Tech conferences — A whole lot of the same thing.

I’ve been to more than a few conferences in the past couple of years. Lately, it has been only Ruby and Ruby related conferences, so my outlook may not be too accurate. What about conferences attracts only white males? What about conferences pushes away people with other demographics? I’m really curious to why this is. In my little world, programming should be able to cross boundaries, but obviously this isn’t the case.