The
Minimum Viable Diversity
Pledge

Spread the word! Share the pledge around, tell conferences and your employer and your friends about it, and help us get as many people involved as possible, so we can make maximum impact.

As well as helping and inspiring individual people from underrepresented groups, increasing speaker diversity is important because diverse groups solve problems better. We've done studies, it's measurably true, and aiming for a diverse mix of genders, races, religions, sexualities & more everywhere makes us all more successful, and the world a better place.

This is important in communities generally, but especially for people in leading role-model positions, such as speakers at industry events. More diverse groups of speakers will give us conference talks and discussion with a wider range of ideas, but more importantly will also include & inspire more diverse audiences in turn.

It's this multiplier effect that's key. More diverse lineups let everybody get involved in the cutting-edge of the field, help spread diversity in the community as a whole, and hopefully inspire more diverse groups of people to share their ideas on stage too.

By focusing on the minimum level, we hope to get as many people as possible involved. If it becomes a common sight for organizers everywhere, nobody can run events that totally ignore diversity. The pledge can't rule out the majority of existing events, or it simply wouldn't be practical. We need to focus first on the clear worst offenders, and build up from there.

The hope here is that this will cause big problems for those below the minimum bar, and the steady pressure from many pledge signers mentioning it when accepting speaking slots and buying tickets will highlight diversity further, even among events already reaching this line. This builds awareness and momentum across the board to improve diversity even further, everywhere.

This is just the start though. You personally don't need to limit yourself to this minimal bar, and we'd definitely encourage you to go even further. (See resources for some suggestions). In future we also hope to extend beyond this, to steadily raise the bar and improve diversity more and more. For now though this pledge is focused on taking a pragmatic and immediate step forward, with a long road ahead.

Diversity is important, and every event should have a diverse lineup. Many free events are tiny meetups organized by volunteers though, with tiny lineups, and barely enough time or resources to actively find any speakers, let alone go further and encourage diverse speakers. (See resources for some tips on doing this.) These events do need to be more inclusive too, but outright boycotts across the board would rule out many events that can't easily invest more effort to go further. Including these events in this pledge would make it impossible for many people to sign up.

Events that charge for entry are a different matter: any event large & successful enough to charge for tickets has the power to provide an inclusive environment, and a responsibility to do so. These events need to be investing some of their revenue and time back into their speaker selection to guarantee at least a minimum level of diversity, and many aren't. This is where we're focusing.

You personally don't have to limit this to only paid events though. This is the minimum general bar, but do feel free to go further and push for more! (See resources if you'd like some ideas for ways to do that.)

The short answer: it depends, but the key is to highlight a range of voices from a variety of backgrounds, especially those who aren't normally heard.

Diversity is a complicated topic, and it's going to depend on the context. You may have to make your own call on this. Not all diversity is visible: many disabilities have no physical manifestation and you cannot tell if a person is LGBT just from appearance. However, a lack of visible diversity is a very clear indicator that an event is not considering diversity at all. It is the clearly failing cases that this pledge is most concerned with. When your whole lineup is white men, there's a clear problem. If you have a lineup that instead includes some women, people of color, LGBT people, and people with disabilities, you've gained some level of diversity.

Existing represention of the groups in question is key. The groups to focus on are those who are otherwise frequently discriminated against, and are different to the typical speakers you'd see at your event. Adding somebody British to a lineup of Americans typically doesn't add any meaningful diversity. Adding somebody from Latin America often would.

For white male speakers, the speaker pledge is often relevant and actionable. It's less relevant as a speaker from an underrepresented group though, as bringing your own voice to an event often increases the diversity of speakers automatically. (That's not always the case! There are occasional instances of problematic lineups including only the voices of cis white women, for example, but it's a much less frequent issue than the classic all-white-male panel.)

For some of us who are ourselves underrepresented, it may feel like we'll never be a member of a homogeneous group of speakers, and this pledge won't matter. These pledges exist though because never seeing people like yourself up on stage sucks, and without the support of the people we're trying to help, they're meaningless. If you're from an underrepresented group, we need your help to create better events:

• Sign the speaker pledge anyway to show your support.
• Sign the attendee pledge, and refuse to attend events that completely ignore diversity.
• Encourage both your company and the events you go to sign the company and event pledges.
• Put yourself forwards as a speaker. Add your name to the list of Speakers Who Want a Platform, follow CallbackWomen, and get your voice out there to help inspire other people like you.

There are quite a few other related pledges. Many of these are more narrowly focused aimed at a specific field or part of world. Some commit you to general rather than concrete action, or look only at panel lineups, rather than whole conferences. Many focus only on including female speakers, rather than encouraging diversity as a whole (an easy way to leave many other underrepresented groups excluded). Those other pledges have value, but they're not doing exactly what we want to do here.

The goal of this pledge is to help people take specific concrete action to solve the diversity problem that appears in professional events of all sorts of fields, all around the world, for everybody. As far as we're aware, this is the only pledge doing that.

Mainly just publish how many of them we get, so everybody can see how many people think this is important.

The pledges also ask you for your name (or your company/event's name and logo). We're planning to eventually publish a list of the people who've signed up, and include a selection of event and company logos on the site. There is an option in the pledge to sign it but opt out of having your name published, if you'd prefer.

Finally, we also collect email addresses (again, optionally). We'll never share these or spam them. They're only going to be used for very occasional later updates closely related to this pledge.