One way to look at percentages is as a quota. "20% of our speakers this year shall be women!" Right or wrong, a lot of people don't like this.
Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach, your CFP is poor, you're not promoting the CFP in a diverse way, etc. You work and improve, and then in year two you might notice you ended up at, say, 30%. Hurrah!
Both approaches involve percentages and measurements, yet the second is not an attempt at fulfilling a "quota" (even if there's a target % to reach) and should be more palatable to everyone while still ensuring efforts are made to increase diversity.
When you look only at the % of speakers who have a particular attribute, you're looking at the output of a very long process spanning years.
Before the schedule was announced.. did the organizers get the speakers they wanted or did some decline?
Before that.. when CfP responses were rated, did the submitters provide relevant supporting material like a resume of previous speaking appearances (to demonstrate speaking skill) and blog posts, articles, etc (to demonstrate expertise in the topic).
Before that.. did the submitters have writing and speaking skills that made them comfortable to submit?
Before that.. was the CfP well-publicized to relevant groups, companies, etc?
Before that.. was the CfP entirely open? Was it invite only? Was it a blend of the two with only some of the slots open to the CfP?
Before that.. did the person believe they had the skills and expertise to submit?
Before that.. did the person actually have the skills and expertise to submit?
Before that.. did the person have a job or interests to give them the opportunity to learn those skills?
Before that.. did they get encouragement and support along the way?
Before that.. did they receive the education to get the job or choose those interests?
Before that.. did they believe they could learn and work in the industry?
Before that.. did the person have the aptitude for those skills?
If the number at the beginning of this process is small and every one of those steps chips away at the entire group - let alone those with particular genders, ethnicities, etc - of course the output is going to be low.
And for the record, that doesn't mean I like the result. I just think we need to look at this as a systemic problem and address it as such.. not blame the people at the end.
For example, my undergradate engineering school adopted a bunch of Girl Scout troops to encourage and grow interest in STEM. It has taken years but female enrolment has increased by 50%.. and they're not just shuffling from other schools. They're growing the pool of qualified candidates.
Every single person making all those decisions (the encouragers, the skill builders, the aptitude developers, the educators, the inviters) are "people at the end". We're all the end of the line when they come across us. Your kindergarten teacher was the person at the end when you entered their classroom.
So I disagree with you. The blame does lie with "the people at the end".
> did they believe they could learn and work in the industry?
> did they get encouragement and support along the way?
> did the person have a job or interests to give them the opportunity to learn those skills?
> did the person believe they had the skills and expertise to submit?
These reasons are exactly why quota systems are used.
If there isn't anyone from your particular group at a highly demanding conference panel, or visible in your industry, you're much less likely to become a part of it... even though you're more than capable of performing at that level if you put the time in.
> If there isn't anyone from your particular group at a highly demanding conference panel, or visible in your industry, you're much less likely to become a part of it... even though you're more than capable of performing at that level if you put the time in.
Technical conferences don't exist to engender your preferred social change, they exist to impart knowledge to attendees, all of whom paid considerable sums to be there.
That's not the case for open-source tech conferences. Open source has a preference for social change at its fundamental level - "anyone can edit". This at least leans towards promoting an egalitarian environment.
Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge', so they are a fundamentally social event. The 'hallway track' as it is known. If it weren't for the networking, conferences would be pointless as you could just do a local course or read up on the niche publications.
> That's not the case for open-source tech conferences. Open source has a preference for social change at its fundamental level - "anyone can edit". This at least leans towards promoting an egalitarian environment.
Open-source is not simply egalitarian. PostgreSQL (for example) doesn't try to apply egalitarian ideals to patch acceptance. Bad code is bad code, no matter who wrote it.
In the ideal, open-source is meritocratic, which also happens to be the ideal criteria applied to selecting conference papers.
> Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge' ...
Why do you think these are different things? Some of the best collaborations I've had have resulted from meeting the smart people presenting at conferences, and sharing knowledge.
If conferences break the signal-to-noise ratio by attempting to fill quotas rather than selecting noteworthy papers, then the smart people will stop attending; the social value AND the associated knowledge sharing will be diminished.
I'm pretty sure that pifflesnort got it correct. Egalitarian means that people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. But open source communities do not treat people equally. If you've never learned to write a good bug report, you're marginalized. If you've learned to program and have time to contribute, you're likely to be able to have a significant impact on the project that you're interested in.
It is true that the economic barriers to entry are fairly low. I've personally known multiple homeless people who found open source to be their gateway to learning a useful skill and getting a good job. (Most who know the ones that I am thinking of do not know this detail of their lives...) But there are other types of barriers to entry. Language skills, intelligence, interest, etc.
It is easy to ignore those requirements. But stop and think about the fact that significantly less than half of adults in the USA can read, write, and do math at a grade 8 level. A lot of the reasons why have to do with unequal opportunities (bad schools, families that discount learning, etc). The fact that open source communities ignore those people rather than actively seeking to give them access is a demonstration that open source is a meritocracy, not an egalitarian society.
You're being overly pedantic on your definitions. Egalitarian means giving everyone an equal starting point free of cultural background. It doesn't mean that the cardiac health advice of a consultant cardiologist is weighed the same as a random person on the street with no medical training. It's not "all opinions are equal", but "opinions should start free of cultural bias". If you want your bug report accepted more easily, then experience with writing bug reports matters - what doesn't matter is if you're a woman, or a south asian or whatever.
Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal. A dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian in need of advice on wood will still seek a carpenter over a weaver.
> Egalitarian means giving everyone an equal starting point free of cultural background.
What is a 'starting point'? Open source certainly doesn't provide equal starting points, because each individual is evaluated on merit, the acquisition of which is often tied to social and economic background.
Conferences don't provide equal starting points, for the same reason.
> Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal.
They are orthogonal. An egalitarian meritocratic society would give each member equal opportunity to achieve, but would judge the achievements of each member according to their merit.
Open source only concerns itself (like any sane organization whose mission is not social advancement) with merit, not with egalitarian questions of how merit was acquired.
Well I don't exist to facilitate your preferred status quo.
That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.
There's not much controversy there, and like it or not, most people feel the same way.
> Well I don't exist to facilitate your preferred status quo.
You are not a technical conference. You are a person.
At a technical conference, focused on technical content: if you sacrifice the quality of that technical content for quotas, then you've produced objectively worse conference.
> That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.
What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?
> Well spotted. The point is that the status quo is a choice, just as being more inclusive is a choice. Which is the better choice?
Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.
> 1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.
No, judging content on the basis of anything other than direct merit will lead to inferior papers and talks.
> Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."
What do you want them to do exactly? They put out a call for papers, they get the papers they get. Of the roughly 200 accepted speakers (authors of papers) presented at Usenix, about 5% were female.
Usenix is well known. It's not new. The call for papers goes out every year. Research arms of corporations and universities send their employees.
Say that you put out a call for conference papers, but due to a bug in your mailing list software, only every other email is sent - 50% of potential participants are excluded. What do you think will happen to the quality of your conference?
Now let's say you find the bug after you've decided on your talk schedule. Should you should fix the bug and include the 50% of papers that you've missed? Isn't that unfair to the people who've already been selected?
I admit that I don't understand your analogy. There isn't a bug in the call for papers -- it's fair. There isn't a bug in the review of papers -- the selections model the actual distribution of the larger population.
Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.
That's only partly true, and even that part depends on what you mean by "better technical content"
It also depends on whose perspective you're measuring from.
If a conference is run purely as a business, then the "better choice" for the organiser is the one that has the highest return on investment (presumably "highest net profit"). And there are lots of things, over and above the merits of the content itself, that contribute to that. If your target audience is 30% women, but your speaker line-up is only 5% women, that might be a problem for you. It might cause some percentage of those women to decide not to attend. The alternative - creating an artificial quota of having women make up 30% of speakers, regardless of quality - might cause an even larger drop in attendance. There's a balance that's needed, and it takes work.
But even if we don't worry about that, "technical content" isn't a simple measure. If your conference has even a moderately broad scope, then you need to worry about the breadth of talks. Clearly a Ruby conference where all the talks are on Rails, is not an ideal lineup even if the best submissions (on individual merit) were all for taks on Rails. In terms of content, if nothing else, you need to worry about diversity.
