There is a country called the Republic of Latvia on the Baltic Sea coast. It is certainly a somewhat unfamiliar country to South Korea. It is a country that established diplomatic relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the most recent news about it is that it is the country where film director Kim Ki-duk died.
Whatever it was, Latvia has been hosting a developer event called DevTernity since 2015. It was the largest in Latvia and one of the best developer conferences in the Nordic countries. It was a huge event in the Nordic and Baltic regions, so much so that it sold out every year even though they sold paid tickets.
The conference is scheduled to take place December 7-9, 2023 and looks set to be a huge success, selling out quickly.
That is, until one conference attendee noticed something strange. Gergely Orosz had been attending DevTernity for several years when he noticed something strange.
"Why aren't there speakers on the speaker list at the actual conference?"
And he started to track down the missing speakers. Coincidentally, all of the missing speakers were female speakers, and Gergely Orosz searched Linkedin, Github, etc. based on the speakers’ affiliations or work that was posted on the DevTernity homepage. The result was surprisingly that they did not exist in the first place.
Both Anna and Alina are non-existent people, careers.
This has been happening for years, ever since DevTernity announced that they would balance the gender ratio of their speakers for diversity. Gergely Orosz noticed this and made it public by posting it on his social media and blog. Currently, the profiles of the speakers have been deleted or replaced, and their traces (fake profiles) are also being deleted one by one. There is also a heated discussion about the article on Wikipedia.
This is a very strange and bizarre incident, but I brought it up because it doesn't seem to be known in Korea. If you want to respect diversity, do it sincerely, or why do you go to the extent of creating fake profile accounts to look PC? I wonder. If you really needed a speaker of a certain gender, there would have been various ways to invite them, such as directly recruiting them or paying them a speaker fee.
Gergely Orosz criticized DevTernity as a paid conference with lazy and PC-like organizers.
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