I worked with what became the Brit Ruby team on the Magrails conference last year, which did have a female speaker in the form of the excellent Rachel Davies, who is a leading Agile coach
I know the guys had the (perhaps unstated) ambition to get as many of the Ruby Rogues in a room and create the largest conference in Europe. The Rogues are all men, but if you listen to the podcast you will know that they all care deeply about these issues and have taken steps themselves in events they organise to make sure that there is no bias.
I was the old guy in the corner with Magrails and it was me who originally mooted the idea. I do remember we had some pressure from sponsors to do things like drive traffic to their websites, I was all for returning the cash and doing without their support because it was so annoying, we were creating a space for the community to gather and talk about Agile development using Rails and if we weren't driving traffic maybe they needed to make their product more compelling instead of blaming us. ;)
If I had still been on the team I would have been arguing strongly to tell the nay sayers to get their own ass in gear and submit proposals, or shut up, assuming they weren't themselves the white guys they seem to see everywhere.
The reason for sponsorship was to keep the ticket cost somewhere affordable by the jobbing developer, while still being able to pay for accommodation for the speakers. I know that a lot of people will come and talk anyway, self funding, but it's a big ask if you want some of the leaders from the US to come. Plus the cost of decent sized venues in Manchester is not cheap. Putting on Magrails cost a lot, let me tell you, and we have less than £100 left in the bank account.
So put the code in the model, where it belongs ... I rarely use helpers for anything but formatting-fu - everything else is in the model. I rarely use helpers, period.
