What is an Innovation Women Super Panel?
An Innovation Women Super Panel is a group of our speaker members, assembled by industry or by topic, intended to provide an example of the awesome speakers an event manager can expect to find inside the Innovation Women platform. Each Super Panel is NOT an exhaustive list and we may revisit popular topics and industries, with different speakers. Currently, there are no speaking duties associated with being on a Super Panel (but more on that later.)
The Innovation Women Super Panels are a way to highlight the speakers on our platform and help them get found by event managers – we don’t call it a visibility bureau for nothing. They also help us connect with new event organizers. (A frequent search by event managers and conference organizers is something akin to “The best female (or women) speakers on (fill in the blank).”
How we select the Super Panel members:
- The Super Panel members all have complete or nearly complete profiles on Innovation Women. (See my profile, Bobbie Carlton, on Innovation Women, for an example of a complete profile – you need to be signed into the site to see an Innovation Women profile. Event manager accounts on the site are free, you just need to be verified.)
- We especially look for members whose profiles include example talks (the titles and abstracts of talks they have given or want to give.)
- We look for diversity. We want our Super Panel members to represent the breadth and depth of our database…and the universe. We want to demonstrate that Innovation Women live all over the world, that there might be one right around the corner, or halfway around the globe.
- We prioritize members who haven’t recently been a featured speaker in our weekly newsletters. (Our featured speakers are the members who share information with us about where they are speaking. We ask our members to “please let us know when you have a speaking engagement, a new book, were featured in the media or won an award, etc.” Speaking begets speaking – the more you are on stage, the more you will be on stage.)
- We also add in those speakers we think of as “super-stars” – those speakers who help us draw attention to the group by having big names, or big audiences or a willingness to share and promote the group. Innovation Women is a ‘collective’, with everyone working together to benefit the whole.
Why do we need Innovation Women Super Panels? Because, even though it is 2018, we still have conferences full of All-male panels and we still find far fewer women on stage than we should. Every time we are able to highlight women, we are helping them achieve their goals, and an industry move one step closer to inclusion, diversity and balance.
