Isn't it a slap in the face of speakers that took time to send in their proposals for presentations? "Your talk is great but your ethnicity or gender just isn't quite right"
The whole thing is ridiculous. To fight perceived discrimination, those people are doing even more direct and overt discrimination.
Suppose a female new grad goes to Electronconf and sees all male speakers. Suppose she goes to other conferences and it's the same story.
She feels there's no way she'll be able to break ground and be recognized as successful. She slowly drops out and leaves the industry and goes somewhere where she can make friends like her.
Now suppose she sees plenty of female speakers and she thinks to herself "wow this is awesome, I wanna be like her, she was like me 5 years ago". She stays in industry, and possibly becomes a speaker on future.
Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.
Height: Hey, all the conference speakers are really tall, there's no way I a 5'4" male be a conference speaker.
College: None of the conference speakers are from my university hence there's no way I from an unknown university can make it in the industry.
There are already a ton of female only events including conferences happening in the tech industry and if most cutting-edge stuff in a narrow field/tech (electron) is being done by male counterparts (or they are more interested in speaking about it) that shouldn't be a bad thing.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I find way more in common between me and the nerdy girl studying programming in my class than between me and the tall athlete playing football. I would have thought that our shared love for programming and geeky stuff would be a sign that this is a space with shared values, more than the gender of the speakers.
Of course, this may be a skewed perspective since there have always been men in the hobbies that I picked; but I would also think that a woman breaking into programming would be aware of the existing gender disparity, just like I am aware I would be a "gender minority" if I pursued teaching or psychology(things I was actually interested in due to great female role models in my youth!)
How does cancelling the conference help anybody? The minority of women that may have otherwise met and inspired each other no will no longer meet. Everyone is worse off.
> Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.
Do you think this really applies in the computer industry? I've been doing this for a while, and at no point have I had - or cared to have - any heroes to emulate. I work with computers because I like computers - not because I like people!
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>She feels there's no way she'll be able to break ground and be recognized as successful.
Does a person like that actually exist? Have you ever met a person that was so discouraged and distraught by the fact that many tech conferences have more white male speakers that she decided to leave the industry?!
Or are we just spinning a hypothetical person that does not actually exist?
>Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.
Again, is that actually based on reality??
This is line argument is so frustrating. I strongly suspect you're just making things up. You have a particular belief and you used a totally made-up scenario as validation for your belief.
Do you think Marie Curie or Ada Lovelace were motivated by the amount of women in science and engineering?
Is this a joke to perpetuate the "can't go alone to the bathroom" meme?
But what she found was radically different. The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it! When the going got tough, they didn’t start blaming themselves; they licked their lips and said “I love a challenge.” They’d say stuff like “The harder it gets the harder I need to try.”
Instead of complaining it wasn’t fun when the puzzles got harder, they’d psych themselves up, saying “I’ve almost got it now” or “I did it before, I can do it again.” One kid, upon being a given a really hard puzzle, one that was supposed to be obviously impossible to solve, just looked up at the experimenter with a smile and said, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative.”` - Aaron Swartz, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck
Another way to look at the scenario is to go "Oh cool I'll get to be the first woman presenter, instead of the millionth."
In order to lift women up, yes it's necessary to push men aside to make room. But women are being and have been pushed aside every day by men for almost all of history.