How Not to Achieve Diversity: Inventing Fake Female Keynote Speakers

as the importance of diversity and representation. Beyond that, I want to talk about a word I really don't like. The word is optics, not the study of light, but rather how people perceive something like when you are concerned with the optics of a situation. And it's an understandable thing, but I feel like it takes prominence in a way that is ultimately harmful in a lot of situations. Now, the reason I want to talk about all of this actually has to do with a really bonker story in

tech right now. It's about a software developer conference that now has been canceled entirely at least for this year, due to what appears to be a misguided attempt to make the conference lineup seem more diverse. So before we get into the whole diversity issue. I want to talk a little bit about the concept of open source. Christine Peterson gets the credit for coming up with the term open source on February third, nineteen ninety eight. The idea, however,

is actually much older than that. In fact, before that it was called sort of free software, but that made people think of just software that was made so that anyone could get the software right, they wouldn't have to pay for it. Free software, though, was meant to be this concept about people freely being able to access everything about the software, not just the program itself, but it's

source code anyway. The basic idea is that an open source project is one that is publicly viewable and modifiable. Open source projects don't have to exclusively be about software, but that's kind of where the concept grew out of. Also, with a true open source project, this isn't the case for every single one. There are different variations of these, but with one that's truly open source, anyone can distribute it. So you take the code and then you can distribute

the code as a program. You can modify it and distribute your variation of that program. There are lots of different examples of this. Linux is a great example of this anyway. It's a sort of communal approach to software development, and the idea is that the community benefits because the community gets to participate in the actual process of creating the stuff. Now, if you contrast this with the way most companies work, then you have a much more closed system.

That's where you lock development down behind the closed doors of your company. Apple is a great example of this because the company has famously tried to close off a lot of its ecosystems over the years. Not so much today, at least not as much as it used to, but yeah,

it really forged its reputation on this approach. So here, you do all the development behind closed doors with your own staff, and then you release your finished application for purchase or whatever, and the IP of the software remains the property of the company. Right the public is not allowed to access the source code or modify it in any way. The only way the public gets access to anything is to purchase a copy of the program. So

the open source approach has some interesting potential benefits. So one is that by opening up development to the general public, well that means everyone can contribute to it and you get lots of different branches off the same basic project, you can have a lot more folks looking over the code and looking for vulnerabilities and bugs. So people could be looking at it from all different angles, and it means that you can very rapidly develop patches for bugs

and vulnerabilities to address issues before they become a real problem. So, in an ideal situation, an open source project will keep the features that work and then gradually ditch features that don't work, and it can be a very laborious process. It's not necessarily super fast, but it also tends to be less expensive than relegating a project to a single author, whether that author is like literally one person or a

company in charge of creating the software. Another way to look at this is to consider how in an open source project, the smartest and most talented developers can potentially take part, no matter where they are or who they work for, or perhaps if you want to be a little more egalitarian about all this, you could say developers who complement one another with their strengths, like one developer's

strengths covers another one's weaknesses. With open source projects, you have this huge community of developers who do that and together they can build a really great product. But in a company that's using its own proprietary methods and its own closed off system, the company is limited by the talent contained within the organization. They might produce great software,

but there's a cap on resources there. Right, they are only going to ever be as great as the strength of their team, and their team is limited by the people who work within that organization, whereas with open source, there is no limit on the team. It's literally anyone who wants to participate. That doesn't necessarily mean that open source is always going to be better than a closed project.