So, if you're planning a Ruby conference, and you know that only 50% of your target audience are Rails users, but 90% of the papers submitted are for Rails talks, then it would appear that something has gone wrong in your process. It look like people have pegged you a a Rails conference, even though that's not your intent.
I'd argue that same applies to speaker demographics as well. If you think that 30% of your target audience are women, but only 5% of your submissions are from women, then there's a reasonable chance that something in the process caused the women not to submit papers. If that's the case, then your conference is going to suffer for it.
There a lots of things that conference organisers can do that either increase or decrease the diversity in their submissions/selection process. E.g.
- Placing too high an emphasis on previous speaking engagements in an industry segment where diversity has been lacking in the past.
- Having a selection panel that is overly skewed towards one group of people (selection bias)
- Putting out your call for papers in the wrong places (one that is skewed)
- Having a call for papers that contains biased language
Even if you are firmly decided on selecting speakers based purely on their content (even though, for some conferences, that might not produce the "best" result), there is work that can be done to make sure you're at least considering the widest selection of papers in the most effective way.
Right, and if their CFP is systematically discouraging some people from applying, or their review process is systematically undervaluing proposals from some people, and those people would give great presentations, then the conference is not going to be as good as it otherwise would be. Conferences that fail to take questions of gender representation seriously are depriving their attendees of great presentations from women. If you care about the quality of technical conferences, you should want to attend those which have a policy that tries to ensure good proposals won't be missed simply because of the gender of the presenter.
You're going to need to be more specific than that. What, exactly, do they need to do differently, and why?
At 'serious' technical conferences, presentations are based on papers, papers are based on work already done. The conference itself is an end game of months or years of work that already happened.
At less serious conferences, talks, presentations, and panels are selected to maximize interest by choosing people of significant stature and interest in the community. Again, this is the end game of months or years of work that already happened.
Where is it the conferences responsibility (and to what advantage) to extend themselves to garnering talks and presenters from a minority industry segment (and which minority segments?). Do you actually have demonstrable evidence that presenters and papers of merit are being excluded from conferences? This would serve as evidence that conferences were failing in the missions to provide top tier content.
It seems that your position is focused more on who is presenting content than what the content actually is.
If by "outreach and encouragement" you mean outright subsidizing the trip for a specific target gender.
Did this actually improve the technical content of the conference, or did it simply redefine the objective measure by which PyCon determines "success" to include non-technical metrics? The latter seems to be the case, in which case, it's not a particularly valuable stratagem for a merit-focused technical conference.
Let's improve Hacker News by adding an empowering point multiplier to women's posts. The overwhelming majority of posts are by men, so isn't this the only just action?
Also: Why are women more valuable than stutterers at conferences?
That first part would be a hilarious application of ~affirmative action.~ Most people like AA until you apply it equally to other things, which is when the sense of how ridiculous it is becomes hard for even the most determinedly discriminatory person to ignore.
I think you're trolling, nonetheless... I have a Stutterer friend, and he does present himself at conferences. And I think it may have others, because actually when Stutterers are very concious of their talk (like in a conference) they stutter a lot less, so it becomes more subtle...
I'll ignore the first line, since I'm parsing that as trolling, but the second line bears some thought.
The basic answer to that is that they're not - if you know someone who stutters, I would like to think that you'd encourage them to present at a conference if they had something valuable to present.
However, imagine that that conference is a brofest - they're not going to feel very included, are they? Bros are assholes after all, and they probably won't want to participate if they feel that they're going to be mocked or not listened to.
Stutterers are disproportionately unrepresented as speakers at conferences, despite potentially having extremely valuable information to share, just like women.
Being on stage in front of an audience who are tweeting about your physical attributes, not what you are saying; who are snarkily commenting about you being the token blonde; who are assuming you got there because of your birth, not your brains -- that's not a hindrance to speaking?
Even if none of those things are true, they can be running through the speaker's head, just as a stutterer is incredibly self-aware of their impediment. We create our own barriers.
Stuttering: "Talk with continued involuntary repetition of sounds, esp. initial consonants"
The definition of stuttering involves having problems with physical speech. The definition of woman doesn't involve having problems with physical speech.
Stutterers are underrepresented in most conferences; even if you could get them up on stage, it would be a difficult presentation to listen give eloquently (and probably hard to listen to). Women are underrepresented at conferences, but it's not because they would have a problem presenting. Some people might have a problem listening to it, but that'd be largely because of their own issues.
Comparing stutterering - a physical (or perhaps mental) impediment - to females is insulting.
You've missed my point entirely. To restate it more bluntly, being a presenting female at a conference can cause a mental impediment. Would I prefer to listen to a female speaker than a stutterer? Not if she were so paralysed by self-doubt that she gave a halting, unconfident, impossible to listen to talk.
I didn't miss it at all. It's just not a good point. What about male presenters who get paralysed or nervous or have self-doubt in front of crowds?
I've seen few female presenters bomb, and the ones that did - there were much easier explanations - no or little experience public speaker, didn't understand the topic, etc. The ones I've seen who know the topic and the audience and have spoken before in public are fine - no better than men. I do have occasion to listen to male speakers who stutter, and while I know they're smart people - they know their subject well - they can not present.
In your example, it seems obvious that the speaker's gender isn't the source of the hindrance - instead, shouldn't it be the audience of misogynists that are at fault as the hindrance?
Can you please show some statistics to back that up? I've been at a conference with a stuttering speaker, and I'm not sure that it's true that the preponderance of stutterers in conference speakers as compared to the general public is as disproportionate as that of women.
This "forced quota" thing rarely works well - on large or small scale. Back in my college days, IBM came to campus - they announced their intention to hire more women than men, to have diversity in their workforce. While it was good for the girls who got hired (edging out guys who were more qualified), it annoyed a lot of guys who had better grades.
May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.
>May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.
I agree wholeheartedly! I think that this is the sort of attitude which would be conducive to moving the state of affairs along. In these fights it's often lost that the problem at hand is that treating people in a way that makes them feel like they're not welcome and not respected is at the root of the issue.
While it was good for the girls who got hired (edging out guys who were more qualified), it annoyed a lot of guys who had better grades.
So what? It's not like those men are going to find all employment doors shut to them. They weren't guaranteed jobs at IBM, and the assumption that they should have a say in the firm's hiring criteria and strategic goals demonstrates an almost laughable sense of entitlement.
Of course. When women don't want to be discriminated against, it's an issue of rights and equality. When men don't want to be discriminated against, it's a laughable sense of entitlement.
By the way, are "grades" still considered as a worthy predictor of one's performance in the workplace?
Because it's kind of strange when I think of it. I've interviewed a lot of people in my life already and I can't remember a single time grades were brought forward or mattered. Is it an US thing?
What else do you have when you are going to a campus to recruit?
On top of that, even if the company didn't consider them, their classmates probably knew where everyone fell in relation to each other. They would know if they got passed over for someone who had better grades than themselves.
If person A came from a privileged background, and got straight As, and person B came from a much less privileged background, and had to overcome many hurdles just to get into school, and continued to fight to stay in school, and got Bs, which person would you want on your team?
I'm not saying that's definitely the case here, just that grades alone don't tell the whole story.
Your comment is so thick in assumptions (students objectively know who is better at whatever metric you have in mind?) that you are proving the case that traditional metrics are untrustworthy for selecting meritorious candidates.
You're making assumptions. I am not saying anything about the objectivity of the grades given to anyone. I am simply saying that you know someone with a 'B' average was picked over you, when you know you have a 'A' average, you are probably going to be irritated over them picking someone who appears in your point of view to be inferior.
I am really good at math problems and I can't explain my ideas (or comprehend yours) to save my life. You got Bus in school but are able to effect a result as part of a group effort.
I will resent you for getting a job that I don't. There is no problem here, my resentment doesn't matter.
This was an Indian university. Different companies had different strategies - some would "filter" the students based on grades alone, and then pick the best from interviews. Some had their own tests, and ignored the grades totally (even in this, some had programming problems only, while others had some weird puzzles etc). It was a while ago, I am not sure what the situation is these days. I do remember that it was a good mix of all kinds of strategies.
