Do Organisers Book More Male or Female Speakers?

Male speakers accounted for 59% of recent UK speaker bookings and female speakers 41%, from 250 bookers surveyed in 2025. The split by topic is not the one most people expect.

What is the split between male and female bookings?

Roughly three bookings in five go to a man.

That is closer to even than the fee gap, where men earn around 15% more per booking. Women are getting onto stages at a rate approaching parity while being paid less for standing on them, so the two problems are separate and need separate answers.

The buyers are not the explanation. Of the 250 people surveyed, 131 were women and 119 were men, so the panel skewed slightly female and still booked a male speaker 59% of the time. Whatever produces the split, it is not male buyers preferring male speakers.

Does topic choice follow the same divide?

It does, but not in the direction most people assume.

Change was the most male-dominated subject in the survey, with 81% of bookings going to men, 22 of 27. Sales and customer service followed at 68% and AI and digital transformation at 65%. Wellbeing was the only large topic to land on an even split, 24 bookings each way, with leadership close behind at 45% women and financial success at 46%.

The one subject where women were booked more often than men was sports success, at 62% of bookings. It was also the topic with the widest fee gap in the survey, at 27%. Being the majority voice on a subject did not translate into being paid for it.

The pattern does not map neatly onto money. The spread from the highest-paying topic to the lowest is under £700, so the way bookings divide by topic is not, on its own, what creates the fee gap. The gap sits inside the topics rather than between them: men out-earned women in every category measured. Topic-level figures rest on smaller sub-samples than the headline split, so read them as indicative.

Is demand actually changing?

The research found rising demand for authentic, relatable and mindset-focused content. Buyers increasingly want a speaker their audience can see themselves in, which is a shift away from booking on profile alone.

That direction of travel favours a wider range of speakers, because relatability is not distributed the way sporting medals or C-suite titles are. Whether it moves the 59/41 split is a question for the next round of research.

How can organisers widen a shortlist?

The most useful test takes a minute. Look at your shortlist and ask what it would look like with the genders reversed. If the answer is that it would be difficult to fill, the search was too narrow rather than the field being too small.

Two things help. Brief on the outcome you need rather than on the profile you imagine, because specifying what the audience should do differently afterwards surfaces a different set of names. And look past the bureau front page, which is ordered by recognition and reflects who was booked last year.

Figures are from the 2025 Speaker Industry Research, an independent survey of 250 UK speaker bookers commissioned by Alison Edgar Ltd in Summer 2025. The full findings cover fees, topics and the pay gap in detail.