That's not the case. It doesn't always mean that the software that emerges from an open source project is going to be useful. Right, Sometimes it's not, But open source projects do enjoy benefits that closed projects simply do not have access to. Now, this again relates to the concept

of diversity. So one way to look at diversity and representation within any industry, but we're specifically focusing on tech, is to say, I wish to address the inherent disparity that's in this organization by fixing the problem of underrepresentation. Like in a lot of tech companies, it's no secret especially here in the United States, and a lot of tech companies here in the US, the vast majority of employees, but really of like management and executive levels, tends to

be white dudes. And it really kind of is an issue, right, It's not just kind of an issue, It is an issue. And this point perspective on diversity. It underlines the unfairness present in a lot of organizations where the demographics of the company might be well out of alignment with the overall population demographics. And there are countless examples of systemic issues that have contributed to this situation. I'm not saying that companies have consciously pursued this and have tried to

make these organizations be dominated by white men. That's not what I'm saying. There are a lot of elements that have contributed to this being sort of a status quo, and some of those our big social problems like racism or sexism or some other ingrained social barrier that then plays out all the way through the process of the creation of these companies. And again, it's not a conscious choice necessarily, it's something that's the product of a lot

of other elements. But the result is we have organizations that effectively discriminate against people in certain categories. And I think a lot of folks would say that having rules that are even you know, perhaps un spoken or unwritten, that deny someone an opportunity based solely on who they are just isn't right. But there's also another way that we can look at diversity. It's a very different perspective, but it's just as important, which is diversity creates the

opportunity for organizations to benefit from multiple perspectives. So if you staff an entire company with like minded folks and they all share similar backgrounds and similar ideologies, you'll probably be pretty effective in producing whatever it is you make. You'll be good at that, but you're not nearly as likely to be super innovative and transformative because you're not

bringing new ideas to the table. When you do bring together different perspectives that have been shaped by very different life experiences, that can really inspire creativity. It can also head off massive problems. Case in point, We've talked about this a lot on the show, but like facial recognition software, we have shown over many cases it is disproportionately inaccurate for people of color and for women compared to how

accurate it is for say, white men. And because you have agencies like law enforcement agencies depending upon these technologies, their dependence on those technologies is causing disproportionate harm in these communities of people of color. And that's a real problem. And one way to approach this problem is to have more diversity in the actual process of developing the technologies so that those unintentional biases that get built into these

systems are addressed before it gets to deployment. But that doesn't just magically happen. You need to have these different perspectives in order to actually get momentum on these things. Now, I really do believe that diversity isn't just important to address historic imbalances. I do. I think that is important. I think we do need to address historic imbalances in the various areas of society and culture that we experience on a daily basis. But it also gives organizations the

chance to make better products and reach new customers. It gives the opportunity for new ideas to take hold in an organization, and that can fuel all sorts of innovation. Often wonder how many amazing ideas have we never had the chance to benefit from simply because there were systemic barriers that kept the people who had those ideas from

being able to contribute. Right, Just imagine that. Imagine how further along we would be if everyone who had great ideas had had a chance to make those ideas into something. But because we have these systemic issues in place, they were prevented from doing so. I think that is a huge tragedy. It's to the detriment of everyone. It's just the person who had the idea, but everyone who could have benefited from that idea. All right, we're going to

take a quick break. When we come back, i'll talk more about diversity representation and this crazy story about the tech conference. But first, let's thank our sponsors. Okay, we are now up to that terrible word I hate optics. So again I'm talking about how people perceive things. Sometimes organizations will pursue diversity and representation projects not to actually address unfairness or to encourage new ideas, but rather so that they appear to the outside world to be concerned

about that kind of thing. So, in other words, they'll do the base level, not even the base level of effort for face value, just to get the benefit of the public seeing the organization as being fair and evolved while not actually doing much to support these concepts internally. So here's an example. A company might designate someone to be head diversity officer, but then that person might have few if any resources to actually do anything meaningful within

the organization. So on paper, the company says, of course, we're concerned about diversity and representation, because we even have a manager with that job title. Here's the person right here. Meanwhile, the corporate status inside the organization remains largely unchanged. That optics thing is a real doozy, and it obviously affects organizations across all contexts and industries. In tech, we can see it affecting lots of different people. Often we see

it centering on women. Now, it's no secret that women are underrepresented in the tech industry. The World Bank estimates that forty nine point seven percent of the world's population is female. Here in the United States, actually make up fifty point five percent of the population, and yet if we look at the tech industry, we see that women hold only around twenty eight percent of the jobs in

mathematical and computational fields here in the US. Now, that's still way ahead of the EU where women make up nineteen point one percent of the workforce, and information and communication technologies, and part of that disparity might come down to some bigger picture stuff rather than just inherent unfairness in the industry. I don't want to say that's the end all bel issue. These are big, big challenges and

they have lots of factors that affect them. So for example, according to the Women Tech Network, only forty seven percent of the world's population of women are actually in the global workforce to begin with, so more than half of all women are not in the global workforce. To get into why that is would take a lot of digressions, and obviously it involves lots of different factors in different countries all around the world, so it gets very complicated.

