June 31, 2016 ?
> KatieConf is a parody
> KatieConf is a parody
The bit: Here's all these female tech people with the name "Katie", thus you shouldn't have problems filling your tech conference with female speakers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.