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The Tech Industry Has Gotten so Bad for Women that Some May Fake Inclusion

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A female software engineer at a laptop (emoji) with sunglasses on and light coming from the screen, cast on her faceImagine if you were going to a music festival because you saw the lineup would feature little-known indie rock bands lead by female performers. You think to yourself, “That’s nice, you don’t see enough women in this genre, I’ll grab some tickets!” You arrive only to find out that they pulled out at the last minute. Later, you find out that the reason you decided to go, the little-known female-lead indie rock bands, were actually fake. They were never going to perform. The man running the festival made some fake female-lead bands. You’d probably feel as though you had been sold a ticket with fraudulent tactics. Some of the other performers who only joined because they saw the festival was inclusive may be upset too.

The DevTernity conference has seen its share of controversy over the past week. Many speakers dropped out, forcing the organizer, Eduards Sizovs, to shut it down. What happened? It turned out the event organizer had allegedly created a number of fake female speakers for the event. He’s admitted that at least one the speaker profiles on his website was fake. He has been accused of using these fake speakers to attract actual female talent and the talent of male speakers who didn’t want to speak at an all-male event. If that’s true, it worked right up until it didn’t. Sizovs became defensive online, and at least one other male engineer called it “cancel culture,” but one of the women Sizovs told critics to talk to may also be a fake profile he created.

It’s looking like the conference was the very definition of “Fake it ’till you make it,” but eventually, all fakes fail. What does it say about the industry that creates fake women instead of just hiring them?

Fake Women, Real Conference

I want to give Eduards Sizovs the benefit of the doubt. After all, women often struggle to make headway in tech, with biases working against us at every chance. Maybe he just couldn’t fill the spots he had reserved for women and accidentally released fake profiles? I wanted to believe that perhaps he had simply made placeholder names on the website, maybe auto-generated, as he claimed, and it was just too darn hard for him to remove them. Remember Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But evidence seems strongly against that, including his own comments after the media discovered the fake women. As the evidence piled in, it became hard to come to any conclusion that didn’t include malice.

Fake Speaker Profiles

Gergely Orosz first discovered that one of the female software engineers listed as a speaker for DevTernity was not real. She “has an impressive profile” and was a featured speaker at a previous conference, but her supposed employer, Coinbase, didn’t know about her. He searched and could not find anything about her anywhere else online.

Next he found Alina Prokhoda, “Senior Engineer at WhatsApp, Microsoft MVP.” She was supposed to speak at the JDKon conference in May. She’s since been removed. Perhaps that’s because she isn’t known to anyone at Meta, who owns WhatsApp, or Microsoft.

How about Natalie Stadler, a “Software Craftswoman at Coinbase?” Coinbase didn’t know about her either. She was a featured speaker in 2021 and 2022… but seemingly doesn’t exist at all. Many of these “women” who previously “spoke” at the conference had to drop out, but remained on the page.

Eduards Sizovs admitted that at least one profile was “auto-generated, with a random title, random Twitter handle, random picture.” However, other engineers were quick to point out that changes had been made to the fake profile he referenced, proving it wasn’t just auto-generated, and the yaml appeared to be made by a human hand, not computer generation. Where did these pictures, some of very convincingly real-looking women come from, anyway? Sizovs stated it was too hard to remove the fake women from the list of speakers, but it was only a few lines that required changing to remove them, exceedingly easy.

Sizovs claimed it was tough to find female speakers, with “1000s of events chasing after the same small sub-group of female speakers.” However, DevTernity does not have an application process, which would make finding speakers easier. Organizers, or just Sizovs, send invites specifically to developers they know and want speaking at the event. He claimed that one of the few female speakers, “Julia” “switched to helping with the organization (you can’t do both speaking and organization).” He did not explain why she couldn’t both speak and help with organization, or what she was doing, specifically. He also told people that they “dropped out for reasons out of our control at the worst possible time. Ask Sandi or Julia.”

So who are these women he’s telling people to talk to? One of them, Julia Kirsina, may be a fake profile ran by Sizovs himself. 404 Media found heaps of evidence showing that Sizovs is—at the very least—managing or involved with the creation and curation of “her” accounts, all across the web. She could be little more than a sock puppet account with a model posing with his MacBook Pro.

Fake Instagram Model?

