our current political climate, I personally have found that women have to fight more than twice as hard, sometimes three or four times as hard, because the current political climate has allowed some—not all—some men to really show how they really feel about women in a position of power.
Again, I use the term heartbreaking because that’s the way it makes me feel. It’s heartbreaking that sometimes we’re reduced down to a gender, and that’s all we are. Despite all of our accomplishments, we’re reduced down to, “You’re a woman, therefore, this is what I think you should be doing, what I think you should be saying. I think you should not be talking at all.”
I know I just took this to a very vulnerable and emotional place, and I probably could cry right now, but I won’t because we’re talking about getting women on stage.
Christopher S. Penn – 15:44
We are. But you can’t extract the cultural context from the issue itself. It’s part and parcel of the issue is that we as a culture, we as a business, and then me as a person all have to do better in terms of saying, “This opportunity, I am not the best person for it.”
It would be—the easy example—to say, “Okay, this is a Women in Construction Operations conference. The speakers should be women.” I mean, that seems pretty logical. And if there are follow-up questions or there are questions where they’re indicating they want a specific kind of expertise, then maybe that’s that we find a way to say, “Okay, well, maybe we cut the speaking fee in half and bring both of us so that I can answer the technical questions, but you can do the majority of the talk, which is on how do you operationalize the use of generative AI?” There’s ways to work around all this stuff.
It’s this question of whether an organization can afford it because of our speaking fees and all this logistics that comes with moving human beings from point to point and prioritizing who should be operating in what context. So is this to the point you’re saying earlier, there are some events like Marketing AI Conference and Marketing Professors that do a great job of being representative of the audience, of having people of different genders, different backgrounds, different gender identities on stage. And, part of going back to what you were saying earlier, part of empowerment is also calling out when people do it.
Katie Robbert – 17:27
Well, and I will say—and so I started the show with the disclaimer—the fact that, number one, you’re willing to have this conversation publicly is huge because not all men, not a lot of men, would be willing to do so in such an open and frank way. And so I just want to show my gratitude for that because that’s a big deal. It’s not something that I tend to see a lot.
Number two is that, despite the fact that you are a very well-known global keynote speaker, you’re willing to rethink what that looks like to make space for other women. That, again, that’s huge. And I just want to sort of acknowledge that because those are the steps that need to be taken in order to find space for women to actually be getting the representation and to be getting on the stages they deserve to be getting on.
Now, we’re sort of picking on this Women in Construction [event]. My first thought when you said, “I’m going to go do this thing,” I was like, “Well, number one, you’re not a woman. Number two, I don’t think you do manual labor if there’s not a keyboard attached.” And so I was thinking more of, like, what—it’s funny because I thought less about the women aspect and more about, “What the heck do you know about construction?”
“How to automate robots? Like, you’re not laying bricks and pouring cement.”
Christopher S. Penn – 18:59
It’s funny because I’ve worked with SMPS now for three years. We’ve done talks and workshops and things. I have never worked in the AEC industry as an AEC employee. But having gotten to know that crowd of folks, which is one of my favorite crowds of folks to work with, I have a fairly good sense of the issues that they face as it relates to the ways that you would use AI, particularly in back-office stuff, like, how do we make the back office more streamlined and profitable so that the construction projects themselves move ahead?
So, for example, RFPs are a big part of how those companies do their work and get business. The bidding process is exhaustive and painful, very expensive, and very slow. So at a recent SMPS workshop we did, we built live on stage a go/no-go proposal analyzer. You drop the RFP in, you drop your company’s—”These are the criteria for the kinds of proposals we know we win”—and you have generative AI say, “Okay, thumbs up, thumbs down. You should bid on this, you should not bid on this.”
That is—that’s not construction. That’s operations and stuff. And so those are the areas where I can definitely help. If they were to say, “Can you show us how to use a vision language model to build a robot that would assess the safety of these girders?” I’m like, “I’m probably not the best person to do that. I can tell you how to build a vision language model and how to deploy it. I have no domain expertise in what a proper weld looks like, so I could not help with that. I would need to be paired with a domain expert.”
Katie Robbert – 20:36
And again, sort of the awareness of your limitations of expertise is huge because I know a lot of people who would just say, “Yeah, I can wing it,” or they would go in saying, “No, I’m totally an expert,” and then kind of BS their way through it. I think that just those steps start to march us in the right direction.
It is interesting when you sort of describe the Women in Construction industry as a whole. This is sort of the same when I talked about the non-profit animal shelter that we work with. Well, we don’t know a lot about running a non-profit animal shelter, but we know what the operations of a business look like.
At the end of the day, it’s a business with the same operational issues as the Women in Construction industry, as the B2B marketing industry, as the largest B2C brand. We all have the same operational challenges that we’re trying to figure out how to automate with AI. I do want to acknowledge that, yeah, in that sense, you are an expert to talk about those things. You know, and I have every faith that, had the, “How do we empower women?” conversation had come up in person, that you would have said a lot of what you said to me here on this podcast.
But you also would have said, “Hey, perhaps you should follow up with our CEO who can speak to the organizations that she works with and how to sort of do some of that from a female perspective.” Because I will say, as a woman, hearing about what I should do from someone who isn’t a woman, I tend to just sort of check out like, “No, we’re—we’re good here. We’re not—you’re not going to tell me how—”
Christopher S. Penn – 22:24
You had your own slide. You had your own slide in the deck, so it didn’t have to come from the conversation. There was an ad for you.
