The Growing Popularity of Manels
A Manel is a conference panel composed entirely of men, and in government contracts law the Manel is not fading away. It is growing, along with the business model that produces it. Long before the Secretary of Defense ordered testosterone tests for the force, and long before federal diversity programs were ordered shut, the Manel and the brotocracy behind it had the arrangement down cold.¹ In December 2025, the government contracts bar convened at the Westin hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, for the Government Contracts Year in Review, an annual program produced by Federal Publications Seminars, a training company that says it has guided government contractors for more than sixty-five years. Over three days, the lawyers presented as the field’s leading authorities reviewed the year: the bid protest decisions, the False Claims Act settlements, the new rules governing data rights and the defense supply chain. The published agenda listed thirty-five speakers across twenty sessions. Twenty-nine of the thirty-five were men. Eleven of the sessions were built as multi-speaker panels, and seven of the eleven were Manels.²
In the summer of 2026, Federal Publications Seminars posted the page announcing the next edition (the “2026 Announcement Page”).³ Most of the 2026 Announcement Page reads like ordinary conference marketing: the dates, a new venue across the river from Washington, the promise of leading practitioners. What deserves closer attention sits under a bold heading: “Call for Speakers & Sponsors.” Beneath that heading, the page makes its solicitation in two sentences: “FPS is seeking speakers and sponsors for 2026. If you’re interested in participating, contact FPS today.” The heading names the arrangement. One call brings in the faculty and the funders together, and nowhere on the page is there a separate channel for speakers. This is the machinery behind Manels, the machinery of a brotocracy, a stage governed by the firms that sponsor it.
The 2026 Announcement Page also lists the conference’s sponsors by tier, a roster absent from the 2025 edition’s page.⁴ The Platinum sponsor is a national law firm with one of the field’s largest government contracts practices. The Gold sponsors include five more national law firms and three consultancies.⁵ The fairest available comparison is between successive editions of the same conference: same producer, same December format, one year apart. The December 2025 faculty is the most recently completed stage, and it shows how these same sponsoring organizations have appeared on it. Those organizations held at least twelve identifiable speaking seats at the 2025 conference, and every one of the twelve was filled by a man.⁶ The Platinum sponsor alone held four of those seats, including the leader of its bid protest team, the co-leader of its investigations practice, and the managing partner of one of its offices. These were titled men, seated on the very panels counted above as Manels. The six women who appeared on the 2025 stage arrived by a different route: five spoke from corporate legal and compliance departments or consulting firms, not from the sponsoring law firms. And the 2026 Announcement Page reveals the sequence of construction. As of this writing, its agenda still reflects the 2025 program, with the 2026 lineup under development.⁷ The sponsor roster is already sold and tiered. The sponsors were secured before the speakers were chosen. That is the order in which a Manel gets built.
Federal Publications Seminars sells content in plainer language elsewhere on its own site. Its sponsorship page invites companies to partner with the firm to expose “your brand, industry knowledge, and thought leadership” to its audiences, and its sponsored-webinar product is described in a single remarkable clause: “We’ll work with you to build a live webinar on a topic of your choice.”⁸ The page also links a priced brochure, titled on its cover “Sponsorship and Business Development Opportunities in 2025,” now preserved in a public archive.⁹ This article does not quote those prices, because they have not yet been examined.
The practice is not peculiar to one producer, and much of the industry publishes its terms. The National Veteran Small Business Coalition publishes the sponsorship prospectus for its annual VETS conference. Its fifty-thousand-dollar Leadership Sponsor tier includes the role of “Opening General Session Sponsor” and an “Introduction for one (1) additional General Session.” Its twenty-five-thousand-dollar Titanium tier includes a “Pre-recorded video introduction for one (1) General Session.” A reception sponsorship includes five minutes of “welcoming remarks during reception.”¹⁰ The HUBZone Contractors National Council, the trade association serving the federal program for Historically Underutilized Business Zones, prices “1 Studio Session Sponsorship” inside its fifty-thousand-dollar Titanium tier, “1 Breakout Session Sponsor” inside its thirty-thousand-dollar Platinum tier, and “1 Highlight Session Sponsor” inside its twenty-thousand-dollar Gold tier.¹¹ The American Conference Institute, a commercial producer of legal conferences, advertises sponsorship “ranging from involvement in thought leadership sessions, exhibition areas, and much more.” It sells involvement in thought-leadership sessions too, but it takes speaker submissions through a separate channel.¹² These are the industry’s own published price lists. Across the conferences of government contracting, the going rate for a place at the podium runs from twenty to fifty thousand dollars, disclosed in writing by the organizations selling it.
