The question that needs answering is not how they should have gone about selecting a diverse group of speakers, but if they should have. What's the value of di

The question that needs answering is not how they should have gone about selecting a diverse group of speakers, but if they should have. What's the value of diversity on a technical panel? I'm not saying that diversity has no value, or that the speakers were the best possible speakers who just happened to be white men. I'm saying that, if you're going to claim that the speakers should be diverse, you need to justify that claim. Is it better to have diversity in speakers than the most technical accumen, or is it your argument that the best group of speakers will likely be diverse? What about when they're not? Why is diversity important? Now, for what it's worth, I believe the best group of speakers probably would be diverse, but only by virtue of the racial and gender composition of the set of experts, not because diversity itself has any significant value in this case. That the selected speakers were white men may be evidence of a suboptimal selection process, or it may be simply a statistical anomaly. What it isn't, is a problem in its own right.