The policy of the conference is to blame too. Up to 2021, it was a women-only event. Then in 2022 the organizers decided to open it to people who call themselves 'non-binary' as well, therefore implicitly making the event about 'gender identity' rather than sex. As anyone can claim any 'gender identity', they effectively changed the conference to include men, instead of being exclusively for women. They also said that men who were 'allies' could attend, and then of course found that the men did not behave like allies at all.

This policy change was a huge departure from the original mission back in the 1990s, which was to have a conference by and for female computer scientists, who every day have to endure the effects of working in a field that is very heavily male-dominated.

I hope that this year's influx of insolent men calling themselves 'non-binary' has reminded the organizers of the extent to which males will dominate given the opportunity, and why their change of policy last year was so absurd and harmful to women. By trying to be more 'inclusive', the end result was female exclusion.

That said, there has been a lot of ideological pressure to center 'gender identity' in recent years, so I can understand why the organizers may have felt the need to go along with this. But redefining 'woman' to be some unfalsifiable inner abstract feeling of femininity doesn't work in reality, given that this is not the basis on which women are discriminated against in tech or anywhere else.