📣🚨 Action Alert | Smart Cities Connect Created ANOTHER Unbalanced Speaker List. Join Us and Challenge Them to Do Better.

photo credit: Chris Murray, via Unsplash

Smart Cities Connect claims to “provide meaningful content and connect a thoughtful community of decision-makers to empower smart cities at all stages of growth.” What irks us is who they consider to be in that “community of decision-makers”. We’ve been tracking Smart Cities Connect since 2017 — you can see our history with them here, here, and here — and in that time they have never had a gender balanced speaker list.

If ever there was a year to make improvements, it’s 2021. The spring conference is being held virtually, which means there was plenty of opportunity for organizers to put together a balanced list — there is no travel to consider, schedules are generally more flexible, and there are less conferences to compete for speakers. And yet, once again, there are too many men speaking.

So we’re issuing a challenge to Smart Cities Connect. The fall conference is in October, and panel submissions are still being collected. Use the next few months to put together a stellar, gender balanced speaker list. We’d love for our October update to include a Stamp of Approval honor instead of yet another unbalanced tally that shows, once again, how Smart Cities limits women’s active public dialog in and decision-making about communities in which they make up at least half the population.

Join us! Challenge Smart Cities Connect to include women equally when talking about the cities they live in:

I’m joining @GenderAvenger to challenge @smartcityc to build a balanced speaker list for their fall conf. After years of imbalance, it’s time to smarten up and ensure women are equal parts of the dialog about cities they live in. #SCC21 #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/action-alert-challenge-smart-cities-connect-to-do-better