I also wonder if it's true that they can't find women to speak. They are not the only conference which claims this. I both hope this is true for their sake, and hope it is not true — because if it is true, we have a serious problem with qualified women speakers.

One odd thing I heard at TEDGlobal this year: speaker Laurie Santos, a cognitive researcher, was asked why none of the lab assistants in her slides were women. Didn't she have women students and assistants? Yes, she said she did. But they didn't want to be photographed.

I also agree that the website is easy to navigate and find talks, I am not disputing that point. These talks will therefore be accessible to internet users the same as the others. However, we are discussing the physical conference that is scheduled separately as TEDWomen.

Why not continue to feed the same ideas through the existing pipeline? The audience exposure will be more diverse, and therefore the impact should be greater.

And FYI – there are already a range of TED events that go on apart from the big one and so far, it seems like people are able to follow what they are interested in. I would never look at the huge range of talks on the TED website and say that it's bad because there is such a diverse range of them. I don't see why suddenly adding a special event that focuses on women will suddenly make this already huge confluence of talks and topics difficult to follow.

I feel bad for the organizers who are trying to do something good – the important word being trying – and everyone is so quick to judge the event's success before they've even had an opportunity to hold one. They already have some pretty amazing speakers lined up. I wish we could take a 'wait and see' approach and give them the benefit of the doubt. They seem to have a pretty good idea of what they're doing – otherwise we wouldn't all feel so connected to and passionate about the TED brand.

If we need new topics, let's have more frequent events, not different events, we won't all be able to follow all of the possible focus topics and still gain the benefits of all the ideas.