Devternity! Did this tech conference create fake women to look more diverse?

You know this about me. I love a good scam. I love scam content, scam podcasts. Give me all the scams. I mean, don't scam me, but I want to be not involved in the scam. And then hear about how the scam unfolded. So what can be like, Oh, that's how they did it.

Is that inclusion a gimmick? Is it done to take the heat off criticism?

speakers tended to be white men. And to deal with that, Edwards, the organizer, allegedly decided to flesh out their lineup by tapping into the existing pool of really talented marginalized people who have been building and shaking things up in tech for a very long time. Oh wait, no, no, no, that's not what he did. That would be a normal thing to do. What he actually did was flesh out that lineup by creating AI generated women speakers to add to the lineup. And as if that's not bad enough, like

that's already pretty bad. It doesn't stop there, because in addition to creating those phony women to speak at his conference, it was also revealed that Edwards had been running this entire like fake female tech influencer Catfish Enterprise, and had been doing so for years. Unsurprisingly, the entire thing was full of drama and honestly, like, I don't think I have ever seen anything unfold quite like this in this before,

So let's get into it. So this all started when engineer Gurgly Orzos was looking into the lineup at deb Trinity after a couple of his colleagues were asked to speak there. He started looking into the lineup and became a little bit suspicious of two of the women's speakers listed.

So these two women's speakers had been listed as coming from a pretty prominent tech company Coinbase, which is like a cryptocurrency exchange platform, and a boyco who was on the speaker's page listed as a staff engineer at Coinbase, and Natalie Slash Natalia. Sometimes it's Natalie, sometimes it's Italia Stadler,

who was listed as a software craftswoman at Coinbase. So one of these women who was listed as working at Coinbase said that she was also affiliated with Ethereum, a type of cryptocurrency, and Girkley was like, it's a little bit odd that somebody would be speaking at a conference representing both Coinbase, a cryptocurrency platform, and also a type

of cryptocurrency. He was like, that didn't seem right to me, So he got suspicious and looked into it, and that's when he found that these women did not seem to exist. They don't have any kind of social presence beyond what appears on the conference website. Gurgly tweeted, imagine a tech conference having no call for proposals. As they reach out to speakers directly, they successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter male speakers in tech and three women speakers.

Now imagine my surprise that two of those women are fake profiles. They do not exist, nada. So I gotta really give it to Gurgley here. He must have sniffed out that something was fishy and then like just held it like nursed it like a grudge and held on to it like a dog with a bone. Because dude did his homework. He found web archives that go back to twenty twenty one that list these two non existent

women as speakers at Debternity. One of them also spoke or at least was listed as a speaker back in twenty twenty two as well. In the aftermath of all this, Gurgley really did some deep digging. He found a tweet from twenty twenty one publicly calling out the conference for

having a mostly male lineup. On August third, twenty twenty one, Mattie Stratton, a director of developer relations, tweeted, good thing I'm not tweeting about tech this week, or else I might have to call out de Trinity for pretty much having all white dudes as speakers. Given who they listed at the top, it doesn't surprise me at all. So then Julia Kurshina, also known as Coding Unicorn, who calls herself one of the conference co founders, replies, remember Julia's

name because she is going to become important. Later, Julia replies to Matti's sweet saying, Hi, matt Julia from the deft Trinity team here, thanks for raising this out of the fourteen invited female speakers, three confirmed, two canceled as we had to postpone to survive COVID. There is a lot to improve, so you can advise on how to make the line up better. Let's chat. I'll send you

a DM. So this very same day that Mattie calls out de Trinity for having an all male lineup August third, twenty twenty one, is when de Trinity also coincidentally adds their very first fake woman speaker. As I said, Gurgley brought receipts. The Defternity conference website has a public GitHub repo. GitHub is a place online where developers can show other folks that they're working on where you could see the

full edit history of the conference website. So he included a screenshot showing the specific changes to the website and the date of those changes. Confirms that Natalia Sladder, software craftswoman at Coinbase, was added a few hours after Maddie's complaint of the lack of diversity of the conference, two hours to be exact. In that edit, Julia, the conference co founder, was also added to the speaker's lineup. So I don't know that seems pretty suspicious like that timing.

not Exist. Overall, Gurgley found four non existent people who are all women listed as speakers on this conference website since they were called out for their lack of women speakers back in twenty twenty one. Gurglely writes on his website, I decided to share that this conference advertises fake speakers and has done so for years. This statement is easily verifiable by anybody in the same way that I did.

