However, I will be that guy that points out that only four of the 33 speakers are women and over two-thirds of the speakers are white men.
While I do appreciate that a good number of the non-profits are ones that help women code, having a low number of women/minority speakers certainly doesn't help and could even be counterproductive to those causes.
I don't disagree. However, is it reasonable to expect the conference speaker roster to have significantly higher diversity than the industry itself, considering those speakers are drawn from the industry? Some would say yes, and I think it's a good idea, but it is going to be harder.
I think the fact that to get a ticket I dontated to Women Who Code is more than most conferences will ever do, and I'm not going to vilify them for this, personally...
If I was throwing a convention, I would want the best and the brightest 30+ year olds for wisdom/experience reasons. And since everyone agrees that males dominated the space in the last 15 years, why would it even make sense for there to be a higher percentage of females presenting?
Should we punish these brilliant people (it's quite the collection of intelligence) because they were born in a certain era? I mean we could, but that would just bring us in another equally bad direction.
I used to mentor college students in a biology lab. I tried to get the students to learn basic programming and data analysis for biological data. All but one of the girls turned down the opportunity. All the males at least tried it out, some got very deep into programming.