Ideas “worth” spreading: Female representation in the TED talk sphere

Nowadays, the complexity of the relationships information has with power and control, business and ideology has been amplified, in part because the networks information now flows over are more complex and farther reaching than prior networks (Chadwick & Howard, 2009; Kallinikos, 2006). What we are currently seeing is the rise of new forms of organizations as the harbingers of information based power and influence brokers. This paper focuses on a specific information based organization, TED, which has become a powerful vector for disseminating information (and consequently influencing public opinion) on a broad range of subjects. While TED talks are immensely popular (Sugimoto et al., 2013), there has not been much scholarly research on this form of public speaking and its impact. Given the growing importance of TED as a means of circulating knowledge to a broad public (the most popular TED talk has been viewed 39 million times) it behooves us to take a closer look at women’s inclusion in the TED talk sphere. This paper seeks to fill the above mentioned research gap by focusing on the TED talk's ability to translate complex research related to science and technology (S&T) projects to a large, non-specialized audience as well as its influence on traditional institutional structures and individual subject role. To this end adopting an intersectional perspective (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013) we aim to analyze the dynamics enforced by or emerging from the TED organization, questioning their relationship to speaker selection and post-TED talk speaker reputation. We use the concepts of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1979) and recognition (Honneth, 2012) to focus on female representation amongst S&T TED talkers. This is especially important in light of the recurring debate on the gender disparity in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines as well as Information Systems (IS) research (Adam, Howcroft, & Richardson, 2004; Ahuja, 2002; Trauth & Howcroft, 2006), and the more fundamental debate on the definition of science (Harding, 1986). We are particularly interested in understanding the impact of the TED Information Infrastructure on women empowerment and the types of subjects defined as “worth” spreading by women.