The international conference for developers DevTernity was canceled after several community leaders refused to participate in the event. They announced this when they learned about the accusations against the event organizer of creating fake profiles of women on the list of speakers, writes The Fortune.

The scandal occurred when the head of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, Gergely Orosz, discovered fabricated profiles of women in the list of speakers at the conference. He wrote about this on his X page, where he showed the relevant screenshots.

According to him, he also found fake female profiles in the lists of speakers of previous and past events. In addition, the site still has profiles of female speakers who refused to participate in the event.

In response, the organizer of the online conference Eduard Sizovs wrote that he “automatically generated” a fake female profile after one of the DevTernity speakers refused to participate in the event.

This was allegedly only a temporary replacement and was not intended to make the conference more diverse in terms of the gender of its participants. Later, according to the organizer, he deleted the fake profile.

Such actions angered the developer community, which considers this practice misleading and potentially deceptive. Therefore, some speakers refused to speak at DevTernity. Among them are representatives of Microsoft Corp., Atlassian Corp. and Just Eat Takeaway.com NV. Eventually, the event, which cost $870, was canceled.