I said 'of this form'. They didn't say it literally, but look at the values implied by their claim. Why don't they quantify who 'the best' that they reached ou

I said 'of this form'. They didn't say it literally, but look at the values implied by their claim. Why don't they quantify who 'the best' that they reached out to where? Here's my point: frequently, people say 'the best people just happen to be white males' or 'we can only hire white males'. In reality, this is often because there's been no effort made to reach out to other segments of society. The tokenism excuse is then deployed - but that isn't the point. No-one likes tokenism. The argument we're making is that there are talented people who get overlooked or are made to feel excluded (often accidentally) because they aren't white men. I find it incredibly offensive when people deploy the tokenism argument against this criticism because the implicit claim is that there aren't enough talented members of minority groups. This isn't the case. Moreover, it's part of the continuous passing the buck you see in sectors like tech. Businesses say they don't hire more women because there aren't many women with CompSci degrees. CompSci programs say they don't get more women because women aren't interested. And yet companies and faculties are still willing to have woman-unfriendly cultures, because women don't want to work there. To be specific to conferences - if every conference says "we reached out to good speakers but there weren't many women" then there never will be - because women won't get their shot. To be fair, I don't know the specifics. Maybe this conference did make efforts. But given that they haven't quantified what effort they did make, their defence is extremely weak.