Women speakers: what 35 per cent at MWC26 Barcelona shows

Women speakers made up 35 per cent of the more than 1,700 speakers at GSMA MWC26 in Barcelona, as the organiser GSMA reported in its closing announcement of 5 March 2026. Forty per cent of the speakers came from the C-level, and among the nearly 105,000 attendees the share of women was 27 per cent, eight percentage points below their share on stage. By arithmetic, that puts more than 590 women on the stages of the event. For female experts, this means that an organiser of this size fills more than a third of its programme with women, and that the proposal and its topic still decide on an acceptance. If you submit, it is best to count beforehand how many women a conference put on stage in the previous year.

Women speakers at MWC26 Barcelona in figures

GSMA, the association of the mobile industry, announced the close of the 20th edition of MWC in Barcelona in a press release on 5 March 2026. According to GSMA, nearly 105,000 attendees from 207 countries and territories came to the event. The programme was shaped by more than 1,700 speakers and thought leaders, of whom 40 per cent were C-level and 35 per cent were women. Among the attendees, 58 per cent came from industries adjacent to the core mobile ecosystem.

The share of women speakers at a conference is the proportion of women among all speakers of an event, counted across the whole programme. The press release gives this figure as a result. It does not say how many of the women work at C-level, how the share is distributed across keynotes and panels, or by which criteria the speakers were selected. Those questions stay open, so the figures can only be used for what they measure: the share in the programme.

The share of women on stage is higher than in the audience

The announcement gives a share of women and a share of senior leaders for the stage and for the audience, and the two pairs can be placed side by side.

Measured against the audience, the stage at MWC26 has a higher share of women than the room, and a clearly higher share of senior leaders. A rough calculation makes the difference visible. Assume that the speakers are not counted among the attendees and that the 27 per cent share of women applies to everyone else present. Then there are about two women speakers for every 100 women attending, while for the remaining attendees there are about 1.4 speakers for every 100. Both starting figures are rounded, so the calculation shows the order of magnitude of the difference.

At C-level the gap is wider. Forty per cent of the speakers belong to it, but GSMA counts only 17 per cent of the attendees as C-suite. A programme of this kind therefore shows its audience mostly people with leadership responsibility, although most of the room consists of other levels. For experts from specialist fields this observation is useful, because 58 per cent of the attendees came from adjacent industries: a large part of the audience consists of professionals who look at the topic from outside and want a perspective that is explained clearly.

What earlier analyses show about women speakers at conferences

A second figure helps with the classification. Students at the Berlin School of Business and Innovation counted the speakers at tech events in 2019, and the technology portal t3n reported on the result on 1 February 2020. The analysis covered 3,658 speakers at ten German and ten international events with at least 70 speakers each, and the share of women was 29 per cent at the German tech fairs and 22 per cent at the international ones.

No trend can be read from the two figures, because the 2019 analysis summarises twenty events and the 2026 announcement covers a single one. A look at the individual German events does show something useful, though: re:publica reached 45 per cent women in 2019, Tech Week Frankfurt 14 per cent. Between two conferences of the same industry there is therefore a factor of more than three, and t3n itself points out that the share on stage is best judged in relation to the audience. MWC26 provides that comparison with 35 against 27 per cent.

If you want to count for your own industry, the initiative 50 Prozent by speakerinnen.org keeps a list of events, mostly from Germany, with the number of speakers and the share of women. The entries come from visitors to the site, so they do not replace a study, but they give a first indication.

How to apply as a woman speaker: using the share of women for your call for papers

A call for papers is the public invitation from a conference through which speakers apply with a talk proposal, and how the process is built is explained in the article What is a call for papers. For choosing your conferences and for the proposal itself, the figures lead to four steps.

1. Count last year's programme: Open the programme of the previous edition and work out the share of women among the speakers. At MWC26 it is 35 per cent, and at the German events in the 2019 analysis the range was 14 to 45 per cent. A conference with a high share shows that women speakers appear in its programme regularly.
2. Choose the conference by your topic: The share of women is an indication, and the fit between your topic and the audience decides on the acceptance. How to find conferences that match your field and your clients is described in the article How to find the right conferences.
3. Name your role and your responsibility: At MWC26, 40 per cent of the speakers are C-level. A speaker bio that names your function and a result from your work shows the programme committee at a glance why you belong in this programme. What goes into such a bio is described in What a speaker bio needs to do.
4. Plan several submissions: Assume you submit two topics to each of eight conferences, which makes 16 submissions in a year. A single proposal remains an application with an open outcome, and how many submissions it takes to land a talk is worked out with practical figures in How many abstracts to submit for one acceptance.

The steps apply to women and men alike, and they lead to the same result: you choose conferences whose programme suits you, and you submit proposals that address a concrete problem of the audience.