Katie Robbert – 22:32
You know what I’m saying, though?
Christopher S. Penn – 22:33
Yes.
Katie Robbert – 22:34
Like—
Christopher S. Penn – 22:39
No, it’d be like you saying, “Hey, let me tell you how to advance Korean Americans.”
Katie Robbert – 22:46
Yeah, I have no business doing that. I’d be like, “Hey, but I know a guy.” But that’s the thing. It’s the reverse is true. As women, yes, we’re finding opportunities, but we also have to be aware of the opportunities that are right and not right for us because if we continue to take opportunities that aren’t right for us just for the sake of getting on stage, that’s going to be more harmful than it is going to be helpful.
We have to have the same amount of self-awareness that we’re asking men to have. It has to work both ways. We can’t just—we can’t just sit back and go, “You need to say no to everything so I can say yes to everything.” That’s not a fair ask. There needs to be equal amounts of work put in from both sides in order for this to move in the right direction.
Christopher S. Penn – 23:39
Right. And very selfishly, if we do a good job of that as a company, we should—it’s not a question of this or that—is we should be doubling the number of events we speak at because we should have more events for you and more events for me, I hope.
Katie Robbert – 23:58
I totally agree. Totally agree because—and this is the thing that I don’t know is well understood—there’s enough room for everybody at the table. And if there’s not, bring a—bring another chair.
Christopher S. Penn – 24:11
Make the table bigger.
Katie Robbert – 24:13
Make the table bigger. Bring a chair. Start your own table.
Christopher S. Penn – 24:17
Our friend Brooke Sellas did that years ago when she was told, “No, you can’t speak at this event.” So she made her own event.
Katie Robbert – 24:26
Now she’s traveling all over the world, speaking all on her own merits, which is fantastic. I’m incredibly proud of her. She’s someone—she’s similar to me where she has those same sort of insecurities of, “Am I too much?” But she pushed past it enough so that she’s now getting all of these amazing opportunities, international opportunities as well, not just domestic, which is fantastic.
That’s a harder market to break into when you are geographically located in the United States. Getting those international speaking gigs really speaks volumes to how wide you’re reaching, to how far of an audience you’re bringing in. And I am just incredibly proud of her.
Christopher S. Penn – 25:13
Exactly. So to your point, there’s not a chair at the feet of the table? Build a bigger table.
Katie Robbert – 25:20
That’s right. What I will say—and I know it’s hard, and I am definitely willing to talk with any woman about this—but we have to figure out our own version of knowing that we’re not too much. It’s going to look different for everybody, but we have to find ways that we feel comfortable promoting ourselves, showing our expertise.
Unfortunately, you can’t all have a Chris Penn as a business partner who is willing to do the work to promote you and boost you up. But even that only takes you so far. You still have to put in the work yourself to say, “Sure, it’s great that whenever he gets the chance, Chris says nice things about me and talks about my expertise. I have to be willing to say those things as well.”
Again, you can’t expect other people to just boost you up. You have to do that boosting yourself, too.
Christopher S. Penn – 26:17
And for the not-women folks, here’s a funny thing: it is in your interest to be supportive, to be collaborative. It makes the table bigger. But I will also say this: having worked with a number of different people of all genders, there are people—people talk, and individuals gain reputations.
You may be losing business, and you don’t know why because you have a reputation among a certain group of people—a group of people of color, a group of women—of someone that they don’t want to do business with because you are not collaborative, because you are outright a jerk. It is incumbent upon you and me to not be a jerk. You might find that more doors are open if you are not a jerk.
Katie Robbert – 27:19
Quite honestly, it makes the conversation way more interesting if you are not surrounded by people who are exactly like you. You learn a lot more about yourself, the world, the industry, your customers, your audience, potential collaborators.
It’s way more interesting, way more fun, than just sitting at the table with everybody who looks exactly like you. I like to joke that I accidentally got sucked into watching *The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives* on Hulu, which is—well, to be fair, I thought it was going to be a true crime, like a cult thing. It turns out it’s more of a *Real Housewives* reality show.
But the thing I was fascinated by was that there’s a certain look, there’s the Mormon housewife look, which is very long blonde hair extensions, a lot of Botox, very white. The joke is that anybody watching the show had a very hard time telling each of the women apart. There was about a dozen of them or so, but they all looked exactly alike. It was very Stepford Wives-esque.
There was so much drama and infighting because there was so much sameness. They were all competing for the same one seat at the table versus bringing up an additional eleven chairs so that everybody could have an equal say. It’s sort of like a silly example, but the point is, as you start to break out of those molds and push yourself out of your comfort zone, it’s going to be really interesting, it’s going to be a little scary, but overall, you’re going to learn a lot.
Christopher S. Penn – 29:02
Exactly. And if you’re not learning a lot, you’re at the wrong table.
Katie Robbert – 29:05
It’s true. What is it? The—”If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
Christopher S. Penn – 29:10
Exactly. Exactly. So if you have some thoughts about doing things like empowering marginalized populations, particularly women, in the context of this show—any population that is underrepresented—and you’d like to share your experiences, pop by our free Slack. Go to TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers, where you and over 3,500 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day.
Wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on instead, go to TrustInsights.ai/TIpodcast, where you can find us on where most podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you next time.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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