I don't get this. What should be in focus is not your gender, nor your race. It is the talk you are going to give which should be the focus. I don't care if you

I don't get this. What should be in focus is not your gender, nor your race. It is the talk you are going to give which should be the focus. I don't care if you are a man a woman, an indian, a japanese and so on. But I deeply care about the talk being interesting. That said, I would much prefer having diversity in the speaker lineup - it makes for more interesting talks in general. I am also for biasing toward the minority: If you have, say, only one woman who applied there should be a good reason to reject her. The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable - simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are no women in the lineup. That is, you have to weigh the chance of an all-white-male lineup to occur at random toward the fact that people where chosen to be all-white-male.