But it is a contributing factor that when you look at the full population of women, less than half of

them are in the global workforce. But another issue is that traditionally, especially here in the United States, women have been discouraged from pursuing an education in or a career in fields like mathematics, computer science, engineering, etc. In concert with this is a social tendency that we think of these kinds of jobs as being male oriented, and so there's this social tendency to discourage women from considering opportunities

in what are traditionally referenced as STEM subjects. Now, of course, there's still plenty of women who study and excel at subjects like math and engineering. There are still lots of women who go on to forge amazing careers undeterred by

any social hurdles that are in the way. But the point I'm making is that there are these social hurdles where there aren'traditionally for men, and that is one of the many factors that then contributes to this lower percentage of women within the industry, which in turn ends up contributing to lots of other issues like sexism in the workplace, which you know, we've talked a lot about that on this show too, because there are a lot of tech

companies that have had some high profile scandals revolving around, you know, sexism in the workforce. Now, breaking down these barriers is a really challenging and ongoing process. There is no easy solution to it. And I'm not here to tell you that companies just need to flip a switch and everything will be fine. That's not true. There's a lot of work to be done, and it goes beyond

any one organization. We're talking about massive changes that are going to take years to really take hold and start to affect things like social concepts that have been deeply ingrained in various cultures. But part of that means that

you're also ensure diversity in industry events. So if you go to a big tech conference and you see that all the listed speakers are white dudes, you're probably going to walk away thinking this conference has really reinforced the idea that white men are somehow the natural dominant group in tech, Like there's some sort of just inclination in white men to be really good at tech, and that's why it's the way it is. It's not that there's an inherent unfairness in the system. White guys are just

good at technology. That is not really true. I mean, let me just remind you that the first person to suggest that numbers and mathematical operations could represent things like music and images was Ada Lovelace, a nineteenth century mathematician who also happened to be a woman. She was amazing. So the people who are having these phenomenal ideas are not just white men. Sure, there are white men who do have phenomenal ideas, but there are people of color

who have phenomenal ideas. There are women who have phenomenal ideas. They're all sorts whose voices aren't necessarily being heard. So again, if you go to a conference and all the speakers are white dudes, that's reinforcing the stereotype that tech is a place for white men, or just if you want to be slightly less reductive men in general. Anyway, with the growing awareness of the disparities in tech, there has been a push for conferences to include speakers who represent

groups other than white dudes. So there's a lot of pressure on conferences and the companies that throw these conferences to make sure that there's greater representation in their lineup of keynote speakers. Now, I'm sure that for most conferences there's actual a mix of sincere desire to represent different perspectives as well as a concern for optics. I'm not here to tell you every conference out there is just scram to get some token representation on their list so

that the pressure is off. I mean, I'm sure that's part of it, and I'm sure for some conferences it might even be the majority part of it. But I also bet there are plenty of people who are genuinely working to get a diverse lineup, not because it's going to look good for the conference, but because it's going to deliver the best message that ends up being the really valuable experience that people walk away from that in turn ends up benefiting not just the speaker, not just

the audience, but the conference itself. So again, it's the bet to go on because it's the one that pays off the best for everybody involved. So I hope that most conferences aren't consumed with the concept of making good optics. But that brings us up to the weird story that happened this week or that unfolded this week. So there's a developer conference called Devternity, and it was scheduled to

take place online next week. Actually, the conference originates out of Latvia and typically includes several keynote sessions followed by workshops. From what I understand, the conference has attracted several hundreds of guests or or rather attendees in the past, but then an investigation by four h four Media kind of set off a series of events that prompted the company behind this event to cancel it. And it all has to do with diversity and representation. I rambled on a

little long. We're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I'll explain more. Okay, so let's go back and talk about dev Ternity. The founder of that conference is a man named Edwards Zobs and I am going to butcher names. Terrible at pronunciation in general, even of English words, and Eastern European is just going to make it even more comically inept. But that's my fault anyway. As conferences go, Defternity really is kind of a modest size.

