We use a spreadsheet that tracks racial and gender diversity and representativeness across cause areas. Along the way, we adjust our invites based on who has accepted so far to ensure a breadth of topics and expertise from a range of fields as well as racial and gender diversity across speakers. To be clear, we don’t invite people to be speakers solely because of their race, gender, or cause area. We invite people we think will have interesting and useful things to say and have these systems to feature qualified people from underrepresented groups and subject matter experts from various fields.
This feels like a preemptive defense against a strawman of the criticism. I don’t think anyone would suggest you’re inviting people based solely on their race—that you’re just mailing invitations to people selected totally at random among all their co-racialists.
Presumably it is the case that, on the margin, you accepted some people because of their race or gender? That there are some people who were accepted who would have been rejected, if they had been otherwise as good a candidate (aptitude, alignment, interest, etc.) but of another race. And there are some people who were rejected who would have been accepted, if they had been otherwise as good a candidate (aptitude, alignment, interest, etc.) but of another race.
This feels like a preemptive defense against a strawman of the criticism. I don’t think anyone would suggest you’re inviting people based solely on their race—that you’re just mailing invitations to people selected totally at random among all their co-racialists.
Presumably it is the case that, on the margin, you accepted some people because of their race or gender? That there are some people who were accepted who would have been rejected, if they had been otherwise as good a candidate (aptitude, alignment, interest, etc.) but of another race. And there are some people who were rejected who would have been accepted, if they had been otherwise as good a candidate (aptitude, alignment, interest, etc.) but of another race.