No, that doesn't make them sexist pigs. But that's a pretty serious oversight to make for the people who are curating a Ruby conference for England in the year 2012. Their sponsors are right to pull out for such an error.
Why is diversity a noble goal in choosing speakers? Like he said, would it have been better to choose 90% of their desired lineup and then seek to fill the remaining 10% with minority speakers just for the sake of diversity?
It makes them indifferent to the question, not hostile.
I think languages like Ruby and Python have reached a point where they are so popular and accessible that it's time to get as many people engaged in using them as possible.
> It makes them indifferent to the question, not hostile.
Anyway, it's not about saying "gee, we better pick an Indian or two to meet our quota." It's about including minorities in the pool to be considered in the first place. That few or none were chosen indicates that that probably wasn't the case.
And this isn't about calling people out as big fat racists. Hardly anyone believes, in their heart of hearts, that people unlike them are inferior. But we all have unconscious biases like that[0], and many folks are starting to demand that people account for that in their decisions.
[0] Plenty of people are great at lying to themselves about it, too. Search for the phrase "I'm not racist, but" on Twitter sometime.
This is why I (sadly) consider myself a feminist -- we're still far away from equal opportunity -- where making an effort to overcome cultural bias in the form of sexism isn't needed. The number of commenters here and on the linked article that assume that a selection that includes only white males, clearly must be the correct one filled with all the most qualified speakers from England illustrates this point.
I'm not really supporting the idea of shutting down the conference over this -- I do see why someone might have raised the issue on Twitter. I don't quite see how it could (reasonably) go from there to cancellation of the event.
This sounds a lot like a tempest in a teapot to me -- the real issue seems to be that their sponsors were spineless twats. But then again, that seems to be what you get for trusting the invisible hand to help you get things done.
What evidence? If they choose speaker based on purely technical factor and ended up with all white-male, why must they change the result?
You're right though that we have no real evidence for this, this is just a natural assumption to make given the evidence we do have (the lineup).
As a poster said above me, this could have possibly been mitigated by publishing who they considered and possibly even selected that were non-white/male and couldn't make it. (this would give us some of the evidence you mention).
I'm not saying that diversity has no value, or that the speakers were the best possible speakers who just happened to be white men. I'm saying that, if you're going to claim that the speakers should be diverse, you need to justify that claim. Is it better to have diversity in speakers than the most technical accumen, or is it your argument that the best group of speakers will likely be diverse? What about when they're not? Why is diversity important?
Now, for what it's worth, I believe the best group of speakers probably would be diverse, but only by virtue of the racial and gender composition of the set of experts, not because diversity itself has any significant value in this case. That the selected speakers were white men may be evidence of a suboptimal selection process, or it may be simply a statistical anomaly. What it isn't, is a problem in its own right.
I don't know whether or not minorities were considered in the first place, but if they were and none were chosen we would still be sitting in exactly the same position. I have no doubt that there are loads of great minority Ruby developers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they live in London, are available on the given day or are interested in conducting a presentation.
I don't think it's entirely implausible that the hosts chose their speakers fairly and ended up with this selection.
It's one thing to say "you must not discriminate because of race or sex". That's racism and sexism and we all find it abhorrent (or at least, I would hope so from HN's readership). But is the fact that they had a non-diverse lineup of speakers proof that they explicitly excluded non-whites and non-males from participating? From what we know, that's not really the case. Ending up with a lineup of white male speakers, at a Ruby conference in England in the year 2012, is not at all an unlikely outcome for a selection process that ignores race and gender. I think you understand this.
But you're saying something else. You're saying that they should have made it a goal to have a diverse panel, by specifically taking into account race and gender to override other factors and get the diversity makeup you want. Don't immediately think of merit, either: it could have taken something such as offering a larger subsidy to get that one female speaker they wanted who had initially declined, or to fly in someone from Japan. Whatever it took, they should have done it, because the race and gender makeup has to be what you decide.
That's not being non-racist and non-sexist. That's positive discrimination, or affirmative action. It's a somewhat controversial policy that might have its place to rectify situations of long-ingrained oppression and prejudice, but it's certainly not the required standard for being non-racist and non-sexist in all situations. Certainly not at a conference for Ruby programmers in England in 2012!
Mind you, explicitly aiming for a diverse panel is still a fine goal for a conference organizer. But that's not to say that it should be the primary goal of all tech conferences in the world, and that any organizers who fail to put it at the top of their agenda should be publicly tarred and feathered as racists and have their conference boycotted and cancelled.
As well-meaning as I'm sure all people involved are, some parts of the tech community have reached a level of paroxistic politicization that will be detrimental to the community itself. We're going to lose conferences, and we're going to lose people who feel uncomfortable with this forceful imposition of ideological attitudes.