I have not seen this type of deceit at any other conference, and I've seen enough that I didn't want to keep quiet, and honestly, like I got a major shout outs to Gurgle here, we will throw the piece on his website with all of his receipts in the show notes for folks to check out. You definitely should.

But one of the questions that Gurgley does ask is that he got suspicious when he saw this lineup, and that he doesn't believe that he is the only person who got suspicious, Like he doesn't think he was the only person to be like looking at these people up. These women were listed as working for very prominent tech companies, and so certainly somebody has like looked them up on

LinkedIn or whatever for whatever reason. Is like, I'm the only person who decided to speak up about it who didn't want to keep quiet, And even that, to me is really interesting, Like I don't know what's really going on there, but it almost makes me wonder if the vast majority of people at this conference didn't think the women speakers were worth really paying attention to so let alone like investigating, throwing them into a quick Google search whatever.

Maybe they were just like prominent male name in tech, prominent mail name in tech, prominent male name in tech, some useless chick, some useless chick, prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech. Like maybe it didn't even register to them to be paying attention to the women speakers, what organizations they represented in what they were talking about. Maybe it didn't even register to be looking at them all that closely because like they maybe they just like

didn't value them in the same way. That's just my theory, because I do agree with Gurgley here that certainly he cannot be the first person who have uncovered this, and it did not take a very substantial amount of digging to find out that these people weren't necessarily real. So like, what's going on?

wrong or misreading something. I respect that Gurgle is the kind of person who was like, I'm taking this to social media right away because something is not right.

It is super long, Like it's still up on Twitter if folks want to, We'll link to the whole thing, but like, I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but I will get into a couple of key bits. So, first of all, Edward says that, oh no, it is not him who has done something wrong. He heavily implies that Gurgly must be the bad guy. Why because Gurgley took to social media to talk about this in the

first place. Rather than I guess like contacting him directly privately, which means that Gurgley just wants attention, he just wants clout. He's jealous, he's trying to take me down. Edwards writes, I won't be responding directly to mister Rozov's accusation and won't even link to it here, given that he didn't even bother contact in me and sharing his concerns. He went straight to socials and, using the power of his social network, shared all his assumptions without validating them, damaging

my life's work and reputation. I don't know what his intention was, but harm has been done, nothing good, only harm. So yeah, it's Gurgle who is the bad guy. Because Gurgley decided to like ask what's happening, to use his platform on social media to ask some really good questions that need answers, That alone is evidence of Gurgley being the bad guy and try being out to get Edwards.

Edwards also uses some pretty choice language defending himself. He writes, alex A blain to you what happened, and then you decide if my life's work and the upcoming event deserved to be ruined and I ought to be lynched. The use of the word lynched there is a choice. It will not be the last time he uses that word

to reference what's going on in the situation. So then he kind of gets into his explanation of what's going on, which is that basically it was a mistake, a mistake that he realized happened, but then this didn't have time

to fix, he says. So he claims that Natalie's name and profile was auto generated with a random title, random Twitter handle, and random picture, and that he realized that this was happening and it was a mistake that he intended to fix it, but then he realized that it wasn't going to be a quick fix, and that quote, it's better to have that demo persona while I'm searching for replacement speakers. And first of all, like I am no developer, so like, maybe it's not a quick fix.

Maybe it takes to fix this. I cannot speak for whether or not that's true. It does sound like bullshit to me, but I don't know. But I have to say, even if that is true, like even if what he said we take him at his word, it is still in my book, pretty deceitful because you're asking people to pay eight hundred dollars when you know the lineup that

you are advertising publicly could not possibly come to fruition. Like, what if I'm really interested in whatever this fake person Natalie has to say and her line, like her line of work and her expertise, and I spend money, I plunk down eight hundred dollars to see her speak because I'm interested in her, and you advertise her as a speaker. That would be deceitful. And it's interesting to me how he, in his like explanation, glosses over that so quickly.

