What you describe is an important goal, but I agree with protomyth[0] - they're doing it backwards. If you want to make the industry more accessible to minorities, focus on making information and training more accessible to them, and not on status rewards (being a speaker on a conference is first and foremost a status reward).

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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481090

The argument here is representation. See also: Uhura from Star Trek.

Learning code should be the only way to make programming 'more accessible'. Black, white, yellow, red, gay, straight, whatever. None of that should matter. All that matters is that you can pull your weight.

The gender gap in the open source world is notoriously bad (worse than in the idustry as a whole), and this goes beyond women not being able to pull their weight.

There are fun statistics such as that women who are not immediately recognizable as such have a higher pull request acceptance rate on github than their male counterparts, whereas women who are easily identifiable have a lower one.

Open-source, an all-volunteer, enthusiast community, where the only requirement is you show up and write good code has a gender gap.

You can even be an open-source developer of one by starting your own project.

Maybe that tells you something about the general interest in programming by women. If people aren't volunteering, maybe they just aren't interested in that thing?

Source? I heard of one study like this but it was refuted for bad procedures