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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers. Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?

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Even worse is when my girlfriend voiced a similar concern about a hacker meeting here in Mexico about how obsessed they seemed to be about getting women speakers at any cost instead of focusing on good content. She was basically told she only thought that way because she was brainwashed by men and didn’t actually believe what she was saying, though I'm embellishing a bit for succinctness.

How do you even argue with some who dismisses you like that?

They were basically approaching her to give a talk at an event here known for advanced technical topics even though she was at hello world level ability with React, and she felt very uncomfortable how persistent they were and it was obviously straight pussy pass.

People find ways to ruin all good things. Even something like helping women feel more welcome in the industry.

They always seem to have a high representation among authority figures at conferences for some reason.

Seriously, it's pretty offensive. They are treating women like props, and they just want women to be present so they can feel inclusive.

>They are treating women like props, and they just want women to be present so they can feel inclusive.

May be they are afraid of the alternative - being branded as non-inclusive, male-chauvinistic, etc. if they don't bring enough women to make the quota sufficient enough to avoid the branding (as we've seen such branding is no joke in the modern environment and can be painfully damaging when it comes to real things like employment/etc).

At some German universities, research groups that have too few female members (for a rather arbitrary threshold) are put under pressure to fix this. Except that they can't because they don't get any applications from women.

This kind of statistics driven approach to gender equality seems to be spreading around here.

Are there really people that worried that they’d cancel an entire conference? Do people feel their lives or livelihoods are at stake here or?

I wish more people realized that if you want to increase representation of a population, you're looking at the wrong part of the pipeline by trying to get more of that group at the conference (beyond a reasonable effort). If some one is passionate about increasing that group, it makes much more sense to try to address this at the educational stage.

You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening conference spots. Conference spots are open to at least somewhat-experienced people who already are committed to the industry, and no one joins to speak at a conference.

The idea is that to increase the number of girls in the beginning of the pipeline, they need to see a path ahead, see role models and not feel weird about their career choice. This needs to be done in many parts of the pipeline at once.

Yes but putting undue burden on a small time organizers of a conference is kind of ridiculous. They do these things on a budget and on personal time outside their normal jobs. Companies and professional societies are far better suited to trying to promote diversity at all parts of the pipeline.

All this does is kill any event that isn't run by them and negatively effects freedom in the industry.

I don't buy this idea that you need to see people with certain characteristics to feel inspired or something. What kind of kid thinks, "Oh, I'm a girl and he's a boy," when she sees a guy giving a talk? From personal experience as a child, those things simply don't register as differences until we're taught to register them. Maybe we ought to go back to, "Look, smart people are doing cool things in comp sci. Maybe you should go into comp sci if it interests you."

I don't think a lot of aspiring programmer will look at conference speaker for role models, rather more teacher/tutorial authors/mentors on their first job/internship

Well one way to think about it is to view the current structure (one of male dominated events) is already enforcing a system that isn't just about PHP. It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently sit in the back. The attempts by speakers and organisers to level this field is trying to get the events to just be about PHP. However they realize that things are very off balance already and without push back we'll continue to enforce a technological patriarchy. The only way to make things just about the tech is to address these things, however painful, and rebuild an environment where women feel equally accepted, respected, and praised.

Do all men feel accepted, respected, and praised just because they are men? No, the ones that do have earned it. Like so, I personally would like to get invited to give a talk only because I am the best person out there who can do so on the topic at hand, not because some organizers feel like they have some sort of obligation to be politically correct.

Men are encouraged to go into CS just because they are men. https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-...

A group with a self interest to have a certain outcome exist find that outcome to exist. It's a bit hard to say that this is a well made study with that conflict of interest involved. Don't get me wrong there are definitely problems abound and studies to support that position, I just don't think Bustle or Sky are the rigorous organizations to lead that charge. I was never encouraged to go into technology, my family wanted be to go into law. I went into tech well before there was any real indication in schools to do so because it made me feel less lonely. There's also the risk of trying to over correct and pushing people into careers that they aren't suited for, and that affects both genders as well. A more troubling correlation has been that women enter a traditionally make dominated field pay for everyone in that field goes down. Why we would suddenly value a field less because of gender is an interesting problem to understand. Another issue is that traditional gender roles for parenting may contribute to the problem. There's no way currently to address that problem without massive societal changes or law specific to address that. The issue is more complex than just a simple men are told to go one place women the other.

