[CarlHoerberg]

Thanks for pointing that out! We would, of course, love to have female speakers on the summit. We had an open call for talks, which was promoted on the web, Twitter, newsletters etc., but there were only male speakers applying, unfortunately.

In the talks committee, Dormain Drewitz (who leads Product Marketing at Pivotal) and Lovisa Johansson (Marketing Manager / Software Developer at CloudAMQP), two female professionals highly experienced in RabbitMQ, was participating in choosing the speakers. In terms of the panel discussion, it will be lead by Dormain.

Lovisa is very skilled in RabbitMQ, and has written ebooks, technical documentation and tons of blog posts on the topic. However, she couldn’t participate as a speaker or in the panel discussion since she will have other commitments during the summit.

Diversity is a high priority for us, and we have a lot of females working behind the scenes as project leaders managing the summit.

[hguhghuff]

I simply do not believe it was not possible to make a panel including women with relevant things to say.

You should research “manel” .... you’ll find “no women applied to speak” is almost always the excuse and it’s really inadequate and just a way to try to literally excuse the outcome. You have a much greater obligation than to just wait for applicants and then shrug and say “wel no women applied”.

It’s very silly to say you value diversity with a panel of all men, whilst pointing to the people who organized the conference to say that’s your diversity. “All the brainy men are doing the talking and being smart while all the assistants and helpers and organizers and running around helping them”. Ugh. I’d advise you to put that line of argument in the nearest garbage bin... it is not going to lead to people thinks “oh yes they employ women, that is an excellent and inclusive diversity strategy and shows deep commitment to diversity”. That’s like saying “hey I have a mother, that’s my diversity strategy”.

If you want to save your conference from possible cancellation then it’s in your interest to replace 2 of those men with at least 2 women before the internet gets wind of this.

And when asked, don’t make the lame excuse you gave me.... you should say “yes that’s a terrible mistake we handled it badly and were fixing it fast.” It sounds stupid to say “we couldn’t get any women”.

And it sounds doubly stupid and deeply patronizing to say “we deeply value diversity, look at all our helper women”.

Frankly sir you seem to lack wisdom.

And you’re in for a big shock if you think you’ll get to the end of this conference with only me raising the issue.

If I were you I’d take all information regarding the panel offline and say you’re revising it, until you fix it properly. That might save you.