On the contrary it almost always works. Force the quota of women, gays, blacks, Jews, poor etc. to zero and the privileged group will spend almost exactly no time considering the fact that there may have been someone more qualified that could have bumped them imperceptibly down the ranks if that quota wasn't enforced. They'll not even notice after decades of this.
Just make sure you don't do it to anyone, like straight, white males who have the political strength to resist it or you'll never hear the end of it.
would you be okay with quotas in sports? music? movies?
something like "30% of olympic 100m finalists should be allocated to minorities" etc?
I've seen students with laughable grades (no, I am not making this up) get into medical schools, because they are from underprivileged group. Would you be okay with them performing surgery on you?
</questions>
Quota system is a very dangerous game to play - it usually goes downhill quickly, even if the intentions are good and even if people who run it are super competent. There are numerous other ways to help the under privileged.
They'll not even notice after decades of this.
History has lots of people from the privileged class who ended up working to improve society as a whole. Bill Gates is great living example.
>One way to look at percentages is as a quota. "20% of our speakers this year shall be women!" Right or wrong, a lot of people don't like this. Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach
You present it as different things but it's exactly the same flawed idea.
"An estimation of your outreach" would only be different from quota if the number of good conference pitches sent in by men was equal or near equal to the number of pitches sent in by women.
Since the number of women in programming are far less than the men, that is obviously not the case (their respective total number of pitches would be unequal and hence their respective total of good pitches would be unequal).
Unless men and women Python programmers are something like 50-50, you cannot have something like 50-50 men and women Python conference speakers. At best, a fair outreach should be M-F, where M/F the respective male and female Python programmers ratio.
And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it.
Which might not be the case at all (it doesn't even have to be because women are, say, less nerdy and obsessive with coding: just assume, which is very plausible, that male bosses in the workplace don't assign them interesting enough problems in their Python work, and prefer males to be project leaders etc. Then, following that, fewer women will have interesting conference pitches to make). And there are 1000s of other factors like that.
Finally, not every field needs to have 50-50 representation anyway. We don't lament that there are far fewer women boxers or rugby players than men. Or that there are far fewer women coal miners or truck drivers than men. Or that there are far more women in fashion that men. Or than there are far more women in biology than men, etc etc.
You are assuming that the curve of ability distribution is equal between the sexes, i.e. that X% of male pitches and X% of female pitches would be "good". What if the females who have the courage to pitch, or to stick around in programming at all, shift the bell curve further up? (Or, the inflammatory counter, what if women just aren't good at math and should be shopping instead - shifting it the other way?)
We don't lament that there are far fewer women $foo than men
We don't, because we're in technology.
Some of my other hobbies are also male dominated and unrelated to technology, there's definitely an awareness of the situation and active efforts to recruit more women. On the flipside, I've seen some arguments about the biology situation, theorising that the reason there are more women in biology is cultural conditioning for girls interested in science (it certainly happened to me, but that's hardly solid data).
>You are assuming that the curve of ability distribution is equal between the sexes, i.e. that X% of male pitches and X% of female pitches would be "good".
No, I'm not taking this for granted.
I even stated: "And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it."
>(Or, the inflammatory counter, what if women just aren't good at math and should be shopping instead - shifting it the other way?)
Could be entirely plausible too. Don't have any numbers though (could also be the inverse, women better at math).
But more plausible to me is an alternative explanation. What if not enough women (due to either nature or nurture) don't have the obsessive nature that being a coder and doing conference worthy stuff requires? I know men working meticulously on some stuff (from hacking to wood-working) for ages. Far less women doing so. I'm not judging, if anything it could be far smarter, personal-development-wise, than programming 10 hours straight at work and then again at home, in your "cave", as a hobby. So, perhaps women favor work-life balance more. Or men coders compensate with coding for other stuff (for example a lot that I know have subpar sex lives and are not exactly "party animals").
Sorry, I missed that specific point in amongst your others; the main argument you made seemed to specifically ignore this, so I guess I just edited it out when I read it. :)
Women do plenty of obsessive hobbies. I know women who can spend an entire day (12+ hours) baking, for example. Sure, our brains are wired differently, but I think the idea that you have to be obsessive to present at a conference (and that females might not be as obsessive for whatever reason) doesn't quite hold up. There are plenty of conference-worthy subjects which might not be deeply meticulous coding topics, for example.
She asks if quotas are marginalizing women's achievements. The function being used to evaluate speakers is broken - that much is clear from the rate of women being selected. A solid guess is that the specific way in which it is broken is that it is giving undue weight to men, topics men find interesting, and topics that exclude women. In a sense, this is "outsourcing" the discriminatory elements.
This has an obvious correction: put a counterweight on it in the form of a quota. Does this fix the illness? No. It is a pill, medicine to manage the symptoms of the illness while the illness is fought. The malady is diffused, the remedy is not, so it is easy to pick on the remedy - but it's better than doing nothing.
We have some guesses about what the "right" number would be, and a quota of 20% or 25% is hardly getting us there - it is ensuring a lower bound. How much injustice is really resulting from having a lower bound?
> The function being used to evaluate speakers is broken - that much is clear from the rate of women being selected.
What numbers do you have to demonstrate that the function is broken? What percentage of our industry is made up of women, and what percentage of them are interested in presenting at a conference?
> This has an obvious correction: put a counterweight on it in the form of a quota. Does this fix the illness? No. It is a pill, medicine to manage the symptoms of the illness while the illness is fought. The malady is diffused, the remedy is not, so it is easy to pick on the remedy - but it's better than doing nothing.
Why do you believe that enforcing the selection of speakers on a basis other than their qualifications is better than doing nothing?
The number being that low is suspicious. In my vague, personal experience, the upper tiers of computing are about 10% female. The odds of 1 in 23 are 0.315. Plausible, but worth investigating.
Are the speaker selectors favoring men? That should be possible to test for. If so, it needs to get clamped down on hard.
Are women less inclined to try to speak at these conferences? If so, why? It's likely that making presenting more female-friendly would be worth it.
Is this subfield just that male? If so, it's not the conference-organizers' place to deal with it, but someone should sniff around for active biases.
In short, this is suspicious enough to justify a real investigation, and I'd be very interested to read the results of one.
When "their qualifications" results in a selection rate of men approaching 100%, I think that's prima facie case that one of the most important qualifications is being a man.
Furthermore, (% of industry that is women) x (% of women interested in presenting at a conference) is exactly what I was referring to when I talked about "outsourcing" the discrimination - the filter was set upstream.
> When "their qualifications" results in a selection rate of men approaching 100%, I think that's prima facie case that one of the most important qualifications is being a man.
Why is this a prima facie case proof of sexist qualification requirements? What evidence do you actually have?
At the 2012 American Academy of Nursing Conference, the expert panels were roughly 100% female. Is this prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications was being a woman?
> Furthermore, (% of industry that is women) x (% of women interested in presenting at a conference) is exactly what I was referring to when I talked about "outsourcing" the discrimination - the filter was set upstream.
I fail to see the issue here. Conferences have to work with the pool of speakers that they have.
>At the 2012 American Academy of Nursing Conference, the expert panels were roughly 100% female. Is this prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications was being a woman?
I think we'll have to agree to disagree, because yes, I easily read that as prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications is being a woman. I think it's a great example of the filter being set upstream - men face hurdles when trying to become a nurse, and face bizarre challenges when practicing as a nurse (although I believe they are still favored for promotions and prestigious placing).
I can't comprehend why you're arguing that these complex "upstream" cultural issues should force me to evaluate conference papers on any other grounds other than their technical merit -- something that would be the to the detriment of speakers, attendees, our industry, and my own sense of ethics and fairness to others.
> It's not some kind of man-hating reverse discrimination, it's an attempt to correct very real and very pervasive institutional inequalities.
Your position also assumes that the parties performing evaluations have existing gender biases -- itself a form of stereotyping, discrimination, and bias.
Evaluating papers anonymously solves the problem you claim, while avoiding any issues with quotas or "man-hating reverse discrimination".
It only solves the problem if women submit papers at close to the same rate (or even a proportional rate) as men, which is not the case. That is, of course, ignoring the yardstick—who gets to decide what has merit?
