KatieConf
katieconf.xyz
katieconf.xyz
> If you are looking for speakers for your conference, why not ask one of the wonderful people featured here? They are all listed with their Twitter accounts, and a link to some of their prior talks.
> Do you really need another conference lineup of all men? Or as many female speakers as speakers called Steve?
I suspect it is a direct rebuttal to the argument that it's difficult to find female speakers for conferences, which is one I've heard a few times before.
If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.
When the subject is one's technical knowledge, the actual genetic makeup of the person making the presentation doesn't matter. It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.
What you are saying is not controversial, but nor does it reflect reality. Conference speakers are not solely selected on the basis of being the best at what they talk on.
This is not a call to add people who are inexpert, it is a call to find experts where you don't usually look.
My understanding is that the complaint is not "these men are not qualified", but "there are women who are qualified who are systematically being ignored".
There isn't an objective ranking of subject matter experts, from which conferences simply invite the top N people. Nor, as far as I know, is anyone in favor of inviting non-qualified minorities to speak. The question is "why are qualified [women, people of color, trans people, etc.] not being invited?".
The problem isn't that people choose expertise and skill over gender. The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason, despite the availability of qualified women speakers.
It's not faux diversity. The fact that you just assume any change from the all-male status quo must be a step down is amazingly sexist and insulting.
I never said anything of the sort and it's quite interesting that you read that into what I wrote. It's very clear what I meant: I don't consider the gender makeup of the people presenting to have any value, as long as the people presenting are the best people available.
> "The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason"
The reason is simple: there's a lot more men in tech. For instance, StackOverflow found that 92% of devs are male. So one would expect that ~90% of presenters on software dev topics would be male. http://fusion.net/story/115998/survey-says-92-percent-of-sof...
Even today, women only receive ~20% of engineering and CompSci degrees. So, unless things change dramatically, you're still going to be looking at a pool of candidates that's significantly more male than female.
> If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.
I assumed that hypothetical was meant to be plausible, because otherwise what's the point? So yes, you're strongly implying that an all-male lineup is likely to be because of qualifications, and that including women would make it worse.
I stand by my "no reason." The StackOverflow survey is obviously flawed (women often get treated badly online, so tend to be discouraged from participating in communities like SO) and if 20% of relevant degrees go to women, why do conferences typically have far less than 20% women?
Also, all of you are acting like children. This is getting pretty ridiculous.
Agreed that this is ridiculous. This is a pretty mild bit of satire, but a ton of people here are going out of their way to be offended by it. It's a great example of how many men are completely oblivious to the advantages they receive.
-- edit --
I just remembered something; wasn't there a post going around the web some time ago about a woman (in Britain?) who got her talk accepted (in some sort of academic setting?) because she's a woman and not because of her talk and she didn't know that this kind of thing was going on and got really upset about it when she found out? Might be interesting to look at the situation from her angle as well. (Interesting to those of you who didn't read her story back then.)
For a conference to say "we couldn't find enough subject-matter-qualified women", one of the following must be true:
* The least qualified speaker on their roster is still more qualified than literally every woman currently living, or
* Something about their conference failed to attract (or worse, repelled) half the population of the planet.
The first is statistically extremely unlikely. The second is more likely, and represents a problem with the conference rather than the pool of potential speakers.
Unfortunately, telling people "the problem is with your conference and not with the pool of speakers" is a controversial statement despite being painfully obvious.
This is without getting into the "faux diversity" insult which implies that there is something about women as a class which naturally makes them less qualified (since, obviously, conferences select purely on qualifications and just coincidentally end up heavily or often entirely male) -- if you didn't believe women are inherently less qualified, you wouldn't think that having women speak was necessarily a relaxing of qualifications or only done for "diversity".
Here's another true-but-sadly-controversial statement: if you believe what you're saying, then the kind of tech conferences you'd likely run are actually affirmative action for people who look and think like you. And I bet you wouldn't want anyone saying you only got in because they give preferential treatment to people like you, right?
Set up "BenConf" with an all-male lineup clearly not chosen purely based on their qualifications, and dozens of people will pay money to attend.
Set up "KatieConf" and you get people coming out of the woodwork complaining about faux diversity, saying that gender doesn't matter and you should only choose speakers based on qualifications, saying that conferences shouldn't have to care about combating sexism, complaining that it's patronizing, etc.
Edit: Controversial comment, so let's say something positive here. I found this site to be unfunny and unclear about its message. However it's easy to improve it.