We don't value fields less because women enter it.

First of all, there is simple supply and demand. More candidates wanting to do a specific job means lower pay.

Secondly, you should ask WHY women suddenly want to enter some field. Very likely, circumstances have changed for that job. Maybe it now allows for flex time, or new machinery makes it safer, or whatever. I don't have a good example at hand. But I would look at that - very likely it is that thing that makes it cheaper (because it is more attractive), not the women entering it.

Another possibility could be a job starts paying less, so the men leave and the women come in (since they are less dependent on high income).

Edit: I just saw example of physicians on the net, which reminds me that women also tend to work fewer ours. Apparently physicians is one of those example where women have taken over and rates seem to have dropped. However, I know that female physicians work far fewer hours than male physicians (averages), which could presumably explain the drop. (example from Germany, don't know about physicians world wide).

Yeah, so encouraged by being ostracized from normal social activities and being called nerds.

I must have missed that invite. I went into CS because that's what I was good at.

I learned how to program at an early age, despite discouragement because I wanted to make video games.

Yet another silly feminist statistic, cleverly cropping context to make things look bad.

This is about advisories given to 16 to 18 year old boys and girls.

Does it seem possible that the advisors took the track record of the person they advise into account. Like for example their choices of subjects at school, their grades in Math, those sorts of things? And perhaps those aspects were more important in advising for or against STEM than the person's gender?

To me, that seems rather likely. But creative feminist statistics make it seem as if gender was the only determining factor, PROVING discrimination.

It's actually a pretty nice example of how typical feminist propaganda works.

Annoyingly, I can't find the study itself, even on the Internet Archive. I'm drawing on knowledge that I have about America and just used this to confirm that there's a similar bias in Europe. I can see how it would be less convincing if you don't have the same background info.

I don't know what background info you mean? You mean you already know that bias exists, from your experience in America, and that Europe study only confirms it?

How/what do you know about the situation in America? Tbh it seems more likely to me that US studies made the same "mistake". European feminists also like to copy methodology from US feminists.

However, if you have an article regarding the US, I will take a look.

I seem to remember being constantly bitched at by my parents for not spending enough time outside and getting made fun of for having no friends, guess I was born too early

https://gender.stanford.edu/news-publications/gender-news/re...

> It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently sit in the back.

That's quite a bold claim. Can you delineate this "structure", since you seem confident that the organizers are making use of it to be certain that women won't be able to participate?

No it's a bit more than that. The assumption is that there are no qualified women, so an unqualified woman has to be put up to meet a quota.

But there are actually qualified women. Putting up unqualified candidates to meet some notional quota is the best possible way of enforcing the status quo.

It's not "a structure", there just happen to be few women willing to speak at such events.

It's a virtue signal in an industry that demands it.

A weird but predictable side effect of using affirmative action to promote women is that statistically attendees will see female presenters as worse. (Availably heuristic / selection criteria bias).

You're living in what I hope is the future. The present is a lot weirder than that.

> As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers.

Good thing that's not why they are withdrawing from the conference. Specifically, they are pulling out because the conference wasn't even wiling to work with them to find a more diverse speaker lineup. If nothing came out of that, then they would have gone. But the conference didn't even do that.

> Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?

Then PHPCE wouldn't have been for you, along with all the other tech conferences I've attended, as they generally had talks that weren't strictly PHP.

Also, the conference was not cancelled because the speakers withdrew - it was cancelled because ticket sales plummeted after the speakers withdrew. One could argue that people where following the discussions and voted with their feet.

> Then PHPCE wouldn't have been for you, along with all the other tech conferences I've attended, as they generally had talks that weren't strictly PHP.

I couldn't find the (now cancelled) schedule for 2019, but to be fair it looks like PHPCE was a very focused conference: https://2018.phpce.eu/de/#agenda

Compare that with the holistic schedule of RubyConf, for example: http://rubyconf.org/schedule

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