So yesterday The Register reported that "The British Ruby* Conference has been cancelled, after a row started over allegations the speaker roster at the conference is insufficiently diverse."

Ah you gotta love it- "insufficiently diverse" that would 100% of the speakers are white guys. The justification-the ever popular "We must remember that Speakers are chosen on merit, what they have to say and how they say it ". The lovely Josh Susser (ok I don't know him, maybe he isn't lovely but I sure hope he is because he busted them with his initial tweet that everyone was white and male) responded to their push back about 'we want the best" by tweeting "Are you saying minority speakers can't get in on merit? Plenty of confs have great speaker lineups that are not 100% white guys."

So their response was (wait I feel like I am channeling a soap opera) was ok fine, we will cancel the whole conference. Wow who knew how powerful the white girl and girls and boys of color cooties were.

Thanks to Josh for busting them. Josh if you are reading this- send me your snail mail address-- I totally owe you cookies! Thanks too to FairerScience friend Mort for letting me know about it (you already get cookies).

The thing that gives me the most hope for the future is that increasingly wonderful white guys are busting other white guys for their-- hmm what's the best way to say this- ok I'll go with lack of diversity. Now that is a reason to give thanks!

*Ruby is an open source programming language.