A tech conference in Latvia is in hot water after organizers reportedly added the name of a woman who doesn't exist to its agenda in a bid to make its speaker lineup appear more diverse.
DevTernity initially had four women scheduled to speak at the event next week. But as software engineer and writer Gergely Orosz pointed out over the weekend, one of the women—Anna Boyko, a Coinbase staff engineer—appears to be fake since there’s no information about her online. A second woman speaker, Julia Kirsina, is employed at DevTernity.
(Credit: DevTernity)Last year, the DevTernity site also featured a profile of a woman speaker named Natalie Stadler, who was also supposed to work at Coinbase. But that profile also appears to have been made up.
Orosz suggests the organizers of DevTernity created the fake profiles to help boost the event’s appeal. "To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers. Because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns,” he wrote on Twitter.
The founder of the tech conference, Eduards Sizovs, says his organization merely made a mistake. “I've been deeply concerned about inclusion and diversity, and I've been working very hard to make DevTernity inclusive for everyone,” he wrote in a tweet.
Sizovs conceded that Anna Boyko is a "demo persona" placeholder that appeared on the site by accident. “I noticed the issue in October,” Sizovs said, “but my busy mind suggested delaying the fix until we finalize the program because 1) it was not a quick fix 2) it’s better to have that demo persona while I am searching for the replacement speakers.”
Although four women were originally supposed to speak at DevTernity, Sizovs noted that two have since been removed. Julia Kirsina is no longer listed since she “switched to helping with the (DevTernity) organization." Programmer Sandi Metz had to drop out due to a medical issue.
DevTernity deleted Boyko from its list of speakers. In addition, Sizovs has vowed to increase his efforts “10x” to ensure the tech conference has enough women speakers going forward.
But despite his statements, support for DevTernity has been rapidly collapsing. 404 Media reports that the last remaining woman speaker, Kristine Howard at Amazon Web Services, has canceled her appearance. Meanwhile, other speakers, such as Microsoft VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman and software engineer Kelsey Hightower, have also said they won’t be participating.
“I take issue with continuing to advertise speakers who have notified you they will no longer be speaking at the conference,” Hightower told Sizovs on Twitter. “You are charging attendees money and they might be making their purchasing decision based on the list of speakers shown to them on the conference website. This is misleading at best.”
DevTernity didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But on Twitter, Sizovs said he's being unfairly canceled. “I said it was a mistake, a bug that turned out to be a feature. I even fixed that on my website! We're cool? Nooooo, we want blood! Let's cancel this SINNER!” he wrote.
