*A long thread on diversity in conferences which asks for some feedback/ideas at the end*
Lots of chat in the @excitELT organisers' group chat tonight about increasing diversity in ELT conferences. Got an email today that was in part about having a very white line up.

We've had some logistical issues that means that we've not been able to announce speakers in the order we originally wanted. We will have some more speaker announcements soon and the conference line up will be more diverse when it's finalised.

That said, I do think it's worth having a talk about diversity in ELT conferencing. When you're organising these things, you have a bunch of competing priorities not only in terms of diversity but also in terms of subject areas covered and being a big draw.

At excitELT we've always had running a good conference ahead of running a big conference in our priorities, but we've always wanted to have a wide range of subjects from our invited speakers.

In terms of diversity there are also a lot of ways in which a conference can/should be diverse. You want to have representation in terms of 'native' and non-'native', gender, LGBT, class, race and all sorts of other factors.

These diversity issues are often self-perpetuating. When you're looking for invited speakers, you probably want to pick people who have experience. In a situation where mostly posh white NS men have experience, you're going to keep that situation till something happens.

At the same time you want to avoid situations where you are picking someone just because of some personal characteristic. As a rule at excitELT, we've definitely said 'we can't have him because we have too many guys'.

However, we'd never say 'we have to have her because she's a woman'. Whenever we brainstorm speaker ideas, we always have way more ideas for speakers than slots to give out, so this has never been a huge issue.

That said we have had a general rule that we always want to have a roughly 50/50 gender split and a 50/50 NS/NNS split.

We've never really had issues filling these slots and have never really been concerned about tokenism because of that. All of our speakers have always deserved to be a speaker on their own merits.

That said we have had issues, for example we realised we often unintentionally ended up spending more money on travel for some groups than others. I think we've also ended up with the men and the NSs often being the same people with the women and NNSs being the same people.

The email we got today has made us think about prioritising NS/NNS status and gender over other things. I do think having the 50/50 rule for both of those aspects has been really useful in the past because it's a) achievable and b) has positive outcomes.

If we decided one day to say 'we're going to have a 50/50 split in terms of race, gender, working/middle class, lgbt/non-lgbt and NS/NNS featured speakers', I don't know how easy it would be to do it in a non-tokenistic way.

Another option would be to say 'we're going to have *some* speakers from each of these groups' without committing to a 50/50 split. You could also keep the 50/50 idea but apply it to different groups. You could also just not have a rule and try your best.

To sum up I don't want people to think we're not thinking about this stuff. I also don't want people to think we're anywhere close to finding the best way to do this stuff. Running a conference is hard with a bunch of trade offs.

I think generally if you can tell yourself 'The conferencing landscape is more diverse for having this conference' you're doing okay. I would really like to get other people's ideas of what conferences should be prioritising with regards to the issues I've posted about above.

I'd also love to hear if you think we've gotten any of this stuff wrong. I will generally avoid debating stuff but will be open minded to any point of view.

I'd also add that this thread is a 'from Tim' thread not a 'from excitELT' thread. Views aren't necessarily those of excitELT as a whole or any other conference organiser past or present