A friend of mine from the typography world recently posed a question to me. And now I'm posing it to you.

He's wanting to organize a small conference on a very, very narrow subject, and he's concerned about having an all-male panel of speakers (partly, perhaps, he worries that it would get criticized, more importantly he wants to attract new blood to the topic, because it's the topic he loves). So he wanted advice on what he could do about it as a conference planner.

The thing is, he legitimately knows all of the potential speakers for this subject, and it's less than ten, and they're all men. It's a combination of the subject matter and how small the field is and the part of the world that it relates to (I won't go into detail on that, but it's regionally an issue). Starting out, he'll be lucky to fill a day with talks; his hope is that over time they can attract a lot more attention to the topic and that the second+ year, there will be more potential speakers from a broader pool. But what does he do for year one; that's the question.

Now, I know it's obvious to take the knee-jerk reaction and tell him he doesn't know what he's talking about and obviously he's overlooking lots and lots of great speakers who are just being kept out by unfair barriers to entry. Well, I know him and the details well enough to tell you that's not the problem, but I don't expect that will quell the "you just need to invite different people" suggestions.

That's also something that he's already looked into, in depth, many many times, so it doesn't do any good to repeat it again. Therefore, for the purposes of this question, I'd like to hear _other_ suggestions. Either [a] you can take my (or his) word for it; that he knows the topic inside and out, it's understudied, and this is a genuinely tiny speaker pool ... or [b] just ignore that for now, and make the question "what *else* can he do to diversify his event"?

Because he legitimately wants to attract a diverse crowd and he would like to interest female scholars and students in getting involved with it. His concern is that the speaker pool won't look good to them and to many will stay away.

The best idea I came up with was to get one (or several) female co-organizers to help plan and MC the event with him. There are talented female scholars in neighboring fields; he knows them; having their names and voices on the web sites, materials, PR, and at the podium (podia? what's the plural of podium anyway?) over the course of the day might make a high-profile impact on what the audience thinks and who tunes it to hear the talks ... not to mention who ultimately gets drawn into the topic and has something interesting to present in year two.

What other ideas do you have?