Why All the Speakers at Schnitzelconf are White Men

Three female organizers, and one male organizer, contacted me privately to thank me for being brave enough to say what I said -- because they, too, have been harrassed and harangued in public about the "diversity" of their speakers.

I am not surprised (though I don't consider myself brave).

If you don't read about conferences, or run one, you might not realize how nasty people are about this one thing -- an accusation you can't defend against. If you are accused of being racist in your speaker selection, what can you say?

"Well I happened to invite a really awesome african woman and an indian dude but they both turned me down"? Because then, of course, you're suggesting that you DO think in terms of race - ergo you are a racist! Then people will list women to you who have nothing to do with your conference, and you are obligated to say "I don't invite speakers who aren't on-topic for my conference" and then you are accused of hating women. Because if you loved women, you'd invite off-topic women speakers to a conference where everybody else would see the women didn't fit, and would assume that they got picked as window dressing.

These are charges you can't defend against, and the people applying it are -- without fail -- privileged caucasian men, who use their power and their smugness to make other people feel small and less righteous than they are. It's some kind of Look, I May Be A Famous White Dude But I'm So Sensitive And Feminist! signalling.

I, for one, am sick of it! It's selfish, divisive, and more importantly, useless, assuming the people trying to kick up a fuss actually care about having more non-white-men in tech and business.

I prepared this essay in advance - because I knew it would happen. Then it did happen. An internet-famous white man (!) reached out to my very slightly involved male co-organizer (!) and not me (even though he knows me, and he knows it's my conference), and accused us of being "non-diverse." As if we had to answer to him.

Note that he never answered our calls to our network for people from different places and walks of life who were bootstrapping.

These brutal attacks have got to stop, and I figured if I could do it while also reaching out to women bootstrappers, and non-white bootstrappers, to convince them to step forward, so much the better.

At the same time, you don't make attacks stop by shrinking away from them. You also can't do it by pointing out that the attackers are hypocritical assholes just in it for the attention. The only way to do it is to shine a light on just how silly the whole thing is.

So that is what I attempted to do.

I tried to make it too embarrassing for anyone else to attack me publicly.

And now there is a resource that those other conference organizers, who don't feel as if they can speak freely, can link to without fear of direct reprisals.

In short, you could say I'm trying to bury non-existent controversy and then tamp down its grave.