Yeah, there’s definitely a preponderance of white people here. People of diff. nations of origin are fairly well represented. Academics and industry people are fairly well represented; I haven’t gotten a sense of government representation.

The organizers are the Annenberg School for Communication. They have the resources to figure out that the ratio of women whose work would be relevant to this conference is much higher than they’ve represented here.

That said, I have (here, now, and elsewhere) praised the organizers for doing this thing in the first place, and for providing so much support so that audience members (myself included) could attend. I appreciate that.

I should also mention that the last sentence of my post was intended to be slightly tongue-in-cheek, which has been a common usage of it (that I’ve seen, anyway).

It also isn’t obvious that the conference organizers deserve blame. Is the gender ratio of experts in this field (CEOs, technologists, etc.) 50/50, or are they drawing representative panel members from a group in which men are favored? Did they invite many women who declined to attend? There’s little point in being accusatory without answering these questions.

There are plenty of ways to actively work toward equality, and plenty of groups working to provide more opportunities for women in computing. Pointing out the skewed gender ratio is a very reasonable thing to do, since it calls attention to a problem. But just dropping off the blame where you did, without any argument as to why the organizers are at fault or what should have been done instead, doesn’t seem so productive.