Julia Kirsina is the name behind “Coding Unicorn,” a popular software engineer account on Instagram with over 115,000 followers. The photos are mostly focused on the model, with many of them just being her looking away from a computer screen with bits of code on it. Videos are usually just still photos, or in some rare cases, generic LinkedIn advice. “Her” posts seem to directly be copied from LinkedIn posts that Sizovs made, without attribution, and sometimes with cute emoji added. She’s been listed as a speaker for DevTernity, but no one could find a talk she delivered, not even on her Instagram page.

The evidence piles up though. Julia has two photos from 2018 that show a laptop. In one, you can see from the file path that the laptop has the username of “eduardsi,” making it seem like Eduards Sizovs actually owned the laptop she was using for photos. In the other, you can see his username in the top right corner of the laptop. “eduardsi” is also the name of one of the accounts an invite-only developer forum, lobste.rs, had to ban for running “sock puppet” accounts. The other accounts possibly belonging to Sizovs, confirmed by usage and IP address logging, were “sizovs,” “CodingUnicorn,” and “UnicornCoding.” Lobste.rs banned all of them. Bhat Harkins, who runs the forum, stated “I remember being creeped out by the effort involved and choice to use instagram glamour shots. It was just the one profile when I saw him and I’m kind of stunned that he’s not just continued but multiplied his efforts.” The accounts were initially flagged for “spammy promotion” of Sizovs’ developer conference, however lobse.rs says it was clear the accounts all belong to Sizovs.

Julia Kirsina, or, as “she” is better known as, “Coding Unicorn,” also has spoken out, claiming that women aren’t disadvantaged in tech. Of course, this was during an email-only interview, and “she” didn’t go into detail about how women have an advantage over men. She wrote, “I don’t like seeing women as victims because such a mindset turns men into suspects. Men suffer from biases equally to women.” If you’ve been on the internet a while, you may have heard of people who set up accounts for fake members of a marginalized community where they support hateful view points. Like a man who has never realized how challenging it is to be a female engineer allegedly claiming we have it easier under a pseudonym.

Inventing women and running a fake Instagram account could be a new low for the tech industry, if true. Using that potentially fake account to discredit the work female engineers have to do just to be taken half as seriously as our male peers, an issue that affects all women in STEM, could be an incredibly sexist attack on women in the industry. If Julia is indeed a fake account Sizovs set up to parrot his own ideas, act as a sock puppet, and spout anti-feminist ideals, then his explanations for his other fake accounts seems disingenuous, and his claims to support women in the industry seem outright false.

Tech Lays Off Women

2023 was a rough year for tech employees. Tech layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of a million people searching for jobs throughout 2023. Disproportionately, those layoffs were women. The layoffs, according to analysis by Layoffs.fyi, were about 45% women, 55% men. More men were laid off than women. However, tech companies are overwhelmingly male. Men make up well over 55% of the tech industry. Meta, for example, a company that has dedicated itself to diversity and inclusion initiatives, has 63% of employees listed as male. Meta, who publishes a yearly report (2023 is not out yet) showed that only 25.8% of their “tech” roles go to women, which is actually surprisingly high for the industry. Despite making up a small portion of employees, female employees make up a disproportionately large number of the employees big tech laid off this year. If you were a female employee, you were more at risk of being laid off than a male employee.

Most companies have not reported their 2023 diversity and inclusion figures yet. However, it’ll be interesting to see if, next year, there are far fewer women at these companies than there was in 2022. Women were disproportionately part of layoffs, of course it could be hard to get women for a conference. That doesn’t mean anyone should create fake women to pad their numbers, or run a fake Instagram account.

You Want Women? Hire Them, Don’t Fake Them

Women are judged more harshly than men for mistakes, especially in STEM. That hurts women in the hiring pipeline as well in performance reviews. Those reviews can be used for companies to decide who to lay off. A single sexist reviewer can torpedo a woman’s reviews within a company. Tech companies are full of “bro culture,” meaning this may be more common in tech than anywhere else.

Speaking anecdotally, it is tough being a female engineer. You have to constantly prove yourself, maintain documents listing the major projects you worked on because your manager may forget them come evaluation time and assume the worst. You have to be absolutely perfect due to biases interviewers and coworkers have about women in STEM. It is not easy. Creating fake accounts instead of elevating real women, or using a fake account to downplay issues women see in the workforce is extremely reprehensible. I’d like to pretend the evidence doesn’t point towards any of this, that it’s an honest mistake instead of a symptom of a much larger problem, but the evidence uncovered thus far has been quite damning. Women aren’t respected enough in this industry, and this incident, along with the layoffs this year, show we still have a lot to fight for just to get equality.

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