Agree 100% with that post... and I'd urge folk to follow the links and read some of the underlying tweets that started this whole thing off.

I'm gonna take the liberty of copy and pasting something I wrote on the other thread about this since I think it's relevant to what Avdi said:

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There's some text up on the main http://2013.britruby.com/ - among other things it says:

"We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? "

I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal?

In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their sex.

Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota.

I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049). Plenty of female speakers on the other stages too.

At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year (http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013...) and the survey has already produced some great possible speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women.

Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major conference.

I'd be reaching out to folk like http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/, or http://www.womenwhotech.com/. I'd be looking to how other folk got more great women speakers at their conferences like http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake...

Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding good speakers is not as effective as it should be.

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As another data point - I notice that the London Perl Workshop - a one day event next weekend - has two women speakers running three sessions. Surely the Ruby folk have as many smart women speakers as the Perl folk ;-)