The natural defense is that expertise and sponsorship simply travel together, that the organizations with the money also have the talent, and that the stage would look the same either way. The American Bar Association’s Section of Public Contract Law, the bar’s national home for this practice area, answers that defense with the record of an institution correcting itself. The section sells sponsorships for its conferences too. What its published materials sell is hospitality: luncheons, receptions, tickets, co-branding. No tier in those materials includes a seat on a panel.¹³ Across the section’s four most recent national conferences, the Federal Procurement Institute in 2024 and 2026 and the Fall Forum in 2024 and 2025, the section staged twenty-six panels. Exactly one was a Manel, and women filled four of every ten seats.¹⁴ Stated as rates: the commercial program ran Manels at seven of eleven panels, a rate of sixty-four percent; the bar section ran one in twenty-six, a rate under four percent. The two stages draw from the same field, the same cities, and largely the same firms. The correction did not happen by accident, and it did not happen overnight. The section elected its first woman chair, Ruth C. Burg, in 1984, and it now opens its flagship annual institute with a luncheon held in her name, honoring women in public contract law.¹⁵ Where a professional body decided that the program belongs to the profession and the sponsorship belongs to the reception hall, the Manel rate fell fifteen-fold. Where one call solicits the speakers and the sponsors together, the Manel rate stands at sixty-four percent and the sponsoring firms’ seats are filled entirely by men.
The deliberate choices available to this field are not mysterious, and the field has already run the experiment proving them. A bar section that sells hospitality instead of podiums produces balanced stages from the same bench, a control group operating in public every year. The choices follow directly. Conference producers can publish, with every agenda, the composition of every panel and a disclosure of which sessions belong to sponsors. Firms can disclose whom they put forward for the seats they purchase, and ask themselves why the answer has been men. Clients and audiences can read agendas the way this article has read them, counting, and noticing which seats were bought. None of this requires a new committee or a decade. It requires a deliberate choice about what to measure. A brotocracy depends on going uncounted. The conference stage is the one institution in this field rebuilt from a blank page every year. It changes when we understand that conferences sell the stage, not the expertise.
Notes
1. In July 2026, the Secretary of Defense announced that service members age thirty and older will have their testosterone levels screened as part of their annual health assessments. Madison Czopek, As Hegseth Pursues a ‘High-T’ Military, Here’s What to Know About Testosterone Replacement, PBS News (July 26, 2026), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/as-hegseth-pursues-a-high-t-military-heres-what-to-know-about-testosterone-replacement (announcement made July 15, 2026). On federal diversity programs, Exec. Order No. 14,151, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, 90 Fed. Reg. 8339 (Jan. 20, 2025).
2. Fed. Publ’ns Seminars, 2025 Government Contracts Year in Review, Westin Tysons Corner, Va. (Dec. 9–11, 2025). The agenda as published listed each session and speaker; the publisher removed the page on August 5, 2026. The surviving program page, with the full faculty roster and biographies, is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260805190222/https://learn.fedpubseminars.com/courses/2025-fps-government-contracts-year-in-review-virtual-december-2025 (captured Aug. 5, 2026; an earlier capture dates to Jan. 24, 2026). Speaker-by-speaker tally, with gender determined from pronouns in each speaker’s published biography, on file with author. The “more than sixty-five years” description appears on the company’s own sponsorship page, infra note 8 (“For more than 65 years, FPS has guided government contractors through complex federal requirements”).
3. Fed. Publ’ns Seminars, 2026 FPS Government Contracts Year in Review (Dec. 8–10, 2026, UVA Darden Conference Center, 1100 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington (Rosslyn), Va., per the event page), https://www.fedpubseminars.com/government-contracts-events/Summit/2026-FPS-Government-Contracts-Year-in-Review/?id=358 (last visited Sept. 7, 2026; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260907164739/https://www.fedpubseminars.com/government-contracts-events/Summit/2026-FPS-Government-Contracts-Year-in-Review/?id=358). The heading and both quoted sentences appear verbatim; the quotation preserves the source’s contraction. The page styles the event the 3rd Annual.