I was looking for a replacement. This partially led to an accusation that since they're not part of the schedule. We've probably added them just to meet arbitrary diversity criterias. This statement is bold and unfair. Sandy and Julia confirmed their participation. They should have been part of the final schedule, but dropped out for reasons out of our control at the worst possible time. Ask Sandy or Julia. So we

ended up with only one female speaker, Chris. So while I was looking for a last minute replacement hoping i'd find it, Sandy and Julia were still mentioned on the website. So I have to say some of these people did end up being real. Christine Howard, who is the head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services, confirmed a foural four media that she had agreed to speak and that

she does exist. Sandy Metz is a real person who four or four media confirmed did agree to speak and had to drop out because she was getting nee surgery.

The conference founder keeps repeating this like very weird point in his defense that none of the fake women ever actually made it onto the final lineup, And I don't totally know what he means there, but I think that what he is saying is that even though these women weren't actually speaking, and they were listed as speakers that they didn't actually show up to speak, and so like nobody was duped, but like, of course they didn't show up to speak, they're not real people.

circumstances beyond their control. But that circumstance was that she wanted to be an organizer rather than a speaker, So like that also does it make sense?

fix than he had previously indicated. Like the reason why he said that he couldn't he was aware of this mistake on the website but couldn't fix it is because it was not a quick fix, but apparently quick enough that it could be taken care of within a day of this going viral on Twitter.

what lynching is like. I would like to sit him down and ask him what he thinks it entails. So not only is this, in my opinion, like deeply unethical behavior, from the perspective of people being asked to pay eight up to eight hundred dollars to attend this conference with a fake lineup. It also really sucks for the other speakers.

Scott Hanselman, who is a very well respected person in the space who cares a lot about things like inclusion and diversity in tech, was slated to speak but pulled out after all this happened, tweeted this whole conference debacle is so disappointing. Speakers like myself, when invited to a conference, will immediately say who all's going to be there? I've my rules for participation posted on my site, including an

inclusive lineup for years. I was duped by fake speakers also, and so it's pretty bad when people who have made it their thing to use their like Scott Hanselman is a white man. The fact that he is someone who is like intentionally using his privilege and his reputation and his background to try to help inclusion in the space and like do what he can to make it more inclusive by saying, yeah, if you want me to speak at your event, it has to be inclusive. Giving that

incentive for organizers to make their spaces inclusive. It doesn't work if these organizers just lie and just make up who is who is going to be on the lineup. David Heinemeir Hansen, the creator of Rubyon Rails, was also slated to speak and pulled out, and he said that he he asked for his name to be removed from the lineup website, a request that was not honored. Oosh.

I mean, I have to say, if I had all of these like big name, high profile people in the tech space dragging me like this, I would just be more. This is like like I had nothing to do with this, and I'm embarrassed for Edwards, you know, like this would be mortifying to me.

professional gig. But it's just like the aesthetic trappings of coding so far as I can tell, Like maybe there's more to it, but like the sense that one gets from looking at the social accounts is not that there's like deep important wisdom, uh and new stuff being revealed at this conference, but it's really just esthetics and social aspects of being a coder developer, and so the loss of these high profile people that that's got to like really sting, right because it seems like the whole thing

is built on big names and credibility and uh starfucking.

is like debternity, this is a conference people attend. There are lanyards like It's like what they're telling me is like, this is definitely a tech conference that people go to. Like they're not telling me what I will learn, what the space feels like, like why I want to show up there. It's like they're more interested in the flash and surface appearance of a slick tech conference, but it feels completely surface level.

