> We see at user groups women don't often give talks and user groups are normally begging for people to give talks.

This (and the rest of your paragraph) doesn't address my question. This addresses the same possible distinction I pointed to of a distinction between women who might be prepared to talk if you approach vs. who will approach you. You're basically repeating the same reasoning I called out. If user groups are begging for speakers - and that is true - and few women still end up speaking, if you care about diversity you ask yourself (and the women) why, rather than just quietly decide there's nothing you can do.

If you choose not to address it, it is then entirely valid for people to read into this that you hold certain views about diversity they don't want to be associated with.

Put another way: I've seen groups entirely fail to get women to speak, and I've seen groups that have had no problems getting women to speak. They're not recruiting from different populations. The logical assumption then is not that there aren't enough women who can speak, but that one of them is failing to identify them and nurture an environment where they are prepared to speak.

> Most conferences aren't making a profit. Most a volunteer ran and people are doing it in their spare time for no compensation. They depend heavily on call for papers where people submit then they do blind appraisals of the submissions.

If this was an example of such a conference, that might be a valid consideration, but this conference is organized by a for profit company and appears not to have taken CFPs. There are a whole lot of such companies of varying sizes - my girlfriend used to work for a 10,000 employee conference operator.

> When you have a CFP and hundreds of talks submitted rejecting them and looking for other people because the people applying are of the wrong gender or race is discrimination.

If you fail to get a diverse mix with your CFPs, 1) ask yourself why you're unable to reach a more diverse audience and address that, 2) don't fill all your slots via CFPs. This is not rocket science.

In this case it appears none of the slots were filled by CFPs anyway, so this is moot.

> Which would be at the user group level where men five their first talks. When you go to a user group you know it's going to be a bit rough, it didn't cost you anything, you haven't booked a hotel room, you haven't gone anywhere, etc. I have no problem listening to people's first talks, I often hang out in uncons if the conference has one and listen to all the random stuff, however, I do feel for people who see conferences as a serious chance to improve their skillset and end up with a reduced quality product all for the sake of virtue signaling.

Cool. Not an excuse for a company that has arranged conferences for multiple years to not have put effort into creating a pipeline once they realized they had a problem. This wasn't a first try gone slightly wrong. It is also clear they knew this was a problem for them given the fake women.

Even if they'd legitimately tried to address it, the legitimate solution is not to defraud your other speakers and your customers.

> The paragraph above seems to make it that they were getting the applicants but were ignoring them because of details in their education. It seems they had the applicants and just didn't hire them. To legally improve your diversity you need to increase who is applying. Not to ignore your applicants because of their sex or race. That is discrimination and illegal.

Discriminating because of sex or race is illegal, yes. Choosing people based on some aspect of the applicants background that is not directly tied to a protected characteristic but that indirectly causes discrimination by it may or may not be illegal depending on jurisdiction, but either way it is far harder to prove, which is why it is a favoured method used to discriminate intentionally, but it also often unintentionally causes discrimination.

If you don't want to discriminate, you take steps to ensure the pool you get your candidates from isn't massively biased, especially when it is pointed out to you. If you stick with a severely biased pool despite having been told repeatedly about the bias, then it is natural to assume the reason is that you're perfectly happy to discriminate.

> Overall, I highly suspect your way of thinking is going to result in lots of settlements and lawsuits because people weren't hired because they were white/male. Sexist and racism should not be acceptable and is illegal! Quite simply that is what is often being suggest.

"My way of thinking" was that e.g. the example of the investment bank was inherently 1) racist, 2) sexist because they knew and were told that had the net effect of weighing details of candidates education that skewed the outcomes but that they had no evidence affected candidate performance, and should stop. No candidates would have any legal recourse for discrimination if they stopped caring about irrelevant details that favored specific schools that reduced the diversity in their hiring.

In other words: Lack of diversity in your applicant pool is not a reasonable excuse.