I mean, a few hundred attendees. That's no slouch, but it's very small compared to the big events that happen in other parts of the world. But Sizov's appears to have been very good at securing at least some prominent male speakers for the conference, but it seems he was less effective at convincing prominent women in the field to follow suit. Now, one explanation he gives, or if you prefer, an excuse that he gives, is that there are fewer

notable women in the tech space already. Right, we already talked about the aforementioned issues with diversity and representation in the industry. There is no denying there are fewer women in the industry than there are men. Further, he says, these notable women are in high demand. That you have hundreds or thousands of tech conferences, all of which are trying to put forth the effort of being more diverse. And meanwhile, you have a relatively small pool of notable

women speakers who could attend your conference. So you have this issue where maybe you can't secure a significant number of women to appear at your conference. So if that, in fact is the case that led to this, it meant there was a real problem for devternity, right. They just couldn't schedule enough prominent women developers to create a diverse lineup of speakers. So what do you do if you can't find qualified speakers to headline your event? Well,

how about you invent some people. So allegedly that's what Sizov's chose to do. On twenty four, twenty twenty three, an engineer named gregly aroz And again apologize for the pronunciation, posted to x that is the platform formerly known as Twitter, and said quote, imagine a tech conference having no CFP as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech and three women speakers. Now, imagine my surprise that two

of those women are fake profiles. They do not exist, nada end quote. Yikes. So his accusation was a really serious one. I mean, a conference posting even a single fake profile for a keynote speaker would be a huge gamble because it's really just a matter of time before someone does even a little bit of digging and then finds out that the keynote speaker who is listed on a website doesn't appear to you know, actually exist. And apparently Devternity had done it twice. But wait, it gets weirder.

So a supposed pair of women who worked for Coinbase named Anna Boyko and Natalie Stradler were listed among the speakers for this Devternity conference, but according to Oroz, they don't actually exist. Further, Roz said that a woman named Elena Procada, a Prokoda supposedly a senior engineer for wasapp, was also most likely fictional. He said he couldn't prove it, but that he pointed out this person who's supposedly the senior engineer or a senior engineer for WhatsApp had no

online profiles except for one. There's only one online profile for this woman, and that was her profile as a speaker for another conference called JD. Cohn jdkon. And it's the same company that puts on JD Cohn that puts on Devternity. The two conferences are run by the same organization. So could it be that this underlying organization was just manufacturing women to make it seem like their lineup was

more diverse. But it gets weirder. So then Sizov's responds to Oroz's accusation and admits that at least one of the profiles that had been listed for Devternity was a fake profile. But Sizov said there was a good reason for this. They originally created the fake profile for the purposes of testing the website early on. That this was just to make sure the formatting and everything was attractive, that it looked the way and behave the way they

wanted it to. So they built a fake profile for that purposes and then they just plane darn forgot to delete the fake profile, and that when and he found this out back in October that this fake profile was still up on the site while the conference was approaching.

