Men. Yup. Even before there was a word for this, the conference circuit has been dominated by manels. I think of the Roman Senate as the first official manel. Followed by centuries of governing bodies made up of manels. Our US Supreme Court’s manel lasted almost two centuries before Sandra Day O’Connor made it a plain old panel. Who first recognized and named this phenomenon? It’s a mystery. But Valeria McFarren first started using the term in 2016 with her clients “across the world to bring awareness to this and make changes in their respective organizations.” The president of Chaski Global and co-founder of The She Lab, had been asked, one too many times, to moderate a panel of men, aka, a “manel.” In one egregious example, she sat watching a panel of six men talk about how to solve oppression of women and gender-based violence. Note that Valeria uses the term, “to make changes.” Language can change how we see things, giving us the choice to make changes in our organizations and in our lives. If you’ve heard this term before, it was probably in Elisa Loehnen’s* blog post where you can read Val’s story. I recently looked up an organization and found that it has four employees—all of them…Read on.