I rarely ever comment, but posts similar to this one have been popping out more and more as of late. I am a minority. I grew up in a different country, and most of my close friends are minorities, too, both female and male; half of them being in the tech industry. (If my username didn't give it away, I'm hispanic and so are most of my acquaintances.)

With that out of the way, I do not understand anything about this article. This bolded line, for example:

>Rarely, though, will you ever hear a white person lamenting about working conditions that their black/brown child/spouse/sibling might have to endure, because they rarely have those relationships, so aren’t forced to develop empathy for brown/black people.

What working conditions? Care giving any examples? What are some pointers you could give to white people to help them understand your deplorable working conditions? Is it simply that there are no black speakers at conferences, or holding positions in these tech organizations?

Personal experiences, as well as experiences from my hispanic friends, point to no such implied "bad working conditions." Some of my friends are brown-skinned and have noticeable accents. Most still use Spanish as their primary language, both on and offline. Yet there has been not one single incident involving either myself or any of my hispanic friends where we suffered any sort of discrimination, or experienced unwelcoming working conditions.

Maybe the author and I have different goals when we attend such conferences. Maybe there are more hispanics than blacks or native Americans in tech. Yet I don't understand why that would matter when attending a conference.

>Yet for the 2015 conference, they could not manage to find one black woman to be a “headline” speaker. Two white men are included in the set of headline speakers at a conference celebrating women in technology, but not a single black woman.

It infuriates me to see this obsession with ethnic or racial background. This obsession with the color of the speaker's skin. In my eyes, that the keynote speakers are white males does not invalidate their opinions in any way. There is no implied message that they speak on behalf of women, or minorities. It's an invitation. It does not mean that they're not qualified on the subject - if anything, these "old white men" are the ones running these big companies and are there not just to speak, but to also listen to the other speakers and the attendants.

I opened the videos linked in the article and I'll try to skip through them and I'll report back, hopefully. It just boggles my mind that in this day and age there is still this obsession with the speaker's racial background. And there is no solution proposed, either, besides "they should find more people of color to speak at these events." Isn't that the one of the points of these conferences? And is there any progress being made, considering that last year's was the first one Google organized? Did the author gather any information about this year's? Does the author have any proposals or people she would like to see at these events?

I go to tech conferences to learn. My political and ethnic background is never, ever something that makes me biased against or for an event. It is also never a problem. My slightly noticeable accent, my hispanic facial features, my shirts with Spanish sentences, they do not have any effect on how people treat me.

It might all come down to what your goals are when attending any event.