An occasion meant to be a career-builder for girls and nonbinary tech employees became one more image of the trade’s gender imbalance after self-identifying males confirmed up in droves.

The Grace Hopper Celebration takes the title of a pioneering laptop scientist and payments itself the world’s largest annual gathering of ladies and nonbinary tech employees.

Tickets for the four-day occasion, which happened in Orlando, Fla., final week, ranged in value from $649 to $1,298, and included a coveted likelihood to fulfill one-on-one with sponsors equivalent to Apple, Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

With some 30,000 annual attendees, that profession expo was already a aggressive house, in response to previous individuals. However this 12 months, entry was much more restricted by what the organizers described as “a rise in participation of self-identifying males.”

Movies posted to social media confirmed scenes of males flocking round recruiters, operating into occasion venues and chopping in entrance of ladies to get an interview slot. Footage confirmed a sea of individuals, a whole bunch deep, ready in line for an opportunity to enter the profession expo.

As one poster put it, “the Kens had taken over Barbieland.”

A number of the attendees had lied about their gender identification on their convention registrations, mentioned Cullen White, the chief influence officer with AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that organizes the convention.

“Judging by the stacks and stacks of resumes you are passing out, you probably did so since you thought you may come right here and take up house to attempt to get jobs,” White mentioned throughout the convention’s plenary tackle. “So let me be completely clear: Cease. Proper now. Cease.”

Tech jobs have been as soon as a protected guess for employees on the lookout for secure, profitable careers. However an industrywide wave of layoffs earlier this 12 months left a whole bunch of hundreds of employees all of the sudden with no job.

Ladies have been disproportionately affected by these cuts, making up 69.2% of all tech layoffs, in response to The Ladies Tech Community. And that is on high of the trade’s ongoing gender imbalance. Ladies maintain simply 26% of jobs throughout all STEM occupations and even much less — 24% — in laptop fields, in response to the newest accessible knowledge from the U.S. Division of Labor.

Bo Younger Lee, AnitaB.org’s president, mentioned in a video publish that the shift in demographics had robbed the convention of the joyous and supportive ambiance that had helped earlier conference-goers develop.

“We tried to create a protected house. And this week, we noticed the skin world creep in,” she mentioned. “I can not assure you that we’ll have options tomorrow. However I can promise you that we’ll be engaged on options, and we can’t do it in a bubble.”

Earlier within the week, the group addressed calls to ban males from the convention by saying that “male allyship is critical” to work towards total inclusivity and likewise that federal legislation prohibited discrimination primarily based on gender.

NPR reached out to AnitaB.org for extra remark however had not acquired a response by the point this text was printed.