Developer conference axed after outcry over fake female speakers

An online developers conference was cancelled last week after several tech executives pulled out of the event following accusations that the organizer fabricated female speakers’ profiles.

High-profile engineering leaders in the developer community — including Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman and Kelsey Hightower, a former developer advocate at Google — withdrew on Monday from Dev Ternity, where tickets were sold for as much as $870 (U.S.).

The event’s organizer, Eduards Sizovs, confirmed the cancellation of the event, which had been slated for Dec.7-8. “It looks like someone really wanted to deliberately damage the conference,” he said in an emailed statement.

Sizovs earlier said in a post on X that he “auto-generated” a fake woman’s profile after a female speaker had dropped out of the conference, but that it was a placeholder and not meant to imply a more diverse conference. He later removed the fake profile.

The outcry began after participants discovered fake profiles late last week when Gergely Orosz, who runs a popular tech newsletter, posted on social media that he had identified fabricated profiles of women on Dev Ternity’s speakers list and notified attendees. He also claimed to have found fake women’s profiles on the speakers lists for previous and future events. Women who had previously dropped out of the conference or declined to speak were also not removed from the event’s website.

It struck a chord with the developer community, which saw the practise as misleading and potentially deceitful, and a step backward from their goal of diversity in maledominated tech events. Nearly half of the 23 speakers still listed on the event’s website had already withdrawn from the conference before it was cancelled. That includes Amazon Web Services’ Kristine Howard, who would have been the sole woman scheduled to speak.

Hanselman, the Microsoft executive, said on X that he had rules for participating in conferences, including that they have inclusive speaker lineups. “I was duped by the fake speakers also,” he said.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of application framework Ruby on Rails, posted that he was also withdrawing from the conference.

“What a strange tale. Never seen anything like this in decades of speaking at conferences . ... I’m out.”