Should they have also made it a goal to include a token gay speaker? But then they're discriminating against people who don't fit into the standard classification of gay and straight!
There's no reason it should be a goal of a conference organizer to have a diverse collection of speakers, just to put on display how not-racist and how not-sexist they are. They should of course not discriminate against a speaker for those things, but to make it a goal to seek out diversity is perverse.
(And I'm not suggesting either is the worse choice, or that they are mutually exclusive!)
Absolutely not. It should be based purely on merit in exactly the same way academic conferences are organised.
There are women in the Ruby community, and they are interesting speakers who have done interesting work. There's no need to ask folks to prevaricate about whether diversity or quality are at odds.
Boys State / Girls State: Open to the two best students from each high school in the state. Had a reputation for being incredibly boring, largely because there were few differences of opinion.
Model State: Open to any student who wanted to come. This featured intense debates and was generally awesome.
Similarly, the best programming conference I ever attended was Lightweight Languages 1 at MIT. There were about 30 attendees who worked on major open source programming languages and on academic research languages. The Perl people and the Python people and the Scheme researchers got into some really intense and amazing debates, because they came from intellectually diverse backgrounds.
Given these experiences, I actually favor diversity of opinions and backgrounds over speaking ability. Of course, I'd rather have both.
For me, this is more of an observed relationship (with an overly-small sample size) than any kind of well-formed theory. Diversity of background seems to be correlated with diversity of ideas, which in turn seems to be correlated with fascinating discussions.
This sounds remarkably similar to "women are too hysterical to vote", doesn't it?
I spend some of my free time doing international recruitment for my alma matter. One question I get asked occasionally is about affirmative action, which is effectively what we're talking about here. To be honest, I don't find the post-mortem being linked to particularly productive or helpful: if anything, it shows a lack of empathy:
> "It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style"
This is a frequently made argument against affirmative action. It's based upon the assumption that the only purpose of college (or, in this case, a conference) is to learn. However, that's not true. Conferences provide social opportunities, and a chance to interact with your peer group. Some people argue conferences are primarily networking opportunities first, learning second.
Because of this, you ideally want to attract as wide a group as possible. Organizers can attract this wide base by providing a diverse group of speakers.
There have been in the past several posts here on HN about women being treated very badly at conferences. We know that sexism (and racism) can and does happen. Ensuring that your conference audience is diverse can help mitigate this. To have a diverse audience you need to consider what barriers might exist: perhaps an all-male caucasian panel is one such barrier.
> "Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys."
This may well be true. But perhaps the pool of speakers was rather self selecting. Colleges like the one I went to spend a considerable amount of time and money actively engaging with minority groups, because those minorities might not otherwise consider applying. The same is true for conferences.
If you're organising a conference, or any public event, you need to be aware of these. In the UK you're required by law to have a disability access policy for your public event: why not spend the time to put together a diversity policy as well?
This whole situation is very sad. I don't think the conference should have been cancelled. People could have approached the organisers with their concerns in private first - it doesn't look as if this happened. Stuff snowballs on Twitter. Nobody comes out smelling of roses here.
However, it does also seem that the conference organisers didn't give particular thought to diversity at their event. The bottom line is these are very sensitive issues. There is no right answer. This sounds like a cop out, but it's true: if affirmative action has taught us anything it's that somebody will be unhappy with whatever approach you take. That somebody may not always be morally or ethically right, but they will be vocal.
"Using data from audition records, the researchers found that blind auditions increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent. The likelihood of a woman's ultimate selection is increased several fold, although the competition is extremely difficult and the chance of success still low." http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/
The question to ask is whether the conference organizers made any efforts to do something like this, or whether they assumed that because they are nice people all their decisions must be completely unaffected by any consideration other than the most objective judgment of presentation quality. Many naive people believe their motives are pure but inevitably they're not for any human who actually exists in the real world. We all have to do some work to compensate for that.
This was a few Rubyists trying to do something for their community - not interviewing for McKinsey.
Are you going to blame the technical community because 13 year old girls don't like it?
I think that's a false dichotomy. By doing nothing, we help foster the problem.
Personally I think quotas is one good way of helping solve the problem. The idea being that they counter the existing bias against some groups.
If there is no existing bias, quotas are indeed "unfair". If there are existing bias, quotas will be unfair to individuals. I still think quotas can do good overall.
If there is bias, and you cannot see it: you will perceive quotas to be unfair.
Even in my 7th grade programming course(back in the late 90s), there were 22 males and 1 female.
That did not come about without a lot of different people and organizations working actively towards changing the ideas of what and who kids would "allow" themselves to aspire to be.
Having said that, being aware of the diversity in software development, if I were to organise a conference, and only managed to attract male speakers, I would think "oh shit, something has gone very wrong here", and I would not hesitate to cancel it and try and address the serious issue.