The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for

stiffing professional speakers

By Melanie Ehrenkranz
March 15, 2017

The 2017 Next Web conference, a tech event held in Amsterdam in May,
features 56 keynote speakers , only 14 of whom are women. That's exactly 25%.
But current and former Next Web speakers and invitees say the gender gap is
nothing compared to the gender pay gap — a glaring and frequent issue at
conferences often dominated by white men.

New York Times best-selling author Luvvie Ajayi is one of several professional
speakers who were asked to appear at the Next Web conference without pay.
According to Forbes , a representative told Ajayi the company had "no budget to
pay any of the speakers and everything they make goes back to production." No
travel budget either. "All [the Next Web] can offer is experience, audience and
publicity."

1 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

Slack engineer Erica Baker was also asked to speak at the conference. When she
checked in with her speaker's bureau, she was informed that the Next Web didn't
cover speaker's fees .

Yet that wasn't quite true.

Forbes contributor Christina Wallace, a speaker at the Next Web's 2016

conference, noted that while she wasn't paid for speaking, she was in fact
compensated for travel. Another author and former tech executive said that after
asking "several of the men who have spoken" whether or not they were paid, it was
split "50-50."

2 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

Luvvie Ajayi

3 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

Paul Morigi/Getty Images

So why the disparity? To clear things up, Next Web CEO Boris Veldhuijzen van
Zanten responded to the Forbes article in an email to Ajayi. He explained
that it was false that there was no speaker budget for the conference. There is a
pay gap, he admitted, but it's a "logical" one. The Next Web prioritizes whom it
pays based on "relevance" and "factors such as knowledge, success, fame and
most importantly, demand."

On Twitter, van Zanten added that at the 2016 conference, of the 140 speakers,
"about 5 of them got some form of payment (mostly we bought books) and about
20 got tickets." One of whom was Vayner Media founder Gary Vaynerchuk, who
told Forbes he was paid in bulk book buying.

4 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

Gary Vaynerchuk in 2014

5 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

Ajayi and van Zanten exchanged tweets, and the conversation spread as people
picked apart van Zanten's email and Twitter responses, criticizing the CEO for
selective treatment and poor transparency.

6 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

Van Zanten countered that he was being "accused of mansplaining." He added,

"You just can't ever win that argument."

In an email to Mic, van Zanten was reluctant to elaborate on the record. He said
that "the talk about inequality is incredibly important, to me personally and the
whole team, but no matter what we say on the matter we will be misquoted and
misinterpreted." (Ajayi did not respond to our request for comment.)

Van Zanten went on, doubling down on the "mansplaining" complaint:

"If I go into too much detail, I'm mansplaining. If I keep my answers short,
I'm not giving the issue the attention it needs. My takeaway is that more
discussion is better, but nothing good will come from saying much more
myself. My goal is just to show we mean well by doing rather than talking."

On Twitter, the conversation evolved into the necessity for women and people of
color to "prove their worth" in order to achieve equal pay.

7 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm
The 'Next Web' tech conference is under fire for stiffing professional s... https://www.mic.com/articles/171287/the-next-web-tech-conference-is...

The conversation around the Next Web conference makes a few things clear:
Having women and people of color onstage is meaningless without paying them
equally to their white and male counterparts. Expecting professional women to
speak for free while compensating men at the same conference only widens the
pay gap and sets a detrimental precedent for other women in the industry. Also, it's
questionable whether van Zanten can successfully argue that there isn't a strong
enough "demand" for Ajayi to get paid — his company reached out to her to begin
with.

8 of 8 22-01-2021, 03:05 pm