Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” speech, and as a part of the celebration, Iceland’s foreign affairs minister Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson announced that they will host a U.N. conference in 2015 for women’s rights. The catch: only men are invited.

On what has been dubbed as the “barbershop conference,” Sveinsson said, “We want to bring men and boys to the table on gender equality in a positive way.” By not allowing women to attend a women’s rights conference, they actually accomplish the opposite of what they say they set out to do. This merely sends a message of excluding women and it paints the picture of the domineering man saying, “I’ll take it from here, sweetheart.” Although Sveinsson may have benevolent intentions, women everywhere balk at the idea of a meeting that does exactly what they say is the root of the problem: excluding women’s voices from participating in conversations on political decision-making.

The conference faced immediate criticism from female politicians. Sveinsson said it did not surprise him and speculated that the backlash was a result of the idea of having a men’s only conference being “quite new.” As if politicians have never held a meeting in which only men attended.

The #HeForShe Campaign motivated Sveinsson to start planning the conference. This campaign, introduced by U.N. Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson, promotes gender equality that brings together men in support of women. I am completely in favor of this campaign. Men should be involved in the fight for women’s rights, and they should take a stand for equality among the sexes. They should not, however, exclude women from that fight.

During Watson’s speech for the #HeForShe initiative, she said, “In 1995 Hillary Clinton made a famous speech in Beijing about women’s rights. But what stood out for me the most was that only 30 percent of her audience were male. How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?”

She started this initiative to get everyone talking about gender equality, not just men and not just women. Sveinsson would be wrong in saying that this conference takes after Watson’s campaign because, unlike the conference, it does not exclude women’s voices from the cause.

“We do not want to be spoken for, we’d like to speak for ourselves,” said associate research professor Dyan Mazurna.