Anna Soliman’s Meta-supported Pass Her The Mic is a training programme and open database for women speakers with a goal of developing female speaking talent and increasing representation at conferences, summits and other events
“We wanted a woman speaker, but we couldn’t find one.” That was the familiar refrain that Anna Soliman, who organises conferences and summits as part of her role as an agency development lead at Meta, kept hearing. Such events were consistently gender imbalanced—according to data, women make up just 30 percent of speakers in global conferences—with a prevalence of what have been termed ‘manels’—all-male panel discussions.
One day, frustration at this disparity got too much and Soliman decided that for the conference she was organising at the time, female speakers must comprise 50 percent of the line-up. When everyone put their mind to it, she discovered it wasn’t difficult to achieve. “It proved to me that yes, it’s possible. And the icing on the cake was that the women we found were the best speakers of the entire event. Why was it so hard to find them, and why weren’t they the first choice in their companies?” asks Soliman, who went on to found Pass Her The Mic in 2021 to increase women’s representation at tech, marketing and communications events in Asia-Pacific.
To answer her own questions, Soliman says that it wasn’t because there weren’t enough women—the excuse often cited—but rather a combination of a lack of confidence among women and a persistent system that favours men.
“I think we [as women] just have more criticism to deal with when it comes to public speaking, and a lot of women don’t want to deal with that kind of vulnerability,” says Soliman, pointing out that training can be an easy fix. “I also think speaker briefs from event organisers are flawed from the beginning. Many say that they need to have a CEO to attract audiences. That is in itself biased against underrepresented groups. They also say this person needs to have been covering the topic for a while and have already talked about it.” This again favours the men who have been chosen to speak previously, perpetuating an ongoing cycle.
For Pass Her The Mic, Soliman teamed up with the agencies she works with at Meta, including WPP, IPG, Publicis, Havas, Omnicom and Dentsu, and asked them to put forward women speakers from their organisations who would be able to take on some of the most popular tech and marcomms conference topics, from the metaverse to digital safety and privacy, to leadership. “We didn’t want women who were already being invited to a lot of events. We wanted those who weren’t being considered,” says Soliman.
The response from the agencies was overwhelmingly positive as this was an opportunity to elevate their people, offer them new opportunities and develop talent, as not only is Pass Her The Mic an open database listing pre-vetted women speakers, but there is a training programme associated with the initiative to allow speakers to hone their skills and grow their confidence, ensuring that everyone included in the Pass Her The Mic talent pool is a high quality speaker.
“Fortunately, my company [Meta] really invests in diversity in the workplace, because we know that it drives business,” says Soliman. “When they saw that this was a real solution, they decided to invest in a professional training programme to get more women ready for the stage.”
The training is run by professional presentation coaches, with LinkedIn also providing coaching sessions. To date, Pass Her The Mic has trained and championed 250 speakers from 14 countries across Asia-Pacific in the technology and marcomms industries and connected them not only to event organisers, but also to each other—through the training, like-minded and similarly accomplished women come together.
Soliman has plans for further training in 2023, while also scaling to different business functions and other organisations aside from the agencies she has worked with thus far, not to mention expanding outside Asia-Pacific. Pass Her The Mic already began welcoming women from Brazil in December 2022, with further growth plans for Latin America and a Europe launch in the second half of 2023.
At some point Soliman wants to be able to “talk to boutique agencies, [and] talk to unemployed women or speakers who don’t have a corporate job,” she says. But right now, she is “going for scale. I’m going for normalisation, so everything is free, everything is easy. In five years, I want it to be at a point where it’s the database for women speakers globally.”
Pass Her The Mic is a step towards increasing the number of women on event stages, and should have a ripple effect. As Christina Peyton, then vice president of marketing and growth APAC at WPP, which works with Pass Her The Mic, said: “Greater representation of female speakers at global speaking events helps inspire the next generation and encourages more women to be visible onstage, in business and in society.”
To access the full database of speakers, visit Pass Her The Mic.