Yeah, I was going to say - what exactly in my OP had a “SJW vibe”?
The things women experience in games… You may not be informed about it, but that doesn’t mean its a ‘lie feminists spread.’ The fact that you (I presume) as a man haven’t seen it or experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that women are making things up.
At no point did I say that I wanted an unqualified female speaker - I am specifically looking for a qualified female speaker because they exist in almost every niche you can think of, they’re just harder to find because there are fewer of us. This assumption that looking to find a woman is somehow going to result in a less qualified speaker is quite a damaging one - that women are automatically less qualified than men. I know women who’ve been working in VR for over 30 years - does that mean they’re less qualified to talk about VR because they’re female?
Actually, what’s bad for integration is creating and reinforcing the impression that a space only has qualified male speakers - panels that only have men on them reinforce the idea that this is a men-only space, that women aren’t qualified to talk about this subject, or that they’re not welcome there. There’s already a perception that women are the others, that they aren’t welcome, and this is a problem all over tech that is extremely hard to solve, but that initiatives like ours are doing a lot to help fix.
If you’re at all interested in the subject of diversity in tech, there are a lot of places to go read about it. I encourage you to educate yourself based on statistics rather than your own opinions about what seems right. I’m going to stop responding to this thread now unless someone specifically suggests a speaker.
Thanks.