One of the problems in the hierarchy underlying this is simply that women (empirically) don't take that first step of reaching out to a small conference to spea

One of the problems in the hierarchy underlying this is simply that women (empirically) don't take that first step of reaching out to a small conference to speak. It's similar to data about self-nomination rates for promotion. Simply raising awareness of the promotion case managed to even the rates out, so arguably anything that raises the visibility of the lack of conference submissions by women could have a similar knock-on effect.