chicken/egg, though. You don't become a speaker expert without having plenty of practise at being a speaker. Irrespective of any demographic quality, we should be open to bringing new speakers to conferences.
If there's evidence that conferences are deliberately excluding women speakers, then that is a bad thing. Not just because of sexism but because the conference would be deliberately narrowing its field of potential speakers.
But why would we favour new speakers who are called Katie (or only new speakers who are women?). We should choose speakers who are experts, and new speakers from all possible candidates.
> If there's evidence that conferences are deliberately excluding women speakers, then that is a bad thing.
The thing is, it's rarely deliberate. It's a subconscious bias thing. Which is why people use blind talk submissions - they're evaluated solely on the basis of the content of the talk.
Just to be clear, blind evaluation of talk submissions is how it should be.
BUT if at the end of that you find out that your conference has all male speakers (or all female speakers, or all speakers under 25, or whatever) what should you do about it? I would say you should try your hardest to encourage more people to apply next time. There are loads of great projects for that like Outreachy.
What you shouldn't do is decide to fill it up with some "quota people" to make it look diverse.
What if conferences are accidentally excluding women speakers? Is that still a bad thing?
Yes, we should chose speakers based entirely on their qualifications. But we don't. The problem is that people somehow assume that the current status quo of speakers almost always being men is what you get when you chose based entirely on qualifications, and any change from that must make things worse.
This is not about adding women by introducing gender bias. This is about adding women by reducing gender bias.
chicken/egg, though. You don't become a speaker expert without having plenty of practise at being a speaker. Irrespective of any demographic quality, we should be open to bringing new speakers to conferences.