How Online Conferences Amplify Women's Voices by Expanding Access
GenderAvenger Barbara Palmer, Deputy Editor of Convene, the leading meetings industry publication for educational content and professional development, recently spoke with Xiaoyin Qu, a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and founder of the digital event platform, Run the World, about why she created the platform and who is using it.
Xiaoyin Qu, Run the World Founder & CEO
Xiaoyin Qu dropped out of Stanford Graduate School of Business last year to start Run the World. Since Run the World’s official Feb. 27 launch, the meeting and event platform has hosted participants from 120 countries at more than 4,000 online events. Backed by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, it has seen rapid growth in tandem with the huge leap in the number of digital conferences and events, which have replaced face-to-face events during COVID-19’s lockdowns and travel bans, but when former Facebook employees Qu and co-founder Xuan Jiang started the company together, their intention was to solve another problem altogether — that of access to meetings, particularly by women.
Qu’s inspiration was the experience that her mother, a pediatric neurologist in China, had when she traveled to the United States for her first international medical conference. Her mother considered the connections she made at the event to be invaluable to her practice, she told Qu, but attending the conference was an ordeal that required taking two weeks off work, applying for a U.S. visa in Beijing, traveling from Qingdao to Chicago, and paying for flights and hotels. She couldn’t see herself attending another international conference again soon.
The wheels began to turn for Qu, whose work at Facebook was focused on video and events. “We have mobile, we have video, we have livestreaming,” Qu said. “We can at least make it easy for people like my mom to attend conferences more regularly.”
runtheworld.today
During Run the World’s first online event, a product management summit, Qu noticed that not only were a lot of women participating, they were joining directly from their phones. Many of them, she later learned, were mothers actively caring for young children. “The use case is them not even using their laptops — they're just joining on their phone” — some holding their children with one arm and holding their phone with the other, Qu learned during follow-up interviews.
Many of them told Qu that they lacked opportunities to make the kinds of business connections available at conferences, because caring for their children keeps them from traveling. Some working mothers told Qu it was impossible to travel to events even in their own hometowns because of the demands of child care. For them, online is not only a good option but also the only option available.
Among the hundreds of events organized on the Run the World platform are what Qu calls “female empowerment communities”, including the “How I Built This, by Women In Product” Conference; the Women Thrive Symposium 2020; and Changing the Game: Women and Esports. Run the World also hosted a global Fertility Empowerment Summit, providing information about egg-freezing options for women. In addition to connecting women interested in the topic, the online event also provided access to information for residents of countries where it is illegal for unmarried women to freeze their eggs. Part of the summit’s mission was to give women, “especially from developing countries, access to all of the possible options they could take for their own fertility decisions,” Qu said.
By enabling and supporting such events, “we are proud,” Qu said, “to be the place where we celebrate diversity, and we bring females to the table to have deep, meaningful conversations that change the world, no matter where they are.”
“The world we imagine and want to pave the way for is one in which we can have ease of use, just like Facebook or Instagram,” she said, but where more meaningful relationships can be built. Run the World is not a replacement for meeting in person — the goal should be to facilitate more, instead of limiting, face-to-face interaction, she said. “We don’t want to live in a world where we don’t meet personally anymore.”
Because of existing barriers, “the right approach, I think, should be creating more occasions and events that otherwise would not exist,” she said. The first focus “is providing opportunity for those who are not enjoying it at all.”
“Even in online events, we are seeing attendees who are mothers apologizing a lot when they have to take care of crying babies,” Qu said. “I wish we could live in a world where working moms don't need to apologize for crying babies, and it doesn't need to be only working moms that take care of the babies.”
