I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.
I assume that many of those female speakers are transwomen, and transwomen are not underrepresented in the Python or similar programming communities (in some of them, they're conspicuously overrepresented).
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.