Outrage Over Fake Female Speakers Leads to Cancellation of DevTernity Online Conference!

DevTernity, an online developers conference, had to be cancelled when numerous tech executives decided to withdraw from the event. This decision came after allegations arose that the organizer had falsified the profiles of female speakers. Prominent engineering leaders within the developer community, such as Scott Hanselman from Microsoft Corp. and Kelsey Hightower, a former developer advocate at Alphabet Inc’s Google, pulled out of the conference on Monday. Tickets for DevTernity were being sold for as high as $870.

Event organizer Eduards Sizovs confirmed the cancellation of the event. “It appears that someone really wanted to intentionally harm the conference,” he said in an emailed statement. Sizovs said earlier in the X post that he “automatically created” a fake female profile after a female speaker dropped out of the conference, but that was a placeholder and not intended to refer to a more diverse conference. He later deleted the fake profile.

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

It struck a chord with the developer community, which saw the practice as misleading and potentially deceptive, and a step back from its goal of diversity at male-dominated tech events.

Almost half of the 23 speakers still listed on the event’s website had already withdrawn from the conference before the event was cancelled. This includes Kristine Howard of Amazon Web Services, who would have been the only woman scheduled to speak.

Hanselman, a Microsoft executive, said at X that he has rules about attending conferences, including that they have a comprehensive lineup of speakers. “I was also fooled by the fake speakers,” he said.

Representatives from Atlassian Corp. and Just Eat Takeaway.com NV also canceled their appearances. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the Ruby on Rails application framework, announced his withdrawal from the conference as well.

“What a strange story. I’ve never seen anything like this in decades of speaking at conferences,” he said, adding: “I’m out.”