Coding Unicorn, the conference co founder. So Julia was slated to be a speaker at dep Trinity in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, and twenty twenty three. She was the person who was supposed to speak, but then moved up to be an organizer, so she couldn't speak, And we think that maybe that's a BS but whatever, She is also a pretty established tech influencer. Her Instagram account, called

Coding Unicorn, goes back to twenty eighteen. She has one hundred and twenty thousand followers on her account, where her bio reads the best coding account on Instagram. Hi, my name is Julia. I am a professional software developer posting nobs coding career and productivity tips and a dep Trinity fan. She's done your basic like influencer stuff. She does giveaways,

raffles on her platform, all that stuff. Her pictures show her presumably working on code and really looking hot, like showing a lot of cleavage and just generally kind of like being a tech hottie while really hyping up devternity events and conferences. But and here's the big reveal, she's not even real. It doesn't look like foural four Media

looked into it. They found ip logs that seem to indicate Edwards inviting and then logging into an account belonging to Coding Unicorn, which is Julia's social media handle, so basically just like logging in as her. A YouTube video posted last year by Edwards that had five views when foal four Media accessed it showed him logged into his own email accounts, as well as one for Coding Unicorn. Many of Coding Unicorn's posts are just copied and pasted

from Edwards's LinkedIn or Instagram without any attribution. Edwards also pretty explicitly admits that he is the one responsible for the Coding Unicorn account on his LinkedIn profile, saying I devote most of my time to growing the most popular coding account on Instagram with one hundred and twenty k followers, coding Unicorn, without elaborating on exactly what that entails. So this is pretty confusing. I think it's time we heard from Julia herself. Hi, everybody, it's good in unicorn here.

into tech? Nine years ago? My parents forced me to go to college and get a computer science degree. They wanted me to find a nice, quiet office job because I was a problem kid, a school rebel. I didn't fulfill my parents' dreams. I am still a rebel, but one with a computer science degree. So tell me that does not sound like like a fantasy version of a

woman working in tech, Like I'm a rebel. The reason why I became a programmer is because my parents were looking for me to settle down and find a nice, quiet job to stay out of trouble.

mindset turns men into suspects. Men suffer from biases equal to women. Think of job interviews, we give too much attention to gender bias and appreciate other cognition biases, such as doubt avoidance, where we make an ill decision just to avoid uncertainty or reject a person that doesn't look nice enough. Julia's advice for women to deal with gender

bias stop blaming others for being biased, improve yourself. So, yeah, it reads to me like this fantasy, fictionalized version of a woman in tech who doesn't think that there's any kind of gender bias. It is not even interested in talking about it. Certainly it would not say that she has faced it herself, and it's only interested in improving her. Like that just reads like a woman invented by a man.

twenty twenty. The person who runs lobster said, I remember being creeped out of the effort involved and choice to use Instagram glamour shots. It was just the one profile when I saw him, and I'm kind of stunned that

He's not just continued, but multiplied his efforts again. Many of Julia's Instagram posts were copied word for word from Edwards's own social media accounts, and The Verge looked into the university where Julia claims to have attended for her bachelor's degree in information technology on her LinkedIn, and the university said that they do not indicate any records of a student with her name. I'm also like ninety nine percent sure that it is not even the same woman

in every picture. It's like just a hot woman with dark hair and ample cleavage and every picture. But I genuinely like, I went back to the very first post back in twenty eighteen, and I genuinely think they are different people the woman who is used back in twenty eighteen when the account first starts, looks very different from the woman that is used today. They both have brown hair and ample bosom, but that is pretty much where

the similarities end. Will put a link to a couple of pictures of Julia from her Instagram in the show notes, and honestly, you can be the judge. Let me know if you think this is legit, these are all the same women, or if you think something is going on and this is kind of complicated, Like I want to make sure that I am speaking about this carefully, but we need to talk about the way that Julia presents

physically on Instagram. Like it's clear that he is going for a specific kind of look with the way that Julia looks on social media, Like she's very conventionally attractive. In all of her pictures, she's posed to look like I saw somebody describe it as almost like a booth babe kind of way, where the cleavage is very prominent. The poses are all kind of like like I wouldn't call them sexualized, but they're definitely meant to highlight her

