How would you feel about an event with a female only speaker list?
Instinctively, it raises my hackles, because positive discrimination is still discrimination, but I've seen it work really well in stand up comedy.
Women standups only events have a very different feel, but you are also more likely to see women do standup that is normally male territory. So you might see an angry female political shock comic, whereas mainstream female comics tend to do observational humor about life.
I'd suggest that there is value in creating a situation where vacuum causes people to fill roles they normally feel they don't fit the expectation for.
I'd probably attend, because I tend to be curious about things and I'd want to see how an event with only female speakers operated differently from 'business as usual'.
Stereotypically, females tend to do the front-end, QA, and design aspects (not saying this is always true or that it should be true, just that this is the common stereotype). So I would find it cool to have more women speaking about "hardcore" stuff like language and compiler implementation in C, low-level optimization, and so forth.
This reminds me of a joke. HR person comes to the boss and says "I've got two candidates for the job. Joe and Jane."
The boss interrupts the HR person. "You know, I've had it with all this affirmative action and diversity crap. It's a waste of time. Let's just stop all this. I just want to interview the best qualified person."
The HR person says "Ok, boss." The next day Jane shows up for the interview.
The joke is that, even without affirmative action, the minority person (well in tech, women are a minority) is more qualified. Since it's a joke I won't analyze it except to say it's not very funny.
The issue here is that she got some notoriety exploiting the gender issue, and now she's burned out because of the gender issue and she doesn't want that.
Typical case of wanting to have the cake and eating it too.
Instinctively, it raises my hackles, because positive discrimination is still discrimination, but I've seen it work really well in stand up comedy.
Women standups only events have a very different feel, but you are also more likely to see women do standup that is normally male territory. So you might see an angry female political shock comic, whereas mainstream female comics tend to do observational humor about life.
I'd suggest that there is value in creating a situation where vacuum causes people to fill roles they normally feel they don't fit the expectation for.