Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish more people realized that if you want to increase representation of a population, you're looking at the wrong part of the pipeline by trying to get more of that group at the conference (beyond a reasonable effort). If some one is passionate about increasing that group, it makes much more sense to try to address this at the educational stage. You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening c…
The idea is that to increase the number of girls in the beginning of the pipeline, they need to see a path ahead, see role models and not feel weird about their career choice. This needs to be done in many parts of the pipeline at once.
I don't think a lot of aspiring programmer will look at conference speaker for role models, rather more teacher/tutorial authors/mentors on their first job/internship