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That's an absolutely great point. What if, for example, prices for things like conferences were lower for women? I'm sure that even men would appreciate a higher female-to-male ratio at such events (and women would not feel like black sheep being there). In fact, this is such a win-win scenario that I don't understand why this is not being done currently.

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I don't know if you saw Sarah Mei's talk[1] about getting the female population of SF Ruby from 2% to 18% in a year, but she presented a lot of interesting (and effective sounding, based on her experiences) methods of how to attract more women to conferences.

[1] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/02/20/scale-8x-slides-post... The audio is a bit long, but it's worth listening to over the slides.

Because lowering prices for women would absolutely be sexism, by definition, and to a certain extent would cheapen their presence there. Maybe it would be worth it. Maybe you could spin it as a promo so it wasn't as big a deal. But that's why.

> lowering prices for women would absolutely be sexism

Just like affirmative action got called racial discrimination... Not really. I guess that's along the lines of how one would spin it.

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