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Blog posted by: Zara Farrar, 9 March 2017 – Events, GDS team.

Last year on International Women’s Day, we publicly announced the GDS Parity Pledge. It said that:

In future, no-one from GDS will take part in a panel discussion of two or more people unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the chair.

In future, no-one from GDS will speak at an event unless the event's organisers are clearly working hard to address gender diversity on stage. It's hard to put a number on this sort of thing, so we will make that decision based on what we see on each event's draft agenda

We'll hold ourselves to the same standards where GDS is the host, for internal events and public ones too.

Ideally, when GDS is invited to supply a guest speaker for an event, we’d like to send women to speak just as often as we send men.

So one year later, how have we done on our pledge?

More gender diversity at external events

Since 8 March 2016, we’ve sent 151 people from GDS to speak at 143 external events. We’re excluding small meet-ups from this as we don’t have a way of tracking who is speaking at these types of events. Occasionally, we’ve sent more than one person to speak together, or in different sessions, at the same event.

Of the 151 that attended, 88 were men and 63 were women. That’s 58.3% men and 41.7% women.

This time last year the figures were roughly 75% men and 25% women. So although we’re not quite at 50/50 equality a year later, we’re much closer to it.

More gender diversity at internal events, too

Internal Civil Service events are tracked differently. To find out what progress we’ve made with these, I looked at 4 events that took place within the past year:

• Civil Service Live 2016, which took place at 5 different venues across the country
• design community meet-ups every 2 months
• ConCon 3 and ConCon 4 – 2 separate content design events

At Civil Service Live, GDS ran a ‘digital hub’ with 6 presentations from speakers representing all our major programmes of work. Across all 5 locations, we sent 51 individual speakers with a breakdown of 29 men (56.9%) to 22 women (43.1%), slightly better than our external figure.

The design community meet-ups usually attract about 100 attendees. They are a mix of updates from senior leaders, guest speakers and show-and-tell sessions from design teams. From March 2016 to March 2017 there were 6 events with a total of 97 speakers, with a gender split of 59 men (60.8%) to 38 women (39.2%). There is overlap of speakers where the heads of design are largely the same at every event, though. Once again, a very similar total to the external events figure.

ConCon is a biannual event run by the Content Design Community. Each ConCon event is a mix of keynote speeches and workshops. For the last 2 events (ConCon 3 and 4) there was a gender split of 24 men (46.2%) to 28 women (53.8%).