If your goal really is to get the best speakers available then you should find a way to do the selection without knowledge of the reputation and demographic details of the applicants. The classic study is from orchestra hiring:
"Using data from audition records, the researchers found that blind auditions increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent. The likelihood of a woman's ultimate selection is increased several fold, although the competition is extremely difficult and the chance of success still low." http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/
The question to ask is whether the conference organizers made any efforts to do something like this, or whether they assumed that because they are nice people all their decisions must be completely unaffected by any consideration other than the most objective judgment of presentation quality. Many naive people believe their motives are pure but inevitably they're not for any human who actually exists in the real world. We all have to do some work to compensate for that.
"Using data from audition records, the researchers found that blind auditions increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent. The likelihood of a woman's ultimate selection is increased several fold, although the competition is extremely difficult and the chance of success still low." http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/
The question to ask is whether the conference organizers made any efforts to do something like this, or whether they assumed that because they are nice people all their decisions must be completely unaffected by any consideration other than the most objective judgment of presentation quality. Many naive people believe their motives are pure but inevitably they're not for any human who actually exists in the real world. We all have to do some work to compensate for that.