The speakers of the IT forum in Europe were invented women

The organizers did not find real specialists and came up with them for inclusiveness

Over the past week, several large speakers from Microsoft, Google and Amazon refused to participate in the technical conference Devternity, which is held annually in Latvia. The reason was that one of the participants found in the list of speakers the profiles of non -existent women. The Creator of the Conference called the incident a mistake and announced the abolition of the event. "Cold" says that this is known.

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The Riga annual DEVTernity Conference, dedicated to the development of software, has been held since 2015 in early December. For the past few years, the event has been held online, and, according to the organizers, in 2022 1300 people participated in it. This year, Devternity was supposed to take place on December 7–8.

Last week, the author of the popular science bulletin of The Pragmatic Engineer Gergeli Oros published on Twitter a series of posts stating that women who really do not exist on the list of conference speakers. For example, among the speakers on the conference website, until recently, Coinbase engineer and the main developer of Ethereum, Anna Boyko , “senior engineer of Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp” , Alina , Anna Boyle , who also “performed” on Devternity in 2022, were “full -engineer Ethereum. According to Oros, he checked information about these women and found out that not one of them had never worked in these companies. He claims that their profiles in social networks were also generated by the organizers of the conference.

OROS notes that after the publication of his posts from the company's website, the mentions of some fake women were removed. Soon after, November 25, the site itself stopped working. It still does not open.

“Artificial intelligence generates images, names and positions for false profiles of women-spikers ... And I cannot understand why this is being done. Absolute laziness and dubious ethics, ”Oros wrote . He also recalled that a ticket for the conference costs about $ 800.

In response, the organizer of Devternity Eduards Sizov accused Oroos of the publication of “unverified information”, which caused damage to his reputation. Sizov claims that he was very concerned about the conference’s inclusive , but this year his team was able to find only three suitable female speakers-Sandy, Julia and Chris (he did not name their surnames). Two of them - Sandy and Julia - subsequently refused to participate in the event.

“Sandy and Julia did not fall into the final program, but their profiles remained on the site while they were looking for a replacement. This partly led to the accusations that, since they were not in the program, we added them to the site only to meet the criterion of diversity. This is not true, ”Sizov wrote.

According to the organizer, along with Sandy and Julia, the participants also listed the Demo-Person with the test version of the site. Sizov says that her image, name and username on Twitter were generated automatically, and the profile hit the conference website by mistake. He stated that he had discovered this mistake back in October, but he did not have time to quickly fix it. Sizov apologized to all Devternity participants and assured that this would not happen again.

Nevertheless, according to Bloomberg, almost half of 23 speakers refused to participate in the conference. Among them is one of the most famous Microsoft programmers Scott Hanselman and a former Google Alphabet Inc. Kelsi Hightauer, reports Fortune. The Executive Director of Amazon Web Services Kristin Hovard also confirmed to Bloomberg his refusal to participate in Devternity.

On November 28, Edwards Sizov told Business Insider that he decided to cancel the conference.