"We have been in close contact with Twitter as they plan their event," CTA's Chupka told CNN Tech in an email. "We are thrilled that our member company is championing women in tech and hosting a strong panel of women leaders. We are still finalizing our keynote lineup and will have further announcements in the coming days."

The social media data analytics company Lissted carried out a detailed analysis to try to find out why British female political journalists are less influential on Twitter than men. It has discovered that there were 4.9 times as many likes and retweets for male political journalists than female ones across Twitter as a whole during the election campaign, and 4.3 times as many retweets from “influencers”: people and organisations who are widely followed in the Twittersphere.

“Hearing the stories from numerous other women has helped me understand how my incident, though unique in its details, is part of a larger narrative,” Huang said. “It’s basically impossible for any individual to know with 100 percent certainty that her promotion was denied due to gender. The only way to understand the systemic bias is for all of us to share our experience so we can look at what’s happening on the whole."

How can Twitter make these policies better and give them some teeth? Simple. Give it a contextual framework from which to operate on; introduce anti-oppression training for moderators so they know the difference between harassment and a person defending themselves, for example. But that’s not all; for these policies to truly work, Twitter needs a diverse moderating team that reflects the users who use its platform. This is important because of the nature of how bias operates.

One of the most profound social changes of the last few decades is opening up public discourse to a broader range of speakers than ever before, and social media has been a large part of that. The specific affordances of Twitter make it powerful—it can amplify marginalized voices but it can also amplify harassment.

"We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day," his announcement began. "We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years. We prioritized this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough. In 2017 we made it our top priority and made a lot of progress. Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re still not doing enough."

Women and men from all over the globe who have been sexually harassed have been tweeting "me too" to show the magnitude of sexual assault.

“It’s not about me. It’s about how women – especially women in politics –face these kinds of … sexist, misogynistic comments, especially from Conservatives. I want to be talking about what I’m doing but unfortunately we’re having this conversation.”