The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
> The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
What does this have to do with evaluating papers? Why would we divert ourselves from a technical mission to pick up an unrelated social cause?
> The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
The place to worry about correcting structural discrimination isn't at the point where it's already happened. That correction would be artificial and as such, detrimental to furtherance of our art and science.
The time to correct structural discrimination is long before anyone is submitting papers to present research they've already done.
I disagree. The function being used to evaluate speakers serves is NOT to achieve an arbitrary percentage split on genders of speakers, but to select the best speakers for a particular topic. If that happens to render a 100% female panel, so be it.
Having said that, a human bias in gender does need to be removed if it exists. If this bias is for or against the inclusion of women, it should be removed.
Applying a counterweight to achieve some superficial quota based on a societal demand just degrades the quality of the function and it's integrity.
How ironic it would be to apply such a fix for a 'tech' conference.
We can't propose effective solutions to the conference imbalance until we accurately identify the source. Your post assumes that the problem is with the function being used to evaluate speakers. That's far from certain. An arguably much likelier explanation is that, due to the huge gender imbalance in computing, the percentage of female applicants to speak at a conference is much lower than 20%. Therefore, the percentage of qualified applicants who are female is presumably much lower than 20%.
Let's assume for the sake of this line of reasoning that the function for evaluating a speaker's ability is accurate. If you are looking to invite ten speakers to your conference and there is only one woman among the top ten speakers, it would make perfect sense if you only invited one woman. That makes you good at your job, not sexist.
Now how do we go about changing this? Well, one approach is what you're suggesting--affirmative action. There are certainly pros and cons to introducing such a minimum quota, but I find the article's assessment that the cons seem to substantially outweigh the pros to be very persuasive. Inviting inferior speakers in an effort to increase the representation of a specific group at a conference is problematic for two main reasons: (1) it results in a conference that is expected to be worse quality and (2) it deprives women who actually are evaluated to be in the top ten speakers from knowing, and from having other people know, that their value to the conference came from their speaking ability rather than their second X chromosome. Additional ways in which the quota approach is problematic are that (3) it discriminates against the many other groups that are under-represented at tech conferences, as well as the oft-debated argument that (4) inviting a worse female speaker over a better male speaker is unfair for the man.
If we suppose the quota system does more harm than good, what alternatives do we have? That's the million dollar question! The only answer I've got is to focus our efforts on addressing the sources of women's under-representation in computing in general, such as encouraging female students to study computer science, getting schools to examine whether their classroom environment discourages female students from pursuing CS, and help software companies identify whether their workplace atmosphere discourages women and what steps they can take to address that. Forcing conferences to invite more women or businesses to hire more women is a highly problematic and very short-term hack. Identifying and fixing the structural barriers to women in computing is a highly difficult but very long-term solution.
Agree that forcing the balance is not the right approach. However, making people aware of it is not a bad thing. Sometimes organisations may (unconsciously) have bias in their selection process; having an invited speaker decline because of gender imbalance is certainly one way to make the organisation take a look at whether something is going on, rather than accepting the status quo as OK, which it rarely is.
Outreach to encourage more submissions from women, and looking at downstream ("lesser") conferences, to help those also encourage more submissions from women, seem like the right steps to me. It can be self-perpetuating though. You go to a conference and no women are speaking, you subconsciously think you don't belong there.
But hey; if you go to a conference and 20% of the speakers are women, yet 5% of the attendees are, isn't that a different kind of red flag?
Making sure a certain % of speakers are women is ridiculous. I'm a woman and a programmer and I'd be offended they just threw a few women on to even it out vs. to make sure the best of the best speakers are there. If some happen to be women - great! If not, who cares. Women are not being excluded, so what's the problem? Why include women who may be mediocre just for the score? Too much sensitivity these days...
This is a point I wish more people would make. There are a huge number of Asians in tech, and we are grossly underrepresented at tech conferences. But no one even thinks to look at diversity numbers there. I've seen discussion about racial diversity for black and even Hispanic people, but nobody thinks twice about Asians (which are even fewer in number in the general population).
Actually...You should care...Americans are fucking racist, but they think being racists with asians it's not trully racism. ( just look at movies like gran torino )
Agreed. This women 2.0 thing has been super annoying. Meanwhile every women I know who kicks ass at their craft doesn't have any problems with "marginalization". People who are competitive and competent tend to just fine in competitive careers. I never knew anyone who deserved to be at the top who got their by asking someone to make some rules so they could get there instead of you know... just being awesome.
You may be interested in research into how some groups are more productive when they work collaboratively rather than competitively, and how women are disproportionately better in collaborative environments.
I don't want a team full of the best indiviual performers. I want the best performing team.
This is the same quota issue we deal with in all sorts of fields for all sorts of minorities. In my opinion the only effective course of action is to continually improve equality of opportunity, not by promoting some people at the expense of others because of minority status, but by concentrating and encouraging/requiring others to concentrate on qualifications to the exclusion of ethnic, sexual, etc. factors.
Yes, definitely, too much (over)sensitivity. There will always be people who discriminate, and there will always be someone out there -- no matter who you are -- that will actively discriminate against you given the opportunity. Those people will never change. For the rest of us, what the world needs is to lighten up and give things some time: In the grander scheme of things, all this equality talk started up relatively recently. People don't change overnight, and the institutions we build change far more slowly.
Patience, people. Patience, tempered expectations, and realism. Not all of this will ever be "fixed," and that which is will pretty much asymptotically approach our best case expectations, so learning to be happy with what we get and work to improve things without pissing everyone off all the time seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
The only people that complain that there aren't enough women in tech are men. Women complain about female unfriendly work environments and conferences. But tech people don't understand the difference between "female unfriendly" and "needs more women". All there needs to be is a smart woman whose input is taken seriously when organizing conferences and establishing workplace culture.
Here's my input on the "need more women"/"female unfriendly" work environment in IT debate:
There's nothing wrong with working with and coding with only men. That's been my only experience so far as a noob who's had two programming internships.
I think most men are easy to get along with and I enjoy their friendships. The only female unfriendly experiences I've had on the job have been due to sexual harassment (as in someone actively trying to sleep with a person, not a stupid off-handed joke). In class it's been the more condescending "you only got that job because you're a girl and you look like this". I think that needs to stop. It's completely fucked up behaviour. But being on an all male team is fine. I think to say we need to get tech to a completely even score is pointless. Most nurses are women and a few are men and they carry on fine? Not a lot of girls are into coding (at least as of yet) and that's fine too. They're being influenced at a younger age to have an interest in tech now by different organizations and that is great, but if after campaigns such as those are completed and women still don't get to 50% of IT - meh, who cares. Given most women who get into tech enjoy tech related hobbies (video games etc.) it's easy to be friendly to coworkers and others in the industry. It's not like women in tech all feel completely disconnected from the men. The women in my class and I have spoke about this and we generally have all had the same experience (unfortunately that includes the sexual harassment too though).
tdlr; most women are not overly sensitive like Adria Richards and we'll be fine. We're too busy coding up stuff to care about this (minus the sexual harassment - which is commenting on boobs and trying to sleep with the girl etc., not dongle jokes lol but actual serious stuff)
I want to add too that sexual harassment happens in all industries and it's a separate issue. Most guys in IT are not like that. I have dealt with this problem prior to IT as well. Certain men need to learn how to take a hint... if someone wants to sleep with you in return you'll know, in the mean time, relax about it and take the option of acting like a friend/coworker more than a sex deprived p.o.s.
That's correct, as is the author. People are advocating for affirmative action for women instead of advocating for the best speaker pitches and letting the chips fall where they may. Don't make women tokens, expect the same excellence you do from men and they will rise to the occasion. I have no doubt that the visibility of women will rise at conferences while they are competing successfully in tech jobs and representing a greater share of programmers and engineers.
