Where are the women speakers? My evidence is anecdotal, but it’s overwhelming: women are underrepresented on the dais. Women are half the population, but only a tiny percentage of the keynote speakers. I was at a conference recently where the attendees had a roughly 50-50 gender split, eyeballing the room. And yet, after a day of speakers – on the order of 8 or so – the audience started to wonder where the women keynoters were. There were none.   It even became a tweet thing. And this wasn’t a Navy-Seals-Who-Have-Lead-Assaults-On-Osama-Bin-Laden-Hideouts-Only-Speakers-Allowed event. It was about marketing.

Then, recently Greg Martin, a mathematics professor, after attending a mathematics conference with 19 male speakers and one woman, did what mathematicians do: he checked the odds. And guess what? It’s statistically impossible for that lineup to be random.

So now we have hard statistical evidence. The reason that there won’t be a representative array of men and women speakers at the next conference you attend is simple: bias.

And it needs to stop. We need – obviously, of course – to achieve diversity of the dais just as much as we need diversity in the boardroom, the executive ranks, and the upper levels of organizational management in general.

Presumably all the same reasons for bias and lack of women in these areas also affect the keynote-speaking world, since the source of many of those speakers is the same.

And there’s one additional reason. To understand it, you need to understand the economics of the professional speaking world.

For most people, the fees commanded by the top keynote speakers are a source of amazement, or wonder, or outrage. How could someone earn $40K in an hour? Or more? Of course, most speakers make much less, but former President Clinton and a few other in-demand speakers make more, often much more.

OK, so the fees can be high. Of course, those who are amazed or outraged at the hourly rate don’t think about the years of preparation, or the amount of effort required to get that hour on the stage, or that fee, but that’s not my concern here.

Let’s look at the typical conference. We’re talking about 500 people descending on a nice venue for a couple of days. The overall budget, excluding the travel required to get everyone there, is roughly 1.5 to 2 million. Most of that is for the venue, food and drink.

I was negotiating once on behalf of a client over the speaking fee, when the organizer laughed as he finally agreed to the haggled price, $30K, saying, “Nick, what you don’t realize is that I’m going to spend $40K on the mid-morning coffee and bagel break. Just so you know.”

He was trying to rub it in, and make himself feel better, but I got the message. If a conference organizer can get a speaker for $10K less, then he might be able to offer steak instead of chicken at lunch. And that might make for happier customers (unless they’re vegan), which might mean more repeat business.

But the speaker is still a relatively small percentage of the total budget. To put those keynote fees into perspective for you.

Here’s another way to look at it. Is Malcolm Gladwell’s reported $100K keynote fee worth it? If the conference costs, say, $1200 to attend, and the star power of Mr. Gladwell’s name induces an additional 100 fence-sitters to show up, then the conference organizers actually make $20K by hiring Mr. Gladwell to speak.

Those are theoretical numbers, but you get the idea. Star power is important for conference organizers because it brings paying customers.

So what we need to redress the gender imbalance on the dais (and incidentally the income imbalance) is to create more women speaking stars.

Partly, it’s a Catch-22. Few women getting hired to speak means fewer can become stars, which means fewer will get hired to speak. But that’s not the whole story. Former Secretary of State Clinton commands high fees and more speaking invitations than she can fulfill because she’s a star first.

We need both. We need more conference organizers to begin to hire more women speakers. And we need more women stars. And that gets back to the need for diversity in general. What are we waiting for?