At Debconf 3 in Oslo in 2003, there a presentation given about "ftp-masters" by Mike Beattie and Anthony Towns which perpetuated the image of Debian as a Boys' club. A description of the talk is given here by Anthony Towns, one of the presenters: Amaya went looking for the slides in 2006, found them, but they've been 404'd again now. The slides can still be found in the Internet archive