The MTS Way.

There is a well run, well loved community for women in tech SEO. Free membership. A mentorship programme. A speakers hub. A founders hub. A festival in two cities. It is warm, it is genuinely useful, and by every account it has materially improved a lot of careers. Nobody sensible objects to it.

This site is that community with one word changed. Same structure, same initiatives, same values, same festival dates, same venues. Read the pages. The only edit is the noun.

If your reaction to the original is good, nice thing to exist, and your reaction to this one is hang on, then that gap is the entire subject. This site is not an argument that the original should not exist. It is an argument that the gap deserves a better answer than embarrassment.

Put properly, at its best, with nothing shaved off it:

Professional communities are not symmetrical because the professions are not. Women are a minority of senior technical roles. They are interrupted more, promoted later off the same evidence, and leave the industry mid career at a higher rate. A women only room is not a room that excludes men, it is a room that finally has the ratio the rest of the week does not. The point is not the exclusion, it is the correction. And no man has ever walked into an SEO conference and found he was the only one there.

That is a real argument and most of it is true. Anyone waving it away has not been paying attention, and this site would rather lose the argument than pretend otherwise.

It works as a defence of the purpose. It works much less well as a defence of the rule.

If the justification for a women only space is that its members share an experience the rest of the industry does not understand, then the space is justified by the experience, not by the chromosome. And there are men in this industry carrying an experience the rest of it does not understand either. The ones being quietly managed out at forty eight. The ones who have not said out loud that they are struggling in a decade. The ones living in a country where suicide kills roughly three times as many men as women, who have never once been in a professional room built with that in mind.

The standard reply is that men already have the room, because the whole industry is the room. But the whole industry is not a room where anybody admits to not coping. That is exactly what these communities are for, and it is exactly the thing the average man in the industry has the least practice at.

Two things, and only two.

One. The case for a single gender professional space is a case about need, not about fairness, and it should be made that way. Defended as fairness, it invites exactly this website, and it loses. Defended as need, it is very hard to argue with, because the need is real and it is measurable.

Two. If need is the right test, then it points at some men too. In which case the correct response to this website is not you cannot have that. It is yes, go and build it. Nobody is stopping you. That answer costs nothing and it also happens to be true.

It is not affiliated with the community it mirrors. It does not use that community's name, marks, logos or copy, and it names none of its people. Nothing here is bookable, no membership is being collected and no money changes hands. The speakers listed are real people who asked to be on it, and half of each line-up is still open. The dates and the venues are real because different ones would have blunted the point.

It is also not an argument that the original should close, be defunded, or apologise for anything. If you have got to the bottom of this page thinking that, then the page is badly written, and I would rather fix the page.