Gender and race are orthogonal to one's merit as a speaker. Content is very relevant to one's merit as a speaker. There's a huge difference. Choosing speakers b

Gender and race are orthogonal to one's merit as a speaker. Content is very relevant to one's merit as a speaker. There's a huge difference. Choosing speakers based on gender and/or racial diversity is a bad idea. It's disrespectful to the people being chosen and to the people who are trying to attend a quality conference. It's also uncomfortable when you can tell that a speaker has been chosen for diversity's sake, and it reflects poorly on the other underrepresented folks speaking at the conference. If you have a transparent process that judges speakers independently of those culturally sensitive traits, that problem can be avoided. Everyone knows that all the speakers are there because they submitted the best proposals. Diversity can be achieved without tokenism.