Excerpt:<p><i>Simply being a woman in technology doesn’t automatically make you qualified or interested in presenting about women in technology. It’s not some sort of ZOMG Uterus! club, and the assumption that it’s the only thing I’d be useful at talking about is a problem for me, regardless of how well-intentioned you are in wanting to bring this topic to the forefront at your conferences.<p>If you want women to feel less like outsiders in technology, try having a few of them speak at your conferences about </i>gasp* technology.*<p>Those are excellent points to make. I happen to have a Certificate in GIS and I run a few websites and know a little html and css but I am kind of not really a "woman in tech." My forte is more social (I have had classes on things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management, etc) and I like writing about social things, including women's issues. Some of my writing on such topics has been discussed a little on HN. But, yes, she is absolutely right that being female and in tech does not, by itself, make "women in tech" her forte and she is also absolutely right that a much stronger position for promoting diversity is to hire her to talk about the thing she is an expert in, in spite of, gasp, her having female genitals.<p>I am glad to see this here. It fits nicely with some of my ideas and past comments, I think.
I think the organizer should have been upfront with you about what he/she wanted you to talk on. That said, I don't think it was an offensive request. The organizer wasn't being presumptuous that you would be interested in speaking on this topic just because you're female -- he/she was merely asking you... As a woman in tech, I get how it's these little things compounded over time that get annoying, but this ask on its own is not unreasonable is it? You can always just say no (as you did). :)
Well this is great. We're told to "just give women in tech a voice". So some organizers go looking for someone who's comfortable with keynoting the damn conference on these issues. She gives a weak "no, but maybe I could generalize to a talk about diversity in general", and they DO NOT cancel the diversity keynote, they find someone who's more confident to talk about this PARTICULARLY bad targeted issue. And she assumes that they are just dum-dum conference organizers... or something.
at least she has a mercy to not name the conference in her righteous rant, as after reading it i also started to feel that the conference organizers are arrogant chauvinist pigs because they reached to a woman in tech to talk about ... you'd not believe it ... women in tech. I guess the right choice was to reach to a man in tech. Yes, yes, that would be the most PC solution that everybody, especially women in tech, would applaud loudly long after the conference ended - a man in tech talking about women in tech.