It's pretty annoying to read articles like this about any topic - someone who doesn't appear to have thought through much of anything, let alone done a little research, bringing up 'thought provoking' ideas like 'did they consider that most of the submissions may have been from men?'. Well gee golly, if only anyone ever had looked at submission patterns across gender and ways to change them. Or there's the 'you think they dismissed awesome presentations from people who happen to wear a bra?' question, which is saying 'you must be accusing everyone involved of outright misgyny!'. Gee whillikers, if only anyone ever had studied the unconscious changes in reaction to a proposal submitted under a male name or a female name! etc etc. Do everyone a favour and do a little research before diving in to a controversial topic that already suffers so much from 'I'm a man/woman, I must know about this!' layman syndrome.
> Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains.
You misrepresent that study by quoting only that part. It continues:
"Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings."
and what's with the spammy intermediate link? direct link:
That is interesting, and I hadn't read that - I was thinking of the hiring study that dreamfactory linked. I'd be interested in seeing some analysis showing whether the new study is considered flawed, or how else to understand the two together (on a superficial level, they seem totally contradictory results).
The author's assertion is simply that enforcing quotas does not empower women, and that instead it devalues the work and talent of the women who are ultimately represented at the conference. And I agree with her. Women shouldn't need quotas in order to be offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
Of course, percentages matter, and the fact that far fewer women are represented in a conference may be a symptom of something else, as opposed to a direct bias by the conference organizers. What we need is more of the underlying data. To start, I'd like to know how many women submitted technical talks to begin with.
I am from a country(India) where reservations and quotas are as rampant as breathing. Quotas and reservations are disastrous to any community over the longer run.
The only place where reservations make any impact is areas where there are too many good candidates and somebody from the lesser privileged sections of the society who is equally good can't make it due to the limited availability of opportunities. In such cases it makes some sense to offer the minorities a degree of reservation as the culture is unwelcoming to a meritorious minority person.
Any thing apart from this and what you will see is, the social problems remain totally unchanged. Reservations and quotas means some one from privileged class who is deserving of a position will be denied the opportunity, and some one oppressed class who is not deserving will get the opportunity instead. The net result is the whole system will be poisoned. Work never gets done, more and more hard working people are denied opportunities. At the same undeserving people get the same opportunities and make a big waste out of them.
If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't.
Our job is to create a level playing field. So that anybody who want's to, can deliver.
There is a provable, significant difference is earning/wealth between different castes in India[1]. If you believe that there is no difference between people depending on their caste, this is situation you want to remedy.
If there has been systematic discrimination against a class of people, spanning centuries, they can not compete without providing affirmative action. Quota's are a way to level the playing field.
"If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't."
Not if the means of productions, wealth and power is hoarded by a few.
I was born and raised in rural India and have seen numerous Dalits benefit from reservations. Reservations in India is a complex sociological arrangement and deeply linked with Casteism and systematic repression for centuries. Just citing few examples of candidates from non-deserving backward castes is not enough to invalidate reservations. There have been attempts to hijack the issue for political political gains, but that's the problem with the political class, not with the Reservations.
A: Number of people who benefit from reservations.
B: Number of people who suffer because of reservations.
Over the years B has been far too larger than A.
Thanks to the IT boom in the 90's. One of the biggest reasons best people from India left to the west was because their much deserved opportunity went to some one who didn't do 1/10th the work they did.
You are speaking with a sense of entitlement which is vain. Backward castes and Dalits constitute 75% of the population of India. So if the electorate decided they need affirmative action as even after 60 years of independence, their representation remains below 20% in white collar jobs, then it is their prerogative. Since when do the minority dictate terms to a majority in a democratic polity. Grow up dude, and be thankful that you still have 50% seats in general category and that is given to you by the will of the majority.
The whole point of constitutional systems is that the majority can't infringe the rights of a minority even by majority vote. I'm not as familiar with the Indian political system as with the US and Europe, but there's a reason no one does unrestricted democracy without limits on state authority.
There is an unprecedented case in India where 75% of population was subjected to persecution for thousands of years in the name of caste and one generation is not enough to get back the ability to compete in general category, especially for people who were regarded as untouchables. How will ensuring 50% of jobs for 75% of the populace, by their elected representatives infringe on minority rights? This is called social justice - opposite of which is fascism.
These days due to reservations, people want to be born in lower castes in India. Because there a lot of free perks, reservations and generally people get a lot of things with little effort.
Compare this with the general merit category where even true meritorious students are denied their due.
In India there are protests by groups asking the government to name them as backwards classes.
"These days due to reservations, people want to be born in lower castes in India."
Pure unadulterated bullshit or trolling.
Er.. I'm from India too.. and kamaal.. you seem to be stuck in the small college student protests about reservation around 7 - 8 years ago.
Nobody wants to be born in a lower caste. In the end, such comments are just jokes. India's social playing field is still more important to the ordinary people. Especially when castes play a big role in marriages in India, the next most important thing after society as a whole.
So, i have to ask... whats your angle kamaal. Convincing HN that reservations are bad is going to make no difference on the politics of India. You seem to be ranting about it every chance you get (and against poor people from the last comment i read).
Also, your rant here is only against the backward sections of society, which have been denied equal opportunities for ages and have now become a political pawn in the reservations fiasco.
I question this, because India, as you know has reservations for women too, already in many educational institutions, pending in the parliament.
So, instead of quoting something relevant like the impact of various reservations the country has implemented for women, you seem to just pout out your own agenda.
Don't wanna make the world a better place? Please don't try to make it worse.
>>Er.. I'm from India too.. and kamaal.. you seem to be stuck in the small college student protests about reservation around 7 - 8 years ago.
Yeah, may be. Most people who come from a middle class general category are going to suffer from reservations. Because they will be doing all the hard work only to watch someone who scored some thing like half their marks eat all their opportunities.
>>Nobody wants to be born in a lower caste. In the end, such comments are just jokes.
Have you ever visited a local Taluk office? Say some where in Bangalore? Do you even know how much bribe is given simply to obtain a OBC certificate because some one needs a job, or to get a seat and doesn't have the required marks to get one?.
>>So, i have to ask... whats your angle kamaal.
Let me put it the other way, what's your angle. I've put my views clear.
You should elaborate how denying the hardworking general category students their due chance is helping the country.
>>Also, your rant here is only against the backward sections of society, which have been denied equal opportunities for ages and have now become a political pawn in the reservations fiasco.
So is this now a revenge cycle? Are we supposed to make the general category suffer because some 20 generations back a ancestor of their made a mistake.
>>I question this, because India, as you know has reservations for women too, already in many educational institutions, pending in the parliament.
Last time I checked most women who stand for elections in my area were the wives of most prominent rowdies/mafia types.
>>So, instead of quoting something relevant like the impact of various reservations the country has implemented for women, you seem to just pout out your own agenda.
>>Don't wanna make the world a better place? Please don't try to make it worse.
Sorry you need to give your agenda, not me.
And how are you making the world a better place by denying the hardworking their due chance. And taking all their opportunities and giving to some one who probably didn't do 1/10th the work they do.
When bias (like gender, or race) is so prolific. It is institutional change that is required.
You are arguing, just make it a level playing field and the hardworking woman will eventually show up. But that takes generations for change to happen.
In a lot of our eyes, that is not good enough. Change needs to happen now. Quota systems may deny an opportunity to a deserving person (as the quota is full). But it is morally equivalent to being denied an opportunity due to some other kind of bias (i.e because you are a woman).
So really, quotas is just a new (not prejudicial) form of bias. The only difference is, it will eventually change the whole system (for the better). Where as prejudicial bias just makes the system worse.
I would say that by keeping the status quo (i.e. 90+% men in tech) you are poisoning the system.
Reservations don't bring about institutional changes.
Again, I have to come down to giving the example of Indian society[Sorry can't help it, but 60 years of these experiments make India the perfect case study for these sort of problems].
In India, there are cases where some one got a medical seat through reservations. The person generally goes on to become a pretty good doctor, earns well and is now pretty much empowered to do anything he/she wants. But yet you will see their children claim seats though reservations. What's more ridiculous? You can even get a post graduation seat through reservations. Why does one need a reservation when a transparent ranking process exists through a competitive exam? The exams are often objective multiple choice questions and the candidates identity is anonymous and known only through a serial number.
While all this is happening, some guy in the general category watches his well deserved seat go to some other guy who makes it through on just qualifying marks.
