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Comment by voyou | Hacker News Reader

"they exist to impart knowledge to attendees"

Right, and if their CFP is systematically discouraging some people from applying, or their review process is systematically undervaluing proposals from some people, and those people would give great presentations, then the conference is not going to be as good as it otherwise would be. Conferences that fail to take questions of gender representation seriously are depriving their attendees of great presentations from women. If you care about the quality of technical conferences, you should want to attend those which have a policy that tries to ensure good proposals won't be missed simply because of the gender of the presenter.

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You're going to need to be more specific than that. What, exactly, do they need to do differently, and why?

At 'serious' technical conferences, presentations are based on papers, papers are based on work already done. The conference itself is an end game of months or years of work that already happened.

At less serious conferences, talks, presentations, and panels are selected to maximize interest by choosing people of significant stature and interest in the community. Again, this is the end game of months or years of work that already happened.

Where is it the conferences responsibility (and to what advantage) to extend themselves to garnering talks and presenters from a minority industry segment (and which minority segments?). Do you actually have demonstrable evidence that presenters and papers of merit are being excluded from conferences? This would serve as evidence that conferences were failing in the missions to provide top tier content.

It seems that your position is focused more on who is presenting content than what the content actually is.

Pycon this year -> outreach and encouragement -> 20% of attendees were women: http://www.forbes.com/sites/women2/2013/04/09/record-number-...

If by "outreach and encouragement" you mean outright subsidizing the trip for a specific target gender.

Did this actually improve the technical content of the conference, or did it simply redefine the objective measure by which PyCon determines "success" to include non-technical metrics? The latter seems to be the case, in which case, it's not a particularly valuable stratagem for a merit-focused technical conference.

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