[mattpointblank]

Article author here. Thanks for the feedback.

I perhaps didn't word that paragraph as well as I could -- my point there wasn't to introduce quotas, but to attempt to nip the problem in the bud. If I'd been organising EdgeConf, and had got to ~80% of my speakers being male with no female representation, I would've dropped everything and made sure that the rest were women. I guess when you include the numbers then this feels like tokenism, but it was mostly arbitrary. My point here was that they should have realised they had a problem before it reached 100%, not start out with the intention to recruit x% women (no matter how relevant or qualified they were) -- that's tokenism, right?

[natrius]

Choosing people primarily because they add diversity is tokenism. There are processes that are effective in obtaining underrepresented speakers that are effective and don't require choosing people because they're a minority. We should use those.

I really don't think we should label conferences failures because they do a poor job on the diversity front. Instead, we should encourage them to do a better job next time and show them how.