| I find it surprising that people here are defending an all-male speaker line up at a conference as being ok because "it's just about tech". It's become increasingly clear that no, tech is not just about tech. Tech has a huge impact on society and if your tech conference only has male speakers you aren't trying hard enough to make your conference reflect this. Further, if your tech group isn't actively working to bring people from other backgrounds into it then it becomes an echo chamber. Echo chambers are the worst, because people don't realise that's what they are in. This isn't some random political position, it's something based on real, measurable results where echo chambers make horrible technical decisions because of real-world blindness. I do machine learning for a living, and there are some particularly notorious examples of this happening in my field. The most obvious one is "Gender from Iris Images" where an entire series of papers by male-only teams ended up being discredited by a single devastating paper by (apparently) the first female to look at the problem. The paper title gives away the whole story: Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?[1] [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01304 |