At one point of time, before the free market reforms in the 90's. This problem was the big reason, why so many Indian's left India to settle abroad.
>>The only difference is, it will eventually change the whole system (for the better).
It won't.
Quota/Reservations systems at best work like socialist/communist set ups.
Sooner or later- The deserving guy finds no motivation to continue contributing to the system. The undeserving guy never contributes because regardless of his work the rewards are assured.
> Are we supposed to make the general category suffer because some 20 generations back a ancestor of their made a mistake.
So what's your proposal here? I would love that each generation we had the wealth allocated on a purely merit basis but the world does not work like that, I know a fair share of mediocre people with fortunes who can send their children to better schools and some smarter poor fellas that can't, and besides I live in Brazil and ignoring the past did not produced a really better alternative.
I don't like reservations very much, but sometimes they're necessary. And anyway, if they're reservations, they will only take SOME opportunities away from the privileged, and give them to the minorities. Not all of them.
Interesting. So you're saying have an extra seat reserved for minorities only, and the minority on the seat must have the appropriate qualifications. That way no one is disadvantaged by the new system.
That's actually a great way of doing things and i'm surprised it's not used more.
I only say there must be a level playing field so that hard working women get same chances as men.
Reservations create a scenario where you are lower the entry bar for A group of people. While keeping it high for B group of people. Net result is there will no motivation for A set of people to try anything extra since they are guaranteed an entry anyway. At the same a certain set of people from B will stop doing any good work because regardless of their work, A's are going to get their chances.
The whole system collapses.
India has tried this for the past 60 years. The situation has only gone worse.
Work should be done to help women win without reservations.
You dance around it, but that's what you're saying. What else would explain the < 5% female speaker rate at conferences? Obviously the good women are making it, and the rest... just aren't very good.
"Reservations" or whatever you want to call them are lowering the bar to the same level as other people, but of course the "B"s are going to scream blue murder because they now have to work instead of cruising.
Women do not constitute 50% of the people in tech it makes sense for them to be a minority when presenting.
Why are they a minority in tech in the first place? Well video games got me and most of my friends into tech, and when I was in high-school in the mid 90s most girls abhorred games and considered them childish and geeky. It was a serious social faux pas to be a tech geek who loved hacking around with computers and playing video games. I never met a single girl in the 90s who was into it beyond playing an occasional game of Mario Kart.
Does anybody know the proportion of women in tech? If there is a lower proportion of women speaking at conferences than in the industries that the conferences are about, you may have a point.
I will call for a reservation policy if you show me instances where a good well deserved talk from a women was rejected at a conference just because she is a woman.
Are there cases where a talk from a woman was judged not because of its merit but because the speaker's gender?
If all woman who have good talks are getting their chances, I don't even see a problem here.
That's a horrible comment that deserve being down voted into the ground.
Not only is it a strawman argument, but it also reiterates sexist claims about women. At best, your comment gets ignored and worst, the comment will work against creating gender equality.
It's not a strawman, it's called argumentum ad absurdum. If we take his premise as true:
> If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't.
The conclusion from that is that the lack of women in tech is because they're not very good at it. If women were good at tech, then from his statement there would be more of them (they would "win anyway").
This is clearly absurd - hence he's wrong, or at least needs to support/make his argument a little better.
Do I really need to stick </sarcasm> tags on everything?
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because quotas are a wrong solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process".
One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.
What's interesting is when people do the opposite. When they A/B test the name. Same content. Half the people have male names, half female. Now, if gender doesn't matter, and people are judged purely on their achievements, and we are in a real meritocracy, then there should be no difference, right? If there a statistically significant difference in how people treat the male vs. female applicant, then there's some bias going on.
Not if there is a difference in outcome, based on gender; if based on the same background, people from gender A publish on average four papers and people from gender B publish on average three papers during their degree, which gender does it make sense to pick? Or if you add a person from gender C to a group that was composed solely of gender D, does it increase or decrease the lab's total output because of different social dynamics? Or, if there are grants that are only accessible to gender E due to positive discrimination, does it make sense to lower their pay, since they can compensate through that grant?
The paper assumes independence between the gender of the applicant and the gender of the students of the professor, which isn't the case unless you hide the applicant in a room away from the current grad students.
Furthermore, the paper mentions that they used both Student's t-test and an ANOVA, both of which assume that the underlying data is normally distributed; there was no mention of a normality test anywhere in the paper. If the data is not normally distributed, which could be the case, then it's violating the normality assumption of both tests, which could potentially make them invalid.
Finally, are there other confounding factors in the study? For example, if the applications were sent in different batches, the time at which they arrived does have an influence. For example, a recent paper evaluated the decision of judges for parole and found out that judges were more lenient right after lunch and were much more strict right before[1].
Maybe something is wrong, but I wouldn't blindly assume it's discrimination (especially since the results are the same if women do the hiring).
I wish somebody woyuld at least look into possible reasons. Personally I suspect the elephant in the room is motherhood. If there is an x% chance for the recipient of your grant to quit the profession after a couple of years, it lowers the value of your investment quite a bit.
Which means we should allow/push men to take paternity leaves in equal proportion to women taking maternity leaves. It's ridiculous that a) maternity leave is essentially not required in the US, and b) that women are expected to bear additional work-burdens, and men are often not allowed to bear the same child-rearing responsibilities due to lack of paternity leave.
I'll take "problems affecting women that feminism has consistently failed to tackle" for $2,000 ;-) (Seriously, it got a brief mention as such in one of bell hooks' books and everything. The solution, alas, is probably not a simple one.)
especially since the results are the same if women do the hiring
You think women can't be sexist against women? Of course they can be! A member of the marginalised group can easily continue that marginalisation. I watched a recent current affairs programme about same sex marriage, and they'd found a gay man to speak out against gay marriage.
Do you think a name blinded review process would yield a different result? I've never run a tech conference but it would not surprise me if ~95% of submitted technical talks were from men.
If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women.
The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
Blinding combined with active outreach to get more people to submit to a CFP has helped several conferences improve their numbers. GoGaRuCo is the one that immediately comes to mind.
I have sat on organizational committees and name-blinding would not work for some of us for one key reason: We use speaker's name/identity as a criteria for talk selection. Two main examples are whether they have presented before and how "strong" of a speaker they are.
We DO use names to discriminate but that often allows us to have "fresh" speakers and keep the lineup somewhat varied. It also allows us to filter for all the other spam-talks; i.e. marketers.
It is an issue of priorities but I would easily place quality of presentations over guaranteed blinding to prevent gender-bias selection.
Name-blinded reviews doesn't seem like a good solution for a conference, where a significant part of the appeal of a potential speaker can be their existing fame. They are a business, and name-blinded reviews could cost ticket sales.
A mixed solution seems more equitable - if there is a "rockstar programmer" invite them as a "Keynote" or some other more select engagement. Have only a small number of these speakers, and hopefully their credentials speak for themselves.
I only wish it was possible for smaller organizations to take advantage of blind review processes for speakers.
Read the article carefully, and quote me the part where she agrees there is a problem.
The balance of evidence is that she is dismissive of the problem. She says she disagrees with Debra Mastaler, she uses scare-quotes around the word "bias", all but one of her "solutions" are aimed at female speakers individually, of the "do more to get noticed" variety. (The one standout is her accusation against Forbes Woman.)
Nowhere does she acknowledge that a) a number conferences have managed to get much, much closer to parity, without resorting to quotas, and b) a conference that still ends up with 95% males therefore very much has a problem.
As someone who has organized several conferences, and countless events in the tech space, let me just say that it is REALLY hard to find and get top-tier/well-known women to speak at your event. I reached out to over a dozen women execs from 10+ startups that were well known and all of them turned us down for this last conference I helped organized in Miami in February.
Part of the issue is that you need well known speakers to sell more tickets, that coupled with the fact that the % of women working in tech is a minority, you're left with a shallow pool of possible speakers. Furthermore, if you're looking for certain skill-sets in tech to be speakers, you're further diminishing your pool of available candidates.
Male executives obviously gave us a much higher acceptance rate (lol anything over 0% acceptance would be higher). But we also had a larger pool of guys to invite/recruit (more males and more visibility of these guys).
