They may come from that tradition, but that doesn’t mean the model makes sense in this context. If academics are presenting their research in academic conference for publicity, peer review “credit”, or something else, then they’re getting something out of it. This doesn’t necessarily apply to people presenting at GHC.

As for your last paragraph: no, it wouldn’t really be a great way to present to women. I don’t want to fly to some city, take 3+ days of my time, pay for my own travel *and* ticket to GHC just to present to 30 women. I could (and do) do that right here in the Bay Area — to a larger audience, too. And those women are no less deserving than the women attending GHC.

By GHC not even providing a free conference ticket, it signals that this probably won’t be a larger talk. I could get randomly slotted into some 9am talk in the far corner of the conference area, with little to no promotion, where maybe 20 people show up. It’s not a good use of my time, as my impact is actually fairly low.

I don’t know what the right answer for GHC is. Maybe they should further tier their talks. Maybe they should cut down the number of talks, so that they can prioritize the ones they have. Maybe they should find a way to let people vote on talks / express interest, so that it’s more obvious to a speaker how big their audience does (one conference I speak at, where there is no compensation, does this). Or maybe they’re already doing the right thing, and I’m just fitting into some edge case.

In any case, it’s not a good fit for me or for many other people.