TED brands itself as the home for progressive thinking, so one would imagine the speakers spreading their wisdom come from a diverse and representative talent pool. A new study from the University of Bamberg set out to explore whether that was actually the case.
The data shows that women gave over half of the TED talks during the first half of 2017, which is considerable growth from the 1/3 who gave talks in 2006. Despite this apparent success however, TED were less successful in encouraging ethnic minority speakers, who gave just 20% of the talks in that time.
“Our results raise some concerns, particularly about the representation of certain ethnic groups in these talks,” the researchers explain. “This highlights the importance of speaker diversity to reduce stereotypes about scientists and people driving societal change.”
Speaker diversity
Since 2006, TED events have become hugely popular, and are a common avenue by which the latest developments in science and culture are communicated to the world. They’ve been home to some of the most well known scientists and entrepreneurs, but concerns persist that they are dominated by white men.
They trawled through the library of talks posted on the TED YouTube channel, and used facial recognition technology to detect the gender and ethnicity of the speakers. They also used automated text analysis software to assess the transcripts of each talk to determine the topics being discussed, together with the comments left by viewers of the talks.
The analysis revealed that women were giving more and more talks since 2006, which they believe is a direct reflection of efforts by the organizers to increase the diversity of their lineups. There has been much less progress made in the ethnic diversity of speakers however, with numbers of non-white speakers remaining largely static.
Hot topics
Also of note is the finding that talks specifically discussing inequality were in the minority, and accounted for just 3% of all talks. These presentations also attracted the most negative comments compared to other themes.
Such hostile critique was not exclusive to minority speakers however, as the analysis found that non-white presenters typically had more positive comments than white speakers, but this was not the case for women, who typically received more negative and hateful comments than male speakers.
“Digital content providers like TED media should increase their efforts to prevent that talking about science and important matters of societal change on a global stage remains a privilege of white people,” the authors conclude. “Otherwise, under-representation of certain ethnic groups in the digital sphere can, similar to traditional media sources, further enhance stereotypes and negative attitudes.”
