Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

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This post prompted me to go check the people we accepted onto the UX stage of Agile 2012 - and we have a 50/50 male/female split. Merit based - sex wasn't a factor in picking speakers. Makes me rather proud of the community we've built up in that particular field over the years.

And community building is what changes things in my experience. People attend conferences to have fun and learn. Speaker or audience. Lose some of that in however small a way for some group and you start losing traction with that group.

I know people who don't attend particular events, or in a few cases conferences in general, because various attendees or organisers or sponsors acted like asshats. Word spreads and it affects future years attendance and submissions if the organisers aren't proactive about dealing with the situation.

Even worse it casts a general air of malaise over the whole field. Attend two different conferences in a row where you're made to feel uncomfortable in one way or another, and it makes you a little less likely to attend the third.... an so things spiral...

The door maybe open - but people's views are tainted by discovering what was actually behind some other supposedly open doors.

> we have a 50/50 male/female split. Merit based - sex wasn't a factor in picking speakers

In a field overpopulated by males at a rate of about 9:1, half of the most qualified speakers you picked were female? Statistically, that doesn't reflect well on the skill of men. I would have expected a merit-based selection process to produce candidates in the same sex ratio as the sampled population.

I had no idea a woman was four times as valuable as a man...

In a field overpopulated by males at a rate of about 9:1

Intriguing. Where did you get this statistic on folk qualified to speak on integrating UX and Agile? It's a fairly narrow field that I'm intimately familiar with and I've never come across a gender breakdown.

Oh wait... the Agile 2012 submission process is an open one... so I can just go look to see what sessions were submitted.

Of the 51 session proposals submitted to the UX stage there were 19 female and 40 male speakers (this adds up to more than 51 because some sessions had multiple speakers) - so judging by submissions that ratio is 2:1. If we only look at the primary speaker of each session we have a 8/5 split. So, statistically, the men don't come off too badly. Good for us boys.

If you're worried about a gender bias in the CFP then you can find an example at http://www.ixda.org/node/31640 - they were sent to many other places but were all pretty much variations on the same theme.

The session reviews and session submissions are public. Just register at http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/ and browse around. If you detected a bias that has caused us to reject an excellent submission please let me know. Wouldn't want that. We try an make the submission process better each year.

One way that the Agile 20XX conferences differ from many others is that we have a public review process. The review panel gives feedback on proposals - and submitters have a chance to clarify and improve their session proposals. I'm too lazy to go through the history of each session to see whether women were more likely to improve their sessions based on feedback. Can't say I noticed any difference at the time - but it's possible that may explain the difference.

[Edit: Hmmm... it might be a factor at that. More men submitted at the last minute when there wasn't enough time for submissions to be updated after the reviewers feedback - so they lost out on a couple of potential feedback loops.]

I had no idea a woman was four times as valuable as a man...

Or maybe it's just that we try quite hard not to say things like this.

[Edit: removed one unnecessarily harsh word]

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