The first thing I would add to the site at the bottom would be a list of recommendations for avoiding bias in selection of candidates. These would include things like always doing blind evaluation of speaker candidates.
Secondly it would be good to talk about how to get more people involved in projects, so that in future you have a more diverse range of speakers. How to broaden access, easier onboarding, removing toxic people.
Thirdly, talk about why it's good to have more diverse opinions. Give some motivation for doing this apart from some hazy feelgood factor. (See references here: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...)
Number four, the site could link to projects like Outreachy which are already doing the above.
I'd say the correct way to avoid bias is to set a blind baseline of expectations (Like 3+ years in industry working with the topic) and then reach out to minorities. That said, even someone who doesn't have experience can be a good presenter if given the right support, I've seen great conference talk made by total newbies to a technology who were encouraged to write code making use of a new feature. They presented what they learned, problem spots that they found that might trip up someone new to the technology, and open sourced their app as a learning tool.
Probably a good opportunity for a similar site emphasising Aboriginal people in business and tech.
Why is that the responsibility of the conference? As far as I'm aware most conferences call for proposals to be submitted. Whether or not anyone of a particular group applies to speak at that conference is not necessarily a fault of the conference organisers? Are there conferences that actively seek out the majority of their speakers?
I am in favour of a wide variety of speakers at a conference (the more viewpoints the better), but this seems unnecessary. I would have liked for this to be a real conference though, the topics are great.
All of this is a vicious circle – women don't apply to be speakers at many tech conferences in equal numbers as men, possibly in large part because they don't attend in equal numbers as men and that happens in large part because it's clear they're not amongst peers – i.e.: there aren't women who are speaking in equal numbers as men and they're not seeing women in attendance in equal numbers as men, so they're less inclined to feel like it's a place for them.
Where does that system of subtle/unintentional exclusion end? Why shouldn't it be the role of the conference to encourage a breaking of that cycle?
PyCon US is a good example of a conference that did just that...
If you reject my explanation for why there are so few women in tech and in tech conferences, I'd request you offer another one that doesn't depend on things like "they don't like math or technology", etc. The data shows that women leave tech/IT/engineering fields – why is that?
Explanations like the one I offered are simple and make sense, (of course, IMHO) and it's not really as much conjecture as you might think. A very close analogy can be seen in Schelling's Model of Segregation: http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg... – essentially, it's an agent based model that shows how segregation can evolve from even a minor preference for being those similar to one's self.
It's not an indictment of men or women in tech, but it shows how even small preferences can end up having big impact.
"What are you doing?" asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to review talk submissions," Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?" asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of who should present," Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
EDIT: I initially wrote Canada instead of Australia. Not that this changes the sentiment. Thanks for catching the error tedmiston.
I mean, encouraging everyone to attend, submit talks, and ensure they all feel welcome and safe is more useful than making it seem like women (or some_x) are only at a conference due to maybe a diversity quota.
It's like the argument, and I'm forgetting which well known tech figurehead made this, but... "We don't need more girls in CS majors, we need more girls playing around on laptops in the summers of elementary school [to put them on a more level playing field with male counterparts 10–15 years later]."
Three is enough for a coven. After that, things get hairy very quickly. Disappointed this turned out to be a parody, it would be a marvellous and amusing thing to do.
Straight-up super-setting the conference name.
> KatieConf is a parody
The bit: Here's all these female tech people with the name "Katie", thus you shouldn't have problems filling your tech conference with female speakers.
chicken/egg, though. You don't become a speaker expert without having plenty of practise at being a speaker. Irrespective of any demographic quality, we should be open to bringing new speakers to conferences.
But why would we favour new speakers who are called Katie (or only new speakers who are women?). We should choose speakers who are experts, and new speakers from all possible candidates.
The thing is, it's rarely deliberate. It's a subconscious bias thing. Which is why people use blind talk submissions - they're evaluated solely on the basis of the content of the talk.
BUT if at the end of that you find out that your conference has all male speakers (or all female speakers, or all speakers under 25, or whatever) what should you do about it? I would say you should try your hardest to encourage more people to apply next time. There are loads of great projects for that like Outreachy.
What you shouldn't do is decide to fill it up with some "quota people" to make it look diverse.
Yes, we should chose speakers based entirely on their qualifications. But we don't. The problem is that people somehow assume that the current status quo of speakers almost always being men is what you get when you chose based entirely on qualifications, and any change from that must make things worse.
This is not about adding women by introducing gender bias. This is about adding women by reducing gender bias.
Malkovich, Malkovich.