physicality and her looks and her figure. And it's this very specific kind of almost like an uncanny valley kind of hot where she is in these very clearly posed staged pictures that look kind of fake that could not possibly be depicting a real area where she's like really working like this is. This might sound minor, but one of the things about her is that she talks quite a bit about how being a developer means that she can travel the world, doesn't have a boss, she can

work from whatever exotic locale that she wants. So in one picture, she's meant to be working from like someplace like an exotic beach of some kind, and she's holding one of those big, giant coconuts where they just chop the top off and put a straw in it and then you're drinking it. Not the small ones, the big ones. So if you've ever had one of those, you know that they're like they're coconuts, and so the bottom is

round it it's not flat. You couldn't put it on a table like you would a normal beverage container that has a flat bottom. It's rounded. It's a coconut. So she's holding it in one hand and working on her laptop with another. In what world with somebody whose computer is the main thing they work on beholding a tippy beverage that you cannot sit down while also working one handed on their laptop. I don't buy it never happening.

as a free thinker. In one post, she talks about her favorite podcast. Can you guess who she lists as one of her favorite podcasts?

he has. So if they're ever looking for a replacement host that show, they could call us because we know how to do it too. So I think that Julia is like this caricature of a certain type of man's dream woman, or like the kind of thing that a male programmer might cook up in his head, his fantasy as a woman in tech. You know, if you've ever seen the movie Gone Girl, it's like the cool girl persona but for tech right, like she's cool, she doesn't, She's not a feminist, she has a foul mouth. Loves

Joe Rogan thinks your sexist jokes are really cute. Loves Elon musks like. I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist. I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man in his head. And it really reminds me of something that an influencer with a very large male following once told me. She told me that if your audience is men, like if you're trying to curate men as your audience and it's men who are consuming your content on Instagram, those men are imagining themselves with you.

So you can't have like other men in your image. You can't have anything that would ruin the illusion that they could be with you. You can't have that in your images. So I think whoever is running Julia's account, I think it's probably Edwards is doing so in this way that very much lets techy guys imagine that they could be traveling the world with this like beautiful, foul mouthed, nerdy woman who only wants to talk about leveling up

her tech skills while wearing like a bikini. Right, Like, this Julia account is for men, Like I think that. When I first saw it, I thought like, oh, this is an account that's trying to boost representation for women in tech. Looking at it again, it's like, no, No, this is an account for men. This is an account that is trying to be a place where male programmers gather, like come for the cheesecake, cleavage shots, stay for my pithy musings on programming and culture. One commenter on Julia's

instagram put it really well. They said, I thought this group is about programming, but it appears to be a group of horny dudes drooling over a girl that always pose right next to a laptop, which I thought was really funny. So apparently me and that commenter are not the only ones who are suspicious. In a twenty twenty comment that Julia left on Hacker News, she actually spoke to the idea of people not thinking that she is real.

But peep how she twists this around about making it a response to a dig about how women can't be programmers, not whether or not she exists at all. In her comment on Hacker News, she writes as a female developer with sixty k followers on Instagram. I went through all of this, programmers. Don't look like that. You're fake, some dude writes on your content. Are you a model or a coder? Bullies are not the happiest people on the planet.

Some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents in schools, etc. I discovered the hard way when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate the hardest and probably why this solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works.

how dev turnity. It seems like a kind of shallow representation of a tech conference, right. I think that Edwards hoarded for himself that tech persona guy like I see it a lot on Twitter since Elon Musk took over somebody who was always trying to like maximize their games and like gamify success and always giving you like eight rules for productivity, eight hacks for this, like things that aren't even necessarily about tech always, I think, like a

general influencer on tech but also life. Like that's what I think that he wanted to be, and he or he thought like, I need to do this. It'll be successful for me if I do this, you know, not just about tech, but about what books to read, how to think about culture. So in twenty sixteen, Edwards' Instagram is pretty normal, right, Like it's pictures of his family, pretty normal pictures of himself, pictures of himself with like a lightsaber from Star Wars or with a Game of

Thrones characters. But around twenty eighteen, his pictures sort of change. They become a lot more polished and a lot more influencery. For lack of a better word, he really is like marketing himself as a tech luminary. He's taking pictures of the books that he's reading. He's you know, in captions, giving life advice about tech and life and leveling up.

