Today’s chat is with Cathy McPhillips.
For those of you who don’t know Cathy, she is the vice president of marketing for the Content Marketing Institute.
She also leads marketing for Content Marketing World, the Intelligent Content Conference, CMI University, Chief Content Officer magazine, and other CMI properties.
I’ve been part of the CMI family for some time now, and have had the sheer pleasure to get to know Cathy in real life.
Not only is she smart and funny and inspirational and well-dressed, she is part of one of my most favorite conferences of the entire year.
Because of that, I’m excited to share Cathy with you!
Talking Gender Equality and Diversity
Here’s the outline we started with for our conversation:
- Last year, Rand Fishkin called out CMI for not having more female speakers at the conference. Was he correct in his conclusion that there was a disproportionate share of male speakers?
- Event organizers certainly have a responsibility to plan a diverse agenda of speakers. But that’s only part of the issue when it comes to conferences not having as many female speakers. What are some of the reasons we’re not seeing as many women on conference agendas, regardless of their representation in the industry?
- How do we, as women and business leaders, encourage more women to raise their hands and submit for inclusion in this and other conference agendas?
- What if the conference you’d love to speak at isn’t accepting proposals? How can you get into the consideration pool?
- How can women work on getting over the fear and dread of public speaking?
There’s More
My favorite parts of the conversation were:
- Our conversation around when and why women lose confidence in themselves
- What CMI is doing to encourage more female presenters to submit proposals
- The importance of not being so hard on yourself
- How productive discomfort can help you reach your goals
- Her awesome mom
- Her first concert
- How she figured out what she wanted to be when she grew up
Enjoy the conversation!
(If you can’t view the video below, click here and you’ll go straight to YouTube.)