I hesitate to write the following, because I don't see anyone say it - maybe I'm not looking in the right places?

But Stephanie's description here... it's of course non-coincidental that the teddy bear party is para 1, the luncheon invite is para 2, and both were held under the guise of Celebrating Women in Tech. (I know, I'm Captain Obvious SS3.)

Which makes this maybe 10 blog posts I, personally, have come across (just me, maybe not you) written by women in tech who all have low opinions of Women in Tech conferences/Tech Conferences, Guest Starring: Women. Reasons for the low opinions vary from post to post and/or writer to writer (I can't tell which). If you're reading this, you're familiar with all of them and their various refactored forms, so we don't need to reiterate.

It can't be a coincidence. It just can't be random that so many of these meetups and luncheons and what-have-you's, according to Stephanie, et al., are all teddy-bear-terrible. I've never been to one, so I have zero clue - all I have to go on is blogger opinion and my own flawed guesstimations of the writer's basis for opinion (intellect, lived experience, etc). So if, after reading the next two paras, you think I'm indeed taking crazy pills, you need to tell me.

It would seem to me, to speak freely, that the common thread in that links Encourage/Celebrate/Defend Women in Tech and teddy-bear-terribleness is: organizers with an agenda other than encouraging/celebrating/defending women in tech. Like, okay, yes, Mrs. Weber had her heart in the right place and just Didn't Get It, but I don't mean her. I mean to submit to you that there's a kind of response bias/selection bias/something-or-other bias at play that makes it so that the organizers putting on these conferences are extremely likely to volunteer themselves for lowercase-p political reasons. If I had to guess, I'd guess that they're i) Vitamin-C junkies ("C" for connections, i.e. networking), and ii) they've (rightly?) identified WiTC as their perfect target, their mile-wide bullseye. In an industry of subdivided technical interest after subdivided technical interest, of high/impossible standards, harsh feedback, and of fickle audiences whose attention spans are exactly equal to the number of milliseconds it takes them to hit CTRL-T.... WiT confs are guaranteed high turnout (by tech meetup standards - and if you haven't attended a meetup without a buzzword in the title, don't talk), they're guaranteed to be lauded (by some vocal fraction), the content standards are Marianas-low, and the "return customers," whatever fraction they represent, are amazingly passionate toward the subject and therefore you, the organizer. From the look of it, WitC organizers may as well have invented a perpetual orange juicing machine. Or if any of you read Phantom Tollbooth as a kid, "Subtraction Soup" (the more you eat, the hungrier you get) but like with lots of Vitamin-C in it or something and also the secret ingredient is heroin.

Oh and as for why there aren't (m)any good organizers, i.e. the kind that hated the teddy bear factory: if there were an equation that described Eternal Septembering, it would include p^3 where p is how mainstream party-political (as opposed to body-political, the way Assange uses the terms) the topic of discussion is. So like r/politics has seen several geological epochs worth of Septembers at this point. The bigger and louder and more influential your pet WiT conference grows, the faster Jezebel & Co. will show up and start beating their bosoms, as Stephanie so eloquently put it.

No TL;DR. First time submitting a crazy pills idea for public criticism, you have to say things the way you've been thinking them.