> It is disheartening to acknowledge that in 2023, there are still people who care about the gender or race of speakers. On one hand, the content of any confer

> It is disheartening to acknowledge that in 2023, there are still people who care about the gender or race of speakers. On one hand, the content of any conference talk is in most cases good or bad regardless of who the person behind it is. Same as how my API performance or DB schema quality won't be impacted much by that either. A bit like how the Silicon Valley show illustrated the fact that trying to hire a "woman engineer" is a bit disrespectful to the person's own achievements. On the other hand, tech seems to be a generally male dominated field and that could still be an issue in some ways, not just in regards to UI/UX design, but social factors. It's one of those careers that aren't back breaking work and are reasonably rewarding, however sometime between the 80s and 90s, it seems that the amount of women in the industry decreased, along the lines of: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... Some representation there would probably be nice. Maybe personal computer marketing was pointlessly gendered, maybe men and women have slightly different approaches to learning and learning in university courses with way more men in them doesn't feel as comfortable for women, maybe the culture in companies isn't exactly welcoming, I don't quite know. That said, I think there are some groups to encourage women to explore ITC work here in Latvia and I've seen some panel discussions/quick talks along those lines, though I don't remember whether that was in DevTernity or FrontCon, Riga DevDays or something else. This situation with fake speakers is quite unfortunate and not a good look, though.