He decided to keep it up there because he was trying to get an actual, real human woman developer to fill a spot on the speaker list, and then presumably he would have swapped out the fake profile for the real profile of the person who had agreed to be a speaker at Devternity, except he couldn't get a real life woman to agree to that. He also mentioned that one person who had dropped out of the event ahead of time was a tech influencer named Julia Kirsina who

uses the handle coding Unicorn on Instagram. So on Instagram she had more than one hundred and fifteen thousand followers, although when I tried to check that today I couldn't access it at all. It was giving me an error message. Now, to be fair, I don't I'm not on Instagram anymore. So I was just using the web based portal to look at this, and it could be that that was where the problem was. So y'all, if you want to check and see if Coding Unicorn is still on Instagram,

feel free anyway. The profile shows an attractive young woman who often is posing with computers and stuff. Some of the posts show her being rather flirty or sexy, and apparently she had previously agreed to appear at Defternity but had to drop out. Actually, she had been listed to appear at previous conferences, but as far as investigators or rather journalists could find, she never actually gave any speeches.

So this was someone who had been listed to appear at conferences in the past and then apparently just never showed up. And further investigation suggested that the reason for this is that there is no Julia Kirsina. One journalist reached out to her supposed alma mater to verify that she had in fact attended that particular university and achieved a degree in the subject that was listed in her profile, and was told that there was no record of such

a student. So that's a big red flag. And other investigations suggested that the account coding unicorn isn't run by a woman at all, but rather by and I bet some of you have guessed this already, Sizov's the guy who organized the Defternity conference in the first place. Now, to be clear, as I record this, he hasn't said that he was behind that account. But several folks appointed to signs that indicate he's very much involved in that.

Everything from IP address logs that suggest he was the one controlling Coding Unicorn to the fact that posts that he made on his own social profiles ended up being repurposed as posts in the Coding Unicorn account. That's a suggestion that, you know, it's one person who's just doing all this. So it's led more than a few people to accuse him of catfishing, of creating this account to

try and create credibility where there is non. Now, in the wake of these discoveries, a bunch of speakers withdrew from Defternity, and now the event appears to be shut down this year. If you go to the website, it says the event will not go on as planned as for jd Con twenty twenty four, which is the next event for that particular conference. I'm not sure if that

event is going to move forward or not. When I try to check the website while I was working on this episode, it was just giving me an error message that there was no site there. So right now I imagine they're kind of in damage control. At the very least. One thing that makes the Defternity story even worse is that the conference has what calls a Hollywood policy, as in don't call up, We'll call you, which means they

don't accept submissions from potential speakers. Instead, Defternity says it reaches out to people to ask them to be part of the conference, they don't accept submissions. This is what Gregly was referencing earlier when he said there was no CFP. There's no way to submit yourself to be considered as speaker, and I imagine that severely limits the number of people Devternity could consider for the conference. It probably means that the organization only targets a small pool of potential speakers

every year. It's impossible to be aware of everyone who's doing great workout there. So this issue is one that I think largely could have been avoided if they had just used a submissions policy and accepted submissions and started to look through which ones are qualified and interesting. Anyway, I want to conclude this episode by once again stressing that diversity is a good thing for everybody if if

it's handled properly. If you're just doing it for the optics, chances are you're not really making things better for anyone, and in fact, you could just be setting yourself up for a big pr nightmare at the very least. But if you do it right, if you do it with intention and sincerity, and you're willing to learn from mistakes and correct those mistakes, and you really push for it, you can bring in and boost points of view that will benefit the organization as a whole, and all boats

get lifted as a result. And even if you are obsessed with optics, well, it sure does look good when a company handles diversity and representation in a sincere and dedicated way. So you still achieve that goal. Yeah, it's a lot of work, and it's ongoing work. It's not, again, something that's just easily done. It requires tons of revision and correction and real dedication. But the benefits are huge

for all concerned. So again, interesting tech story. I think it brings up something important that all organizations really need to consider, and hopefully was at least interesting because golly, when I read about devternity and this apparently fake Instagram influencer and all of these things, it just made my head spin. It's been quite a couple of weeks for

weird tech news. Y'all. I guess people are really deciding to let it out for the end of twenty twenty three, so tomorrow we should have another news episode of tech Stuff. I just want to let y'all know, if you hadn't heard already, I am going on vacation next week. So next week we are going to have some classic episodes

and maybe some other surprises in there. But just wanted to make you aware of that and that I will be back the following week and then we'll be heading into the holiday season, so we'll see how that goes. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.