[trhway]

>They are treating women like props, and they just want women to be present so they can feel inclusive.

May be they are afraid of the alternative - being branded as non-inclusive, male-chauvinistic, etc. if they don't bring enough women to make the quota sufficient enough to avoid the branding (as we've seen such branding is no joke in the modern environment and can be painfully damaging when it comes to real things like employment/etc).

[gmueckl]

At some German universities, research groups that have too few female members (for a rather arbitrary threshold) are put under pressure to fix this. Except that they can't because they don't get any applications from women.

This kind of statistics driven approach to gender equality seems to be spreading around here.

[mieseratte]

Are there really people that worried that they’d cancel an entire conference? Do people feel their lives or livelihoods are at stake here or?