And I think that he must have done this for a little bit of time and maybe not seen success or growth, and then sometime in twenty eighteen he creates Julia's page. Now, the first few pictures on Julia's Instagram account, interestingly, don't show Julia's face right. They're just like disembodied body parts, like in one at the close up of her cleavage holding a book about programming called Elegant Objects up against

her chest. In another, it's just her feet while she's like got a laptop on her lap in some In many of them, she is using her hands to obscure her face or like has her face down. Honestly, I think that Covid was probably like beneficial to these people because in a lot of the images post Covid you see Julia wearing a face mask, and so I think they were like, oh, great, we've got a reason to not show her face. And so, you know, at first, I was thinking about how deeply insulting this entire thing

is to women in tech. You know, this idea that says that being a woman in tech means like wearing a bikini that says GitHub on it and showing off your body while there's like a laptop vaguely in the background or whatever. But I also want to say that, like, not only is it incredibly insulting to women, and it's also incredibly insulting to men. I think, like, I think that Edwards thinks that men are so horny and stupid that they won't even notice that it is not the

same woman in every picture. Like, they are so stupid and horny that if you create a fictional version of their own fantasy that is just projecting their desires back at them, they will be invested and also believe that person actually exists.

much she loves the conferences. People have to pay as much as eight hundred dollars to go to these events that Julia hypes up to her one hundred and fifty thousand Instagram or one hundred and twenty thousand Instagram followers. Edwards also sells master classes, and so I think that Julia in some ways is just like having your own built in sexy tech influencer to hype up whatever the thing is that you're selling, and it's just like a

straightforward financial grift. But I also think it doesn't stop there, because that wouldn't explain the effort that it takes to like comment as Julia on Hacker News right, to comment in articles as Julia right, because that's a different thing. So I also think that there might be like a kind of clout that comes with being Julia, this attractive

woman in technology. You know, I almost would feel differently if Edwards was you know, if when he was asked to do an interview for a blog about women in tech, if he was like, oh, this is just a persona like I don't want to take up room. I don't want to take away a slot from another an actual human woman in tech. But he did those interviews specifically about being a woman in tech, and he did them

as Julia. He could have it would be pretty weird, but he could have been like, oh, well, this is what I've learned as a man running an account as a woman persona in tech, Like, like, there are all kinds of things he could have done that I feel like I would be looking at it a little bit less side i e. But he didn't do any of those things, And so I think there must be like an element to this that must be fun, Like it's probably fun to see your following and reach grow, like

I think that he if he was unable to be a tech influencer when he's just like some guy, when he's a sexy woman. I certainly it's easier to grow an audience of programmer men when you're a sexy woman. And I think it probably is fun and intoxicating to see your following and reach grow. So I think that Julia allowed for Edwards to be the tech influencer that he never got to be as himself, that he never would be as himself because his musings aren't really that novel.

They're not really that good, right saying. If you're listing a list of podcasts for folks to check out, and top three is Joe Rogan the most popular podcaster in the world, I'm sorry, that's not really novel advice. If the books that you're suggesting people read are books like Atomic Habits, I'm sorry that book is in every airport in the country. These are not novel takes. This is

not novel advice. I think that he's somebody who wanted the shine of being a tech luminary, somebody who could give sage wisdom, that people when he spoke, people would listen. But I don't think he had that in him, and so I think that doing it as Julia was the only way that he could do it and actually make an impact, which is actually kind of sad when you think about it that way.

like make the financial grift work. Or was the bigger motivation being part of that cool kids club of tech guys who talk about their agile practices and post changes to their website to get hub for some ridiculous reason.

