Sphinx

If ever there was a good week to smuggle out an announcement of a conference with a few diversity issues, it’s this week; unless you have Jordan Peterson and Steve Bannon as keynotes and put on a minstrel show as part of the evening entertainment, there’s no way you could look worse than the Stanford Sausage Fest.

But having more female speakers than none is hardly cause for self-congratulation; 25%, as we have for our forthcoming workshop in Berlin at the beginning of next month on Thomas Piketty and Capital in Classical Antiquity, really isn’t great. I’m writing this partly to acknowledge the problem and accept responsibility for it, and partly – more importantly – to emphasise the lesson: having a diverse range of speakers as one of your goals in putting together a conference programme, and taking various steps to try to ensure it, may still not be nearly enough.

You think of the people you know who might have interesting things to say about the theme – and if you’re a male academic of a certain age, you tend to know plenty of blokes. You send out invitations – and all the blokes accept but a few of the women decline, for different reasons but including caring responsibilities. You send out a call for papers, as a means to ensure a decent number of younger scholars and grad students – and for some reason (something about the theme?) 80% of the submitted abstracts come from men. And then you try to think of someone else to invite to make the numbers a bit less dreadful, and all the names that come to mind are US-based, and there’s not enough left in the budget…

None of this is offered as an excuse; there’s nothing new here, nothing I didn’t already know – unless perhaps the way that they’ve all reinforced one another, which came as more of a surprise than it should have done. There may indeed be an issue with the topic; not just that ancient economic history may be a bit male, but this kind of approach to economic history perhaps appeals more to men. Even so: not good enough, must try harder.