I have been one of the most vocal critics of gender and racial bias in the programming community in the UK in the last few years. I have wrung my hands at the misogyny, the "jokes", the lack of diversity and I have spoken to as many people as I could about "what we can do to fix this".
BritRuby did not - and would not - fall into this category had it proceeded with its planned line-up. There was no evidence of racial or gender bias in the line-up, because the line-up reflected the community.
Are there too many fat white guys in the community? Speaking as one, yes. But conferences aren't how we fix that.
To explain why that's a legitimate call, we need to look at a bit of history. First, let's go back to one of the most vocal pieces of hand-wringing - almost a milepost for critics of gender and racial diversity in conference line-ups - Chris Messina's arguments about the 2006 FOWA line-up: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-bo...
This piece was so controversial and so widely read at the time, that when I talked about "the fat white boy club problem" for several years later, many knew what I was talking about. As a fat white boy myself, I realised there was a germ of truth in this, but I felt Messina had tackled the problem in the wrong way.
The issue of gender and racial diversity is not one that is fixable in conference line-ups. Conferences do have problems (I'll come back to that), but speaker selection at conferences is the wrong point to deal with the lack of diversity. By then - by the time somebody is qualified to talk at a conference - it's clearly too late.
By definition, speakers at conferences have to be domain experts. To be domain experts they have to have worked in the domain for many years. To work in the domain for many years, they must first enter a career in that domain. To enter the domain they must be attracted to the work.
In other words, if you want to increase racial and gender diversity in conference line-ups, you must first go down the stack and increase it at the entry point in the programming/tech careers.
We are crap at attracting women and non-caucasians to the geek industries.
So that's the problem I set out to solve (in my own small way), some years ago. I joined the Royal Society's STEMNET Ambassador programme and I went into schools around Greater Manchester (the 30-mile radius around where BritRuby was to be hosted), cheering on kids from all sorts of backgrounds to learn some coding, play with some tech under the hood, and get them to imagine what they could do.
The stereotypes I had to fight were varied, and it's there the fight must take place.
For example, I did a Summer school type away day programme with about 40 girls from a range of Greater Manchester schools at Salford University. Myself and the 4-5 colleagues I was working with from other companies asked them as they came into our part of the away day what careers they thought we did.
One girl thought I was a crane driver (I'm a biggish bloke). When I laughed a little and explained no, I ran my own tech consultancy and helped SMEs develop ideas to go into the app store, on the web, Facebook apps, etc., etc. her jaw dropped.
Later when I pointed out to another girl that she could develop her mild interest in space with perhaps a degree and career in aviation engineering and that we were about to see a boom time for people building small scale commercial space craft, I could see hope dawn on her face. Nobody had ever told her she could do that.
Why was all this so odd to them? Because as a society we didn't bother telling them that these careers were for them as well. They assumed that they were out of reach for them. The news that they're for anybody came as almost a cultural shock.
Another time, I did a presentation at Manchester's Muslim High School for Girls. I went in as a 30-something white fat boy agnostic with virtually nothing in common with a single person in that room. I talked about Babbage and Lovelace. I talked about Turing and the work he did a few miles up the road at Manchester University. I talked about Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates (because they're people the audience knew slightly, and knew the products they had created) and their teenage exploits.
I pointed out that with a laptop or the kit in the school's computer lab and a bit a of knowledge they too could create something that could spread out over the World and change it forever. All they needed was their intelligence, their creativity and a little bit of relatively-easy-to-acquire knowledge. They ranged in age from 11-14, and I don't think a middle class white guy had ever talked to them quite like that before. The feedback after the talk I got was that they were amazed this was a possibility open to them.
Imagine how my heart sank when the talk after mine that I stayed for was from British Gas telling them they could become boiler service engineers: "You get company-supplied overalls and use of a company van!"
But slowly, surely, I hope through STEMNET and other programmes we'll see the number of women and non-caucasians involved in the industry increase. If every person who is reading this went and signed up for such a programme, or just phoned a school and talked about going and doing a talk, if every person who reads HN went and did this, then in 10 years time the industry would be transformed.
And 10 years after that, the speaker line-ups at conferences will be transformed. And this kind of situation will never happen again.
The BritRuby organisers aren't the problem. The problem is with people who aren't actively recruiting diversity into the industry. The problem is with people who think the current diversity situation is acceptable.
Earlier I said there was a problem at conferences that needed addressing though. It's the content.
I know the Wiki I'm about to link to gets some heat from many on HN (that heat is part of the problem, not part of the solution), but let me remind you of some of the talks that have caused us issues in the past:
* http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Flashbelt_slide_show * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexist_jokes_at_JSConf
Fuck it, just go through these that are conf-related (there are plenty): http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents
That's just the documented cases at that wiki about misogyny - race related ones aren't there (perhaps because thankfully it's less prevalent, but I'm not sure if the KKK have a programming conference arm).
The number of gender and racial discriminatory incidents I've seen with my own eyes (mostly sexism rather than racism) at conferences number more than that. It's absolutely disgusting that when it's pointed out many will explain it away with the argument it's "all in the eye of the beholder" and that the critics should learn to "relax".
Not cool people. Not cool.
Etiquette in the Victorian sense was created as a concept that was designed to avoid embarrassing or upsetting others around you. You would eat soup a certain way so you don't make a disgusting noise everybody else had to put up with. You would bow and curtsy in different ways for different ranks of Lords, Earls and Barons to show you knew their title and their contribution to the nation. In other words, etiquette was forgetting yourself and saying to somebody else - somebody you might not even like - you matter, let's make this work, here's a little piece of theatre that shows how deep down I think you and your feelings are important to me and to everybody else. And those who were the best at etiquette became the most revered, the most liked, the most socially connected people of their era. And the society became so efficient it ended up conquering half the planet. That bit, not so good, but you get the idea.
We need a little etiquette here, hackers. We need to step back and realise that whilst we might think a joke is funny, for many it is not and if we want them to feel welcome in the room, the joke should be unwelcome. You don't get to decide if the black lesbian in a wheelchair should or should not be offended by the content of a talk, you only get to decide if you care about them being offended, and so when putting together a talk, think about that.
BritRuby didn't get a chance to do that.
I am 100% certain any content that was discriminatory would have been canned. I am astonished they weren't given that chance, and instead were judged on an incomplete line-up.
I'm hoping that in a year or two they'll try again. I'm hoping they'll get the support of the community, and if need be I'll go around the UK tech scene knocking on doors getting them some under-writing in lieu of sponsorship so they won't feel the sponsor pressure quite so much again. It's a simple pitch: "write a cheque now. It'll be returned when the conference goes ahead with full sponsor support, but your cheque under-writes them so if another Twitter furore blows up, they can ride it out".
And in the meantime, let's all make sure our content isn't offensive, our doors are open, and please, please, please go out and talk to kids from a range of backgrounds about how they can get into coding: we can start today on making sure this kind of scenario is impossible to recreate in a decade.