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Comment by Ianvdl | Hacker News Reader

People here are saying that this page is trying to create awareness that there are enough females in technology to ensure greater numbers of female speakers at conferences, and that conferences should try harder to achieve that.

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.

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While I think your point is superficially valid, I'd ask you this – what if you had the power to change something that you admit is less than ideal (i.e.: the lack of a wide variety of speakers, or even the exclusion of a group) – if you had that power and didn't use it, wouldn't you be part of the problem?

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...

Aren't amongst peers? I mean I get the concern about gender imbalance, really I do, but to feel that someone is a 'peer' in a professional context really shouldn't require identical genital configurations, surely?

First off – gender isn't always equal to genitals – I gather you're trying to be light hearted in that but it's an example that highlights the fact it can be hard to understand situations outside of the mainstream.

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.

Everytime we try blind auditions we see more women being picked. It's the responsibility of the conference to guard against bias.

Don't conferences already use a blind process to determine speakers?

The vast majority of tech conferences do not.

I thought conferences typically wanted to know who was proposing talks so they could look up people's backgrounds and such. Many have speakers in mind and reach out to them, rather than waiting for proposals to come in. I don't recall seeing any that talked about blinding proposals so they could be chosen without knowledge of who was doing the proposing. I'm sure it's been done, but I don't think it's common.

Sometimes you get Curtis Yarvin.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat reviewing talk proposals for PDP-6-Con.

"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.

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