have those kinds of platforms. I think that he probably just saw some of those guys and was like, why not me? And so I think it's got to be. I think the grift was probably a part of it, but I think if, in my opinion, not the only part. And I think that you know, has weird of a story as this is. I do think it all goes back to this persistent myth that there are no women

in tech. It's the myth that I started this podcast to bust, you know, Like Edwards was quoted as saying, the real problem is that there are not enough women out there that he could book to speak, and that tech conferences are all chasing this very small group of women and that's the problem. He said, there have been thousands of events chasing the same small subgroup of women speakers and not to me really like that reveals to me a really just messed up way of understanding and

thinking about marginalized people and technology. If you, if you truly believe that how it works is there's a small handful of people that go to every conference that's because every other are on every stage, and that every conference is just like booking those same people. That to me signals that like, first of all, you don't really know the space, because that's just it makes me laugh. But second of all, you don't really care. You don't really

care about uplifting marginalized voices. You maybe have gleaned that in twenty twenty three, you can't have a lineup of all white men at a tech conference without somebody saying something about it, and so you know that you need to not have people saying something about it, But you don't really care beyond that. And I think it also shows to me that he didn't think it was worth it to do the real work, like somehow this elaborate catfish AI generated scam to him was less work than

just like widening your network of marginalized people. And honestly, it's like other conferences managed to do that work of lifting up actual marginalized humans who exist in the space without inventing fake people, right. Valerie Phoenix, the founder of Tech by Choice, which is a group that highlights underestimated people in tech, really put it well on Twitter. Valerie says, the last few days, I've felt like a slap in the face to many of us whose experiences are seen

as cosplay or engagement. I've dedicated countless hours to running Tech by Choice, a nonprofit focused on helping underrepresented groups thrive in tech through education, resources and mentorship. It's never been about engagement, status or power. It's about making a difference. Every Grifter and Catfish story, we push engagement towards overshadows marginalized individuals real struggles and victories in tech. And I

guess that's really how I feel like. There are so many women and trans folks and non binary folks and queer folks and black folks and people of color in the space that the and these kind of stunts just like further complicate that experience for us even more. This might be a bit of a tangent, but I did want to talk about it because I remember we talked about the Grace Hopper conference and how this men showed up and like overran this conference that was specifically supposed

to be a place for women in tech. And one of the things that we did not talk about in that episode that is absolutely true that actually a listener correctly called me out on not raising in that episode, is that a climate where men are taking opportunities like this away from marginalized people really also hurts gender nonconforming folks, trans folks, people who are butcher or mask So it creates this climate where people feel like they need to

be suspicious of these folks when these are the same people who should be feeling comfortable and included in these spaces, right, it creates the conditions where folks feel like even more surveiled and watched and sidelined and pushed out of these spaces where they really ought to be included. And so stunts like this one just make it harder for actual

marginalized people humans who exist in tech. You know, we already have to prove we belong, Prove we aren't fake, Prove we are real, prove we're in tech, Prove we know what we're doing, and now prove that we exist, that we're actually humans. Like I've actually already seen men on Twitter saying that this whole catfish thing just proves like what happens when people focus too much on diversity.

So this whole debacle of a man doing something bad is already being used to further marginalize and punish people who are already marginalized in tech. Like it never ends. And I think it really is important that like, inclusion is not something that you do for points or cud or to get followers to your bake account, or to grift or to avoid getting called out. It really matters.

Like we've talked about this on across several episodes, it matters that our spaces where technology is being built include as many voices as they can. It matters for all of us. And so I think that people like Edwards just don't get it right. They just see it as this cosmetic thing that you can use to boost your own credibility, and that it really hurts. It hurts. It hurts that this is how they see us. It really does.

pretty quiet on Twitter after this whole thing unfolded. His last tweets are still his tweets about being canceled, and you know his weird explanations from November twenty fifth, the

Departy conference is canceled. As for Julia, Well, on November seventeenth, she hinted that maybe she's re examining her priorities and might be spending less time on Instagram on her last post on November seventeenth, saying, I started posting less on Instagram since my life priorities have shanged significantly, or maybe I'm just getting older, So maybe we'll be hearing a little bit less from Julia on Instagram. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to

say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget tod. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer Michael Amado is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review.