Technical conference cancelled after the blind review process selects only male speakers

GitHub is a software hosting website which many programmers use, particularly in the free/open source communities. The company seems to have branched out into producing other products that programmers use. It's all very hip and trendy, far removed from the traditional socially awkward hacker programming in some basement.

Recently they put out a call for speakers for a technical conference about some programming framework that they've set up. After the blind review process, the speakers were selected and published. So far, so good.

Then one woman notices that all of the speakers are men. She posts about this on Twitter [1]. The conference organisers respond by cancelling the conference, stating that the speaker list "does not reflect the standards to which we hold ourselves." and that they are "postponing this event until we can deliver a more diverse slate of speakers" [2]. So those speakers who were selected based purely on their merits? Not enough vagina.

I'm a professional programmer and I can tell you that it takes a "special" kind of person to be a really good programmer. Borderline autistic is a good start. One requires the ability to focus on the task at hand which such strength for hours at a time. And, of course, it requires an extremely logical brain. You can probably guess that all of the best programmers that have ever been are men.

Of course, some exceptional women will also display these talents. But they are rare. And even when they do appear, they often cause drama in the communities they take part in. Sarah Sharp was a Linux kernel maintainer. But she couldn't handle the brutal way in which other maintainers often communicate with each other. In these communities respect is something that has to be earned and if you don't deserve it, you will be told straight in no uncertain terms. Anyway, she ended up publicly quitting.

The sad thing about all this is that it is the male developers who will suffer. Employers are incredibly eager to hire female programmers. This always creates more work for the competent ones. And now it's harder for men to speak at conferences. There are literally no barriers to becoming a programmer. You just need a computer, which virtually everyone in a developed country has access to, and discipline. Given the extremely low barriers to entry, you would think that there would be plenty of competent female programmers. Or maybe they just aren't good at it, or aren't interested enough to become good. Who knows...

[1] http://archive.is/2lKEI [2] http://archive.is/Vp9TA