Wow, all these posts and not one suggestion of a name.
To address some of the comments here - no, this is not “suspicious” behavior - I run a VR meetup group and school teaching women VR development, and one of our goals is for VR to have gender equality in five years. One of the ways we do that is by helping organizations include qualified female speakers and panelists in their events. In this case, I was asked to help find at least one speaker for this event by the hosts. There are a large number of highly qualified speakers that I work with in the area - from every major VR company, as well as many indies, however for the most part, developers I know work in Unity, rather than Unreal, so this event was a challenge.
To address some of the other comments here:-
(1) The quality of discussion and topics is often significantly improved by having a more diverse panel - the prior event at this space had all male speakers for a Unity panel, some of which were at best, lackluster presenters.
(2) The quality of the industry is significantly improved by being diverse - women have different brains than men, want different things from their experiences, and design different things when they start to build. Funnily enough, this particular panel was about non-gaming VR, a field much more likely to attract female developers, because we don’t have to wade through all of these assumptions that we’re not qualified to work in games.
(3) I understand why you don’t think diversity on panels is important - that somehow seeking to find qualified female speakers is hurting some other male speaker. It’s not. Men have many more opportunities to speak at events than women, I frequently attend events that forget that we even exist - despite the represented companies having women who are just as capable of speaking as the men are. It’s just default to ask the man on the team, something that we’re trying to change.
(4) Representation is important. It’s hard to picture yourself succeeding when nobody in the industry looks like you. When your voice is drowned out by a lot of people who are the same, and often think the same. You can be 100% right about a problem, but frequently find yourself the sole person in the room who sees it the way you do, if you’re an underrepresented demographic.
(5) VR and AR are amazing things. There will be no shortage of FPS games in VR. There should also be a wealth of other, alternate content, made by a vast variety of people. Wanting to increase their representation in the industry, including on panels, as speakers, as employees and developers is a good thing for everybody. I love this technology and the potential it has, and for it to really succeed, we need every kind of creator creating every kind of content, so it’s not some marginalized, specialist, basement dwelling stereotype pursuit.
Oh, and (6) My target audience isn’t male developers. The vast majority of VR events I go to have 25-75% female attendees. Don’t you think they might like to see female speakers too?
(7) It bears repeating. Highly qualified women exist in every field, including VR and AR. My personal network is light on Unreal developers in this area, for whatever reason, I only know one, and he lives in Nevada, hence me reaching out to this community in the hopes that someone here was in this area or knew someone. I think it’s a little weird, personally, that in a community of unreal developers, not one of you has someone that you know who fits my ‘narrow’ band of qualifications. Ask yourself why that is - why don’t you know any female unreal devs in VR? (Given that a huge number of VR devs live in the SF bay area, I’m not as worried about the location being restrictive) Is it that there are no Unreal developers in VR here?
