(admittingly, it's really hard to know what Niel meant or actually said since there are no transcripts - just three different peoples interpretations of what Niel said.)

As far as I could tell from the quotes in the posts that I linked to, Neil never denies that women can be great creatives. His problem was that they take time off when having babies.

But not all women (or men for that matter), have babies. And not all women stay home with their babies either. But all women are judged as if we will breed and take time off for breeding at some point in our career - while men (equally fertile) are not, even though they too can choose to stay home and take time off. s'all I'm sayin'.

Suprised because you heard nothing of cancelled speaker appearances? Or what are you suprised about?

All I know is that when I first saw the list of speakers I would have loved to attend, I would have really looked forward to seeing, say, Lee & Dan or Brian Clark - but had I bought a ticket then, I would have been terribly dissapointed as most - if not all - of the names that I found interesting vanished from that list of speakers as time went by. Some still haven't vanished despite cancelling their appearance ages ago - like Balder and Jason for example. This schedule is still available to download on their site today.

However, saying that it was disorganised doesn't mean that people can not enjoy themselves at the conferance - even though many might resent buying tickets to se XYZ speakers but instead get ABC speakers - this is why I asked how it turned out in the end. This blogger Carl Walter seems to have enjoyed the conferance just like you - he blogs about it here. Thanks to Björn at site-9 for that link.