(Thinking of) Presenting at a UK ELT event?

 

If you are presenting at a UK ELT event soon, you may find the following tips, written by Catherine Walter, for presenters at international conferences, very useful. (See article here).
If you feel you would benefit from some mentoring before you present, please read the section on this web site under the button marked ‘Mentoring Pages’.

Those tips will make sure you are really well-prepared. But what if you are also concerned about the number of women presenting at the event? What can you do to try to make sure there are even, or close to even, numbers of women and men.

Here are some ideas:

  • When invited to speak, ask how many women will be presenting at plenary level and how many women presenters and workshop givers there will be.
  • If you are a well-known male speaker, have been invited (many times) to speak at an event and know that the balance of speaker gender is not great, you might consider suggesting that the organisers give your place to a woman this year or at least have another plenary speaker who is a woman.
  • Check the programme to make sure that, if there are a few women on it, they are not all programmed on at the same time as each other in parallel slots. Instead, make sure they are ‘sprinkled’ so that, at most times of the day, there is a chance of attending a woman’s talk.
  • If you get there and discover there is only one woman on, for example, a speaker panel, ask the organisers if they can provide a woman chair or suggest that some women participants be invited to come up to give their views as ‘consumers’ on the questions put.
  • Comment on gender balance when asked for feedback at the end of, or after, the event.