Last month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did something it has never done in its 62-year history: it sued a company over a corporate diversity program. The target was Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast, a regional bottler that employs 3,400 people — more than 85 percent of them men. The alleged offense? Hosting a one-day Women’s Forum for approximately 250 female employees, complete with speakers, roundtable discussions, and a cocktail reception the night before.

The EEOC, now led by a Trump appointee, called it illegal discrimination against men.

The chilling effect was immediate and predictable. Legal teams across corporate America began quietly reviewing their own programming. Diversity calendars got scrutinized. Event budgets went under the microscope. Some organizations didn’t wait for guidance — they started canceling.

This is understandable. It is also exactly the wrong response.

Women’s professional development events exist because a gap exists. They exist because women — particularly in male-dominated industries like manufacturing, logistics, tech, and finance — have historically had less access to the informal networks, mentorship relationships, and visibility that drive advancement. Pulling back on programming designed to close that gap doesn’t create a level playing field. It preserves an uneven one.

For L&D professionals and conference organizers, the task right now is not retreat. It’s intention. The organizations that will come out ahead are the ones who keep investing in women’s development — and who do it with clear purpose, measurable outcomes, and speakers who are worth the room.

That last part matters more than people admit. The right speaker doesn’t just fill a slot. She sets the tone for what the event is trying to do — and for what women are expected to do with it afterward. Choose wrong and you get a nice day. Choose right and you get changed behavior, renewed commitment, and a room full of people who leave with something they’ll actually use.

The three speakers below operate in completely different lanes. They are not interchangeable, and they are not meant to share a stage. Each one is the right choice for a specific conference goal — and the wrong choice if your goal is something else. Here’s how to tell which one you need.

If Your Goal Is to Prepare Women for the AI-Driven Workplace: Joy Buolamwini

If the question your conference is trying to answer is “how do we make sure women have a seat at the table as AI reshapes our industry,” Joy Buolamwini is your speaker.

A researcher at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, Buolamwini is the scientist who proved what many women of color had long suspected: that the facial recognition systems being deployed by governments and corporations were dramatically less accurate when identifying women and darker-skinned faces. Her research triggered congressional hearings, forced major tech companies to pause their facial recognition programs, and established her as one of the most important voices on AI ethics working today. She is the subject of the documentary *Coded Bias* and the author of *Unmasking AI*, named one of the best books of the year by multiple outlets.

What makes Buolamwini exceptional on a conference stage is that she doesn’t traffic in abstract warnings. She makes the stakes personal and immediate. When she asks attendees to consider which faces the AI systems in their workplace were trained on, whose voices the speech recognition tools were built to understand, and who gets to decide what “neutral” looks like in an algorithm — she’s not asking theoretical questions. She’s asking women to see themselves inside systems they interact with every day.

Book her if: Your attendees are navigating AI tools in their work and need to understand how those tools may be working against them — and how to advocate for systems that don’t. She’s also the right choice if your organization is actively building or deploying AI and needs women’s voices more visibly in that process. Industries like tech, healthcare, financial services, and government are a natural fit.

Don’t book her if: Your audience is primarily focused on personal career development or internal organizational dynamics. Buolamwini’s work operates at the societal and systems level — it’s galvanizing for the right audience and potentially disconnected for the wrong one.

What attendees leave with: A framework for identifying bias in the tools they use, language for raising those concerns internally, and a sense of urgency — and agency — around why their participation in AI conversations is not optional.

If Your Goal Is to Give Women Tools to Own Their Careers Right Now: Julia Korn

If the question your conference is trying to answer is “what can the women in this room do differently starting Monday”, Julia Korn is your speaker.

Korn is a career strategist and the creator of the Personal Board of Directors framework — a structured, concrete approach to identifying and activating the people who will champion your career when you’re not in the room. Her work starts from a simple but underappreciated premise: advancement is a team sport, and most women are playing it alone.

Korn’s work has been featured on BBC World Business News, Fox Business News, and Forbes Women, where she is a regular careers and leadership contributor. Business Insider named her one of the most innovative career coaches working today, and her TEDx talk was selected as an editors’ pick of the year. Her clients are mid-level corporate women who are done waiting to be noticed — and who leave her work with a new role, a clearer path, or both.

The Personal Board of Directors concept is immediately actionable in a way that most conference content is not. It asks women to move beyond generic networking — collecting contacts, attending events, hoping someone notices them — and instead to think strategically about who is in their corner: who advocates for them, who challenges them, who opens doors, who tells them the truth. It works whether you are three years into your career or thirty, whether your company is a DEI champion or has gone quiet on the topic.

In the current climate, this talk lands with particular force. When women cannot rely on institutional support to carry them — when DEI programs are being scaled back and legal challenges are making organizations gun-shy — the question of who is in their corner becomes urgent, not aspirational. Korn meets that urgency with something concrete and usable. Not a mindset shift, but a method.

Book her if: You want your attendees to leave the event having done something, not just felt something. She is the right choice for conferences focused on individual leadership development, career advancement, and practical skill-building. She also works exceptionally well when your attendees span a wide range of levels and tenures, because the framework scales.

Don’t book her if: Your event is primarily focused on organizational transformation or technology trends. Korn’s lane is the individual — what she can do, who she can activate, how she can build a career that doesn’t depend on any one institution to sustain it.

What attendees leave with: A completed draft of their own Personal Board of Directors, clarity on where their gaps are, and a specific 90-day action plan.

If Your Goal Is to Drive Organizational Change: Sanyin Siang

If the question your conference is trying to answer is *how do we build an organization that actually develops and retains women*, Sanyin Siang is your speaker — and notably, she may be the right choice even when your audience includes the leaders and managers in those women’s lives, not just the women themselves.

As the executive director of the Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Siang has spent decades advising CEOs, military leaders, and organizations through transformation. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a *Thinkers50* honoree, and the author of *The Launch Book*. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Army.

What sets Siang apart is her ability to hold two things at once: the experience of the individual woman trying to navigate her organization, and the responsibility of the leaders and institutions that shape her environment. She doesn’t let either off the hook. She gives women a systems-level understanding of why they face the obstacles they face — not to make them angry, but to make them strategic. And she gives leaders a clear-eyed view of what genuine organizational support looks like, as opposed to the performative kind.

This distinction matters especially now. In a moment when many organizations are quietly asking whether their DEI commitments still mean anything, Siang’s work offers a durable answer: the business case for developing women was never about optics, and it doesn’t disappear when the political winds shift. Talent retention, succession planning, and leadership quality are structural imperatives. The organizations that build systems to develop and keep talented women will outperform those that don’t.

Book her if: Your conference is oriented toward organizational culture, leadership development, or change management — or if you are bringing together a mixed audience of women and the leaders who manage them. She is particularly powerful in environments where the goal is not just to inspire women but to change what their organizations do.

Don’t book her if: You’re looking for highly individual, immediately actionable content. Siang’s work operates at the systems level — it will shift how people think about their organizations, but it’s not designed to send someone home with a personal to-do list.

What attendees leave with: A language for diagnosing structural barriers, tools for advocating upward and leading differently, and a clear picture of what their organization should actually be doing — and what they can reasonably demand.

The EEOC’s lawsuit against Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast may signal a harder legal environment for some diversity programs. It does not change the underlying reality that women’s professional development events close real gaps and produce real business outcomes. The organizations that understand this will keep investing. The ones that don’t will spend the next decade wondering why their leadership pipeline looks the way it does.

But investment without intention is just expense. The most important thing you can do as an L&D professional or conference organizer right now is to be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish — and then choose the speaker who is actually built to do that.

These three are. You just need to know which problem you’re solving.

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