Is there an extreme shortage? Or is there an extreme shortage of women who applies to speak because they're not used to seeing many women speak and assume they wouldn't get a slot? I genuinely don't know, but I have met enough women in tech with speaking experience as a total introvert that I do find it astounding that someone making a living of arranging events don't have a sufficient network to be able to line up some women as speakers. Makes it very hard to think this doesn't reflect their attitudes.
> It's got to the point from what I've noticed from conference organisers talking on Twitter/X in the past the only way they can get women speakers in a decent amount is for them to approach women who don't give talks and invite them to talk.
Then they should do that. As a man, of the times I've been speaking in public-ish contexts in my life, I've volunteered or applied less than half. I'm not at all surprised it takes work to line up speakers, and more work to line up speakers of any group that has a history of being underrepresented in this field.
If you expect every speaker you sign up to be drawn from applicants, it's also not just diversity you throw over-board, but you lose out on a whole lot of perspectives from people who for other reasons aren't really that interested in speaking, or are too busy with other things, but who might be willing to if asked.
> That is a bit worrying since anyone who has given a talk will know, your first time is completely terrible.
The way to fix that is to ensure more women get a first chance to hold a talk. If they don't want that to be at their conference, then try to work with user groups and the like to find women who have held talks there, or arrange events to provide a feed. Once is understandable - people may well not realize what is needed to fix the problem. But if they then don't act, or if they lie and deceive people about it, it's another matter.
This reminds me of when my ex worked for a major investment bank where she as a black woman was promptly put on a "diversity board" to figure out how they could fix their diversity without actually changing the one thing that made fixing their diversity impossible: They heavily weighed in their hiring candidates from certain schools which skewed significantly white and male, to the point that even if they hired every black person and every female from those schools entire graduating classes, they'd still have a diversity problem. They did not want to hear that. They wanted nice quotes for their website and some token photos (and eventually got a significant bill for settling employment law cases instead)
The point is that if you genuinely want to address diversity, and your applicant pool isn't diverse, then you need to look beyond your applicant pool. If you choose not to, then you don't really care about addressing diversity; in that case, you're just trying to do enough to be able to throw your hands up, and it's in that case entirely fair for people to judge the organizers accordingly.