Affirmative action are troublesome, and its good that someone are directly speaking against it. There are all from social to statistical problems, and those problem need to not be ignored.
Take Sweden education system. In the 1990s, they thought it would be a good idea to encourage minority groups by giving them an bonus when applying to a area of study where the applying individual would be a minority. It was a very simple rule, and it backfired, got scraped by the early 2000, and declared illegal. What the Swedish Education board found out was, that in 90% of the time where a applying individual would become a minority in a class, it was a white male trying to enter a female dominated area of study. The concept was scraped short after, with statements that the initial goals was not achieved, and that affirmative action was found as counterproductive to the concept of education. The second part was also reaffirmed in the courts and is now made illegal.
There are also much better alternatives to affirmative action which has been proven to be effective. Outreach programs works. Just a few months ago, there were a article describing how they reached around 50% or above female speaker participation through just doing outreach. They even made it a large point that they did no distinction what so ever when picking speakers, and the only work towards equality was outreach.
There are also social studies. We need more of those. As a scientific society, we should even demand it before listening to anyone arguing about problems within this society, and more importantly, when the discussion turns to causes or suggested solutions. If we do not demand it, those studies won't happen, as there will be no pressure to do so or money invested into it.
A few years ago I heard someone push the premise that women were simply too smart to acquire or keep a career in the tech industry. While sweeping generalizations like that usually set off my spidey-senses, this hypothesis might actually have merit.
The short version is that women won't put up with the (lack of) work-life balance, long hours and constant on-call status. The successful women I've worked with all stayed because they simply love it (like I do) but it's entirely possible that this is something that even young girls notice when they avoid IT related curricula.
To get back to the topic at hand, I think the best way to get women involved in more conferences is to have more "tenured" women in the industry. And the best way to do that is to that is to recruit more into the industry and to make the industry more aligned with their desires.
I'm actually not opposed to quotas for female participation at conferences ... I simply want to learn something from anyone that's put in front of me.
-The author claims that criticism is misguided, because we don't know the ratio of men to women who pitched or work in the industry.
-The author doesn't seem to know either.
-Insofar as criticism of conference excluding women is uninformed, the defense that the author provides is equally uninformed.
If there are fewer women speaking, applying to speak, or in the industry as a whole, there's a reason why. It seems to me we should spend less time going back and forth with vague abstractions, and more time looking for the underlying cause. Anything else is just cheap uninformed opinion. In this case, it's probably just linkbait.
In my mind, the author is the one pointing out the lack of industry data. Just because she doesn't provide it does not mean her core argument -- that quotas undermine the empowerment of women by devaluing their hard work and talent -- is invalid. It just means that, ultimately, we still need more data.
I vote for link bait though I believe the author is authentic in her frustration. I like the suggestions at the end of her article.
To share a personal reflection, I just applied to speak at a conference in June. I submitted two ideas and I have many more I could share. I would love if the conference organizers were interested in diversity of viewpoints and gave me feedback that would allow my topic to be accepted. I think there is a nuance here between a handout and a handup.
It's the same experience I have applying to accelerators. I want to make it into the next YC class but I may not, not because of my race and gender but that I don't know the technique. Teach me to fish. I will be the captain of fishing.
Out of curiosity, what's the acceptance rate for these tech conferences? Are these like academic conferences where < 20% of the talks are accepted after months and months of work, or do mere mortals have a reasonable chance of acceptance?
I think it depends on the conference, but my general impression is that mere mortals cannot expect to get speaker spots. In most cases, the organizers or at least the community in general want well-known speakers. There is no way random people are allowed to just walk up there and present. That's probably for the best, since as an organizer you want to have some kind of quality control. I do suspect that's part of the gender ratio problem though.
When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).
Yes. From what I can tell there are several funnels that can get you speaker gigs. The most common is probably when your company arranges it or at least puts some weight behind your application and sends you to do a presentation explicitly as an employee of that company. That's what "worked" for me, and I see it often at tech conferences.
The other way would be if you personally know some movers and shakers. I think that's also quite common. From time to time it's so obvious you're going to see speakers talking about projects or subjects that couldn't possibly have gotten up there on their own merits. They're not terrible, but they're sure not doing stuff that's significantly cooler than what most other people in the community do.
The third option is that you're so well known in your community that you technically don't need corporate sponsorship or personal connections, but those probably go together anyway more often than not.
Everybody else is going to have a bad time. Im uncertain if this is a bad thing per se, but it's also easy to see how that precludes the participation of a lot of people who could make a nice contribution. But if speaking is what you absolutely want to do, you could conceivably work your way up from smaller to ever-bigger conferences.
You can always start with smaller local events. In southern California we have the SoCal Code Camp which let me speak with no experience. There's also user groups. Build up a bit of a resume and a name for yourself, then go to the big shows.
Not all conferences are AAA big name affairs. There are literally hundreds of smaller ones across the country every year who are looking to get people with fresh ideas to speak at them.
PyCon has been around 25% the last couple of years. For 2013 we accepted 114 out of 458 proposals, and in 2012 we accepted 95 out of 378 proposals.
For 2014 we're more than likely going back to 95 slots, and I'd expect the number of proposals submitted to be roughly the same or higher. That'll put us closer to 20%.
Plenty of mere mortals get on stage at PyCon. Speaking experience does hold some weight with reviewers, but a well organized and interesting topic will take you pretty far.
YAPC::NA generally accepts one talk per applying speaker if we have the slots; some years this has meant we've added an extra track or too to do it, some years this has meant leaving 20-30% of the potential speakers out.
We always schedule at least some first time speakers, because, well, that's how you get your next batch of experienced speakers.
On top of this, anybody whose talk isn't scheduled tends to be encouraged to give a lightning talk (5 minutes), and anybody who gave a particularly memorable lightning talk one year is almost certainly going to be accepted the following year.
I would expect that a lot of non-profit community conferences end up along these lines; the expensive commercial ones much less so.
It's a tricky question to address. It doesn't help that the people addressing it are obviously not entirely clear on the concept of an unbiased sample. To quote the fine article:
But let’s say a larger percentage of the pitches came from women. Then people are also assuming that of the pitches that came from women, 100% of them were awesome pitches that organizers passed up solely because the presenter would be wearing a bra.
No, people are assuming that pitches from women and men are on average of equal quality. It's an assumption borne out by experience. So we do need to ask the question why there are less women. If indeed 95% of the proposals were from male speakers, it's not a problem with the conference. If there were more than 5% of the proposals coming from women, but the final selection looked like it did, the organizers should take a look at their process - something is likely to be off if that's the case.
I don't pretend to know if the conferences mentioned in the story are exclusionary or just choosing the best speakers. The only thing I'll say is that speaking or joining a panel at a small conference often leads to speaking at bigger conferences and keynote appearances.
If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot.
I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.
One of the problems in the hierarchy underlying this is simply that women (empirically) don't take that first step of reaching out to a small conference to speak. It's similar to data about self-nomination rates for promotion. Simply raising awareness of the promotion case managed to even the rates out, so arguably anything that raises the visibility of the lack of conference submissions by women could have a similar knock-on effect.
Interesting how she characterizes it throughout her piece as a very violent gender war, but at the end claims it to be a class war at then end.
I think that's the crux of many of the problematic perspectives of contemporary feminism, that what are class differences are jammed into the square box of gender war.
Well, according to Feminism 101, everything in society that is bad is because of the Patriarchy. So even if it is a class war, men are still to blame for it. I...don't agree with this, but they make the same jump in "logic" over and over again, so it's fairly predictable.
It's frankly a little alarming. College should be about learning diverse methods of evaluating a position, and critical thinking, not blaming everything on X root cause. (Any given problem is quite likely to have several variables affecting it.)
Yeah, they should do more of that "critical thinking" where you deliberately mischaracterise an entire ideology and dismiss concepts out of hand.
You realise that the theory of patriarchy has been extensively discussed and refined throughout the years. More 'critical thinking' has gone into it than you could even dream of. I am willing to wager that you've never even picked up a book about it, let alone read one. So, explain to us your theories of 'critical thinking'...
"Make no fucking mistake that you occupy your cushy tech salary, your mid-level management job, your paltry access to power by permission of the patriarchy."
