I did state in the blogpost that I know Andrew is a good chap and I respect him and his intentions, and I don't for a minute think he set out to make this event 100% male. My issue is in his response to my challenge on it, and the lack of acknowledgement by the organisers that an 100% male lineup isn't ideal.
I also find it quite hard to believe that amongst companies like Google and Facebook, there aren't enough highly-qualified female/minority devs who could've spoken. And besides, the speaker roster isn't exclusive to those three companies, either.
I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write about it don't "respect" it?). My goal with writing this (as stated in the article) isn't to launch some Twitter hate mob or cancel a conference, but to start a dialogue (which I couldn't continue with the organisers). I don't claim to understand every facet of the issue but I'm most definitely an interested "amateur" if that makes snese.
I don't think it's fair to say I "ignore the possibility" that women could've been invited / applied. My whole point is that we have no idea about this process because the organisers are being opaque about their methods, and in my opinion, if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why that ended up being the case, otherwise we're left to assume that you think there's nothing wrong with that. If they genuinely tried every approach they could to make things more diverse and weren't able to, good -- I'm happy to be proven wrong. But we have no idea whether they did and we can only assume from the communication that it isn't an issue for them -- that's bad.
No need for rhetorical questions:
In the "Postscript" below the entry itself I recommended a good amount of local-or-close-to-London female devs who could've spoken. For all I know, they were approached. But I don't know (see above).
I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it, and starting this discussion. It needs to be on everyone's minds.
I perhaps didn't word that paragraph as well as I could -- my point there wasn't to introduce quotas, but to attempt to nip the problem in the bud. If I'd been organising EdgeConf, and had got to ~80% of my speakers being male with no female representation, I would've dropped everything and made sure that the rest were women. I guess when you include the numbers then this feels like tokenism, but it was mostly arbitrary. My point here was that they should have realised they had a problem before it reached 100%, not start out with the intention to recruit x% women (no matter how relevant or qualified they were) -- that's tokenism, right?