[jasonlotito]

> As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers.

Good thing that's not why they are withdrawing from the conference. Specifically, they are pulling out because the conference wasn't even wiling to work with them to find a more diverse speaker lineup. If nothing came out of that, then they would have gone. But the conference didn't even do that.

> Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?

Then PHPCE wouldn't have been for you, along with all the other tech conferences I've attended, as they generally had talks that weren't strictly PHP.

[gurkendoktor]

> Then PHPCE wouldn't have been for you, along with all the other tech conferences I've attended, as they generally had talks that weren't strictly PHP.

I couldn't find the (now cancelled) schedule for 2019, but to be fair it looks like PHPCE was a very focused conference: https://2018.phpce.eu/de/#agenda

Compare that with the holistic schedule of RubyConf, for example: http://rubyconf.org/schedule

[pflenker]

Also, the conference was not cancelled because the speakers withdrew - it was cancelled because ticket sales plummeted after the speakers withdrew. One could argue that people where following the discussions and voted with their feet.