Oooh, it's one of those tumblr-style feminists. You always know you're in for a psychotic, incoherent rant when they start dropping the f-bomb repeatedly. (not to mention blaming everything from car engine troubles to a stubbed toe on the nebulous yet infamous "Patriarchy"...)
Clearly it is the fault of the patriarchy to make engines that women don’t want to service and to implement measures that no women are allowed in fire brigades and ambulance services. Hence it is also absolutely obvious that engine troubles and medical problems are due to the patriarchy.
Oh wait, there aren’t any laws banning women from entering fire brigades and ambulance services or to take up apprenticeships in car workshops? Then it is obviously again the patriarchy’s fault to affect women in such a way that they don’t join those areas anyways.
When you submit a paper to an academic journal, the reviewers do not know the name or origin of the authors, and make a decision based on the contents only. Conferences should select talks using a similar process. This would prevent potential bias against women, and also shield the conference from allegations of bias.
This has come up a few times for PyCon, but we get a very wide range of proposal qualities from a wide range of people that would make it hard to come up with the best schedule we can, which is the ultimate goal of the Program Committee. Some of the best speakers submit relatively poor proposals if you read them without their name and experience. Those things obviously aren't everything, but they do hold some weight in the review process.
Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
Conversely, the difference is that women are incentivised just as much as men to apply and be accepted as (in the UK at least) it's tied to research outcomes.
At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.
This is the concept of affirmative action at it's core. Do we base admission partly on demographics instead of merit? On one hand it may help promote the minority, though there are downsides as well.
Sadly, in modern times Dr. King's dream of basing ones judgement of others solely on character (including merit) rather than on skin color is considered by many to be passé. I must quickly add that I am not of that modern group -- I still cling to the notion of a color-blind society as being the 'right' approach. Clearly we need "gender blindness", too. However, counting colors and genitalia and striving for parity across all colors and parts has proved, over and over, to cause as many errors as it solves.
I'd pose the same question to professional women as has been posed to black males for decades now: "Are you wanting to define yourself as a great lawyer/doctor/engineer, or a great _black_ (or in this case _woman_) lawyer/doctor/engineer?"
Personally, I have far, far greater respect when the gender and race is not part of the definition. Otherwise it seems there is a message of "I get extra points due to the mistake of my birth". Is that not just another form of 'privilege'?
I saw Neil Degrasse Tyson speak a few months ago. In his talk, he mentioned how strange it was that he was always referred to as "a black physicist," since he had always thought of himself as just "a physicist."
Yes I'm surprised there's not more mention of affirmative action since that debate raged heavily in much wider circles decades ago, and many of the talking points are the same.
Personally I think affirmative action is more justifiable in something like college admissions where it's a critical gateway that a majority of people are expected to pass through on the way to success, versus conference speakers who are ostensibly there to talk about something they've already done rather than some future potential.
In other words, if you let more minorities into college, I think it's a credible argument that many will fulfill their potential and that will help correct structural problems over time, whereas I don't see how getting more women speakers at tech conferences does anything to solve the larger gender imbalance other than paper over the problem at the edges.
I don't get why this is made to be a big deal. Gender or race shouldn't matter in choice of speakers, it should be their talent, track record, relevance of their work etc. What woman would want to be invited to speak if they knew it was because the organizers want to be representative of both sexes.
There is this perverse notion that there is something like "fair discrimination". As a South African this is something I've been forced to accept. Actually what it does is breed extreme discontent and disillusionment in those on the opposite side of the fence. No amount of rationalization can make this palatable. They even do it in sports. What this does is discredit people because everyone is thinking "Oh look, a quota player" and any actual merit this person might have possessed is discredited because of the bias in the selection process.
It's unsurprising that the "SEO" industry is taking gender equality seriously: They obviously wouldn't want to besmirch their reputation for ethical conduct.
Generally speaking, I agree with the author of this post. While the language is at times intentionally inflammatory, the core point still stands: people who have talents, skills, and ideas should get to float to the top.
We work in a hyper-logical field (the only thing more logical is math). Why can't people involved in the field see that the only thing that truly matters is furthering the progress of our craft/art/discipline/whatever-you-call-it. I don't care who wrote my framework/language/IDE/whatever. I just want it to be quality.
This is the same problem that plagues things like education. No child seems to be allowed to be special or exceptional anymore. Everyone wants a damn participation ribbon. Screw your participation ribbon.
For all the people who rail against quotas, the reason they exist is because of institutional sexism (or racism, in other matters). An overly simplified way to explain it is where there isn't any one instance or person that is sexist, but where the overall result of the system is sexist. A quota is a non-ideal blunt tool but it is one way to try and make up for the institutional sexism - not with the intent of giving improper advantages to a particular person who may be unqualified in a limited view, but by shocking an overall system to reduce the overall levels of sexism.
I’m happy with quotas, provided that they’re implemented correctly:
1) Quotas for both genders, in the form that no more than, say, 60% of the employees of a company and no more than 60% of the employees in a given position may be of a given gender (with a threshold of maybe five persons in said positions before the quota kicks in).
2) Extension of said quotas to government agencies, tax-exempt societies and associations and students per university class.
3) Enforcement of the quota insofar as that ‘surplus’ members/employees of the ‘wrong’ gender have to leave the agency/society/company.
4) Empowerment of local governments to draft people from an under-represented gender into security relevant agencies (such as fire brigades, the military and the police) where necessary.
5) Empowerment of universities to draft under-represented students into classes requested by local businesses (such as science & technology, where necessary).
This isn't the way to do it. I'd be really offended if someone explicitly added me to the speaking roster just because of my genitals, just as much as I'd be annoyed if they explicitly denied me because of them.
While I don't know many of the particulars, I believe that one possible good example is Etsy. Etsy started a deliberate effort to employ more female engineers, and they did it by hiring junior female engineers and training them.
They don't call it a quota, but it certainly fits the loose definition - they wanted more females, and so they hired junior female engineers when they could have hired more senior male engineers. I'm sure that at some point, a team of theirs was considered at full capacity and some male resume was passed over that might have otherwise been considered.
But it's really, really hard to argue that they did something offensive there. They created more engineering talent, got some good press out of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had some sort of small effect in making programming a more viable-seeming career choice for women.
They choose their engineers based on their gender, hence acted sexist. I find that offensive and will take it into account when having to decide whether to do business with them.
BTW, I'd also point out that if you got rejected because of your genitals, you probably wouldn't know it. They'd probably have plenty of other defensible reasons they could hang their hat on, even if your genitals did have something to do with it. And you'd be left with a disquieting suspicion that is probably correct, and no way to prove it.
Which is very similar what institutional sexism is - except that women deal with it to a much greater degree than men.
It becomes absurd if you substitute tall and short people for men and women. Tall people have higher earnings[1] and are better off in many other ways, so should we not be satisfied if a conference panel doesn't include at least one short person?
Stalking proper happens to both men and women, and is done by both men and women.
I suspect you mean something other than stalking. I guess, but I have nothing to support this, that the answer is "Women probably have more men acting weird and creepy after the woman has spoken at a conference".
I suspect you're right. I wasn't sure how to word it.
I could probably talk about a great many things but have done no conferences. There's something a little too "real world" about it. Does that make any sense?
I've seen Rae speak at multiple conferences and she's freaking awesome. Couldn't agree more with this article - gender quotas for panels are a.) a slippery slope and b.) detract from both the quality of the conference and the accomplishments of the speakers that have made it there without them
Tech Conferences these days are just terrible. It's always the same people saying the same things, it's just a plain repetition of the same straight white male men saying the same boring things. I always think i'm just loosing my time. If i had dedicated the same amount of time to study seriously, it would be more benefical.
You know, if you had called her a third-rate philosopher the sentence would have a beautiful linear 1-2-3 progression to it. Consider that for next time.
Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach, your CFP is poor, you're not promoting the CFP in a diverse way, etc. You work and improve, and then in year two you might notice you ended up at, say, 30%. Hurrah!
Both approaches involve percentages and measurements, yet the second is not an attempt at fulfilling a "quota" (even if there's a target % to reach) and should be more palatable to everyone while still ensuring efforts are made to increase diversity.