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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate for a moment--would you rather go to a conference with diversity as its goal, or one with quality speaking?

(And I'm not suggesting either is the worse choice, or that they are mutually exclusive!)

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Then why are we speculating about counter-factuals?

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.

Yes, there are women in the Ruby community who fit that criteria. But the question isn't whether there are women, it's how many of them are there vs how many men are there with similar qualifications? If there are 100 men for every 10 women (which doesn't seem too far off based on my experience), then it isn't unrealistic to have a panel of 6 composed entirely of men with no gender discrimination taking place.

Both quality and diversity of speakers should be goals when curating a tech conference. And I think it's quite achievable, and has been achieved. Here's one example, just to the north:

http://programme.scottishrubyconference.com/schedule

>> "Both quality and diversity of speakers should be goals when curating a tech conference"

Absolutely not. It should be based purely on merit in exactly the same way academic conferences are organised.

So they shouldn't be arranged along the same lines as academic conferences? Please.

I know of two interesting data points here, actually. In the state of Maine, there were 3 programs which allowed high school students to simulate the state government (write bills, hold committee hearings, etc).

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.

What makes you think women and men will have different opinions about software development based solely on their gender?

I interpreted angersock's question to be about diversity in general, and not specifically gender diversity.

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.

Counter-devil's advocate: Yeah! Let's have a real conference, not one with all those minorities-who-aren't-very-good-at-ruby...

This sounds remarkably similar to "women are too hysterical to vote", doesn't it?

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