4. The 2025 edition’s announcement page, reviewed while live (Aug. 4–5, 2026), displayed no sponsor roster. The 2024 edition’s page was not reviewed; the claim is limited to the 2025 comparison.
5. Supra note 3 (sponsor listing by tier). The page lists each sponsor by name and tier: the Platinum sponsor is Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and the Gold sponsors are CohnReznick, Dentons, HKA, J.A. White, Jackson Lewis, Jenner & Block, McCarter & English, and Troutman (firm names rendered in their conventional forms).
6. Mapping of the 2026 sponsor roster to the December 2025 faculty: Pillsbury, four seats; Dentons, two; HKA, two; McCarter & English, two; Jenner & Block, one; J.A. White, one. Gender determined from pronouns in each speaker’s published firm or company biography, not inferred from given names; verification records on file with author.
7. Supra note 3. As of the last-visited date, the page states, above its session list: “The agenda below reflects the 2025 program. Stay tuned for exciting updates as we build the 2026 lineup!”
8. Fed. Publ’ns Seminars, Sponsorship, https://www.fedpubseminars.com/Company/Sponsorship (last visited Sept. 7, 2026; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260907164811/https://www.fedpubseminars.com/Company/Sponsorship). The page invites sponsors to “expose your brand, industry knowledge, and thought leadership”; the webinar clause is quoted verbatim.
9. Fed. Publ’ns Seminars, Sponsorship and Business Development Opportunities in 2025 (brochure), archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260810221600/https://mcusercontent.com/33f5670f67efd730ada28afc9/files/09e185cf-d7a9-ce39-e663-a91b4ba2b664/2025_Rob_LoRes_Sponsorship_amp_Biz_DevBrochure.pdf (captured Aug. 10, 2026, from the “Download Brochure” link on the sponsorship page). Cover title verified against the archived copy; interior pricing not yet examined.
10. Nat’l Veteran Small Bus. Coal., VETS26 Sponsorship Prospectus (2025), https://nvsbc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/VETS26-Prospectus-2025-FINAL.pdf (last visited Sept. 7, 2026; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260907164914/https://nvsbc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/VETS26-Prospectus-2025-FINAL.pdf). Quoted language verbatim; “Opening General Session Sponsor” is a listed benefit of the Leadership Sponsor tier, and the reception-remarks benefit is quoted without a tier price because the prospectus’s layout leaves its tier assignment ambiguous.
11. HUBZone Contractors Nat’l Council, 2025 National HUBZone Conference Sponsorships, https://hubzonecouncil.org/event-5971534 (last visited Sept. 7, 2026; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260907164924/https://hubzonecouncil.org/event-5971534). Quoted language verbatim.
12. Am. Conf. Inst., Sponsorship Opportunities, https://www.americanconference.com/conferences/defense-government-summits/sponsorship-opportunities/ (last visited Sept. 7, 2026; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260907164954/https://www.americanconference.com/conferences/defense-government-summits/sponsorship-opportunities/) (quoted language verbatim); the organization separately maintains a “Call For Speakers” page for the same conference series, https://www.americanconference.com/conferences/defense-government-summits/call-for-speakers/ (last visited Sept. 7, 2026; archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260907165027/https://www.americanconference.com/conferences/defense-government-summits/call-for-speakers/).
13. Am. Bar Ass’n Section of Pub. Contract Law, Sponsorships, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_contract_law/about/sponsorships/ (last visited Sept. 7, 2026). The published benefits comprise luncheons, receptions, tickets, and co-branding; no published tier includes program participation. The section’s detailed sponsorship guide, referenced on the page as a download, was not retrievable for this draft; the statement is limited to the published page.
14. Panel and speaker tallies compiled from the section’s published conference accounts in The Procurement Lawyer (Federal Procurement Institute, 2024 and 2026; Fall Forum, 2024 and 2025): twenty-six panels; one composed entirely of men; women in 41 percent of classified speaker seats. Gender determined from pronouns in published biographies; tallies and sources on file with author.
15. Am. Bar Ass’n Women Trailblazers Project, Biography of Ruth C. Burg (Stanford Law Sch. archive) (first woman chair of the ABA Section of Public Contract Law, 1984–85; administrative judge, Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals, 1972–1995). In its published account of the 2026 Federal Procurement Institute, the ABA describes the institute as opening with the Ruth C. Burg Luncheon and characterizes the luncheon as a long-standing tradition originating with the section’s first woman chair.