We don't lament that there are far fewer women $foo than men
We don't, because we're in technology.
Some of my other hobbies are also male dominated and unrelated to technology, there's definitely an awareness of the situation and active efforts to recruit more women. On the flipside, I've seen some arguments about the biology situation, theorising that the reason there are more women in biology is cultural conditioning for girls interested in science (it certainly happened to me, but that's hardly solid data).
No, I'm not taking this for granted.
I even stated: "And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it."
>(Or, the inflammatory counter, what if women just aren't good at math and should be shopping instead - shifting it the other way?)
Could be entirely plausible too. Don't have any numbers though (could also be the inverse, women better at math).
But more plausible to me is an alternative explanation. What if not enough women (due to either nature or nurture) don't have the obsessive nature that being a coder and doing conference worthy stuff requires? I know men working meticulously on some stuff (from hacking to wood-working) for ages. Far less women doing so. I'm not judging, if anything it could be far smarter, personal-development-wise, than programming 10 hours straight at work and then again at home, in your "cave", as a hobby. So, perhaps women favor work-life balance more. Or men coders compensate with coding for other stuff (for example a lot that I know have subpar sex lives and are not exactly "party animals").
Women do plenty of obsessive hobbies. I know women who can spend an entire day (12+ hours) baking, for example. Sure, our brains are wired differently, but I think the idea that you have to be obsessive to present at a conference (and that females might not be as obsessive for whatever reason) doesn't quite hold up. There are plenty of conference-worthy subjects which might not be deeply meticulous coding topics, for example.
You present it as different things but it's exactly the same flawed idea.
"An estimation of your outreach" would only be different from quota if the number of good conference pitches sent in by men was equal or near equal to the number of pitches sent in by women.
Since the number of women in programming are far less than the men, that is obviously not the case (their respective total number of pitches would be unequal and hence their respective total of good pitches would be unequal).
Unless men and women Python programmers are something like 50-50, you cannot have something like 50-50 men and women Python conference speakers. At best, a fair outreach should be M-F, where M/F the respective male and female Python programmers ratio.
And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it.
Which might not be the case at all (it doesn't even have to be because women are, say, less nerdy and obsessive with coding: just assume, which is very plausible, that male bosses in the workplace don't assign them interesting enough problems in their Python work, and prefer males to be project leaders etc. Then, following that, fewer women will have interesting conference pitches to make). And there are 1000s of other factors like that.
Finally, not every field needs to have 50-50 representation anyway. We don't lament that there are far fewer women boxers or rugby players than men. Or that there are far fewer women coal miners or truck drivers than men. Or that there are far more women in fashion that men. Or than there are far more women in biology than men, etc etc.