On BritRuby
devblog.avdi.org
devblog.avdi.org
Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference, I can make the assumption that a line up of Spanish, South African, German, Icelandic and Russian speakers - who are all white - isn't diverse.
I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.
That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about.
You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post).
What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended.
> Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference
Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.
Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1].
As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people.
[1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.
I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Because things are so heavily biased at the moment, some help to begin moving things towards balanced can be greatly beneficial, to help people trying to move into the field.
I was recently in the unusual position of being the only man at a computing conference, and was surprised to find it an exhausting experience, even though almost everybody there made me feel very welcome.
Yes please!
> that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good.
If the problem is that you're associating with small groups of people, the solution should not be to make sure that this particular group of people gets artificially more diverse to satisfy a lacking in your experience. You should just get out of the house and meet more types of people.
> I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby.
Why? Do you believe that the Ruby community should have people who are good at programming and bad at programming? Racists and non-racists? Pacifists and militarists? Pro-choice and pro-life people? People who like gruyere cheese and those who don't? Why do we stick to race and gender in particular as an axis of diversity? Specifically, why aren't we arguing the corner of racist, cheese-eating pacifists?
> to help people trying to move into the field
As I've said in other comments, I find this attitude to be quite condescending. I do not need your help to move into any field. In Western civilisation at least, my own efforts will be good enough.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/
Employer's replies to racial names
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
One thing I personally like about these surveys is that they appear to tell us people do these things subconsiously.
You don't want my help or to be condescended to. I (and other white males) don't want to be called out as racist and sexist.
There always will be people who "beat the odds". It sounds like you have. I am from a poor background, yet I went to Cambridge University. My wife is one of the top AI researchers in the UK, if not the world.
My wife also brings in another perspective to me. Having helped run a couple of conferences, we didn't have to lower our standards to be more diverse. We just had to look more widely than we might have done if we were lazy, and just asked our close friends.
With numbers as they are, it's just as likely that the organizers could pick a random sample of people qualified to give talks and still come up with an all white male audience. If you were to pick an entirely white-male sample out of a bag, would you resample because the results weren't sufficiently diverse? If so, I'm trying to find out why.
Personally, it is not an issue of cultural guilt. Personally, I knew people as a young child who were poor, and I believe would have made excellent computer scientists if they had had better opportunity. My wife knows females who gave up on computer science because they could not fight through the male-dominated area (there is a whole other long discussion to have about the issues they faced, this is perhaps not the place).
In general, given my experiences with women and the poorer members of society, I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society. I think computing is great, and people should not be held back from it for real or imagined reasons (or course, some people might not like computing. That's fine to). If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.
If computing was already (for example) 50% women, then I would feel much less need to push particular conferences or events.
I think then that it's fair to say that diversity in and of itself is not the goal here, i.e. you don't have an underlying reason for pursuing diversity for the sake of it.
I would note that I believe that rooting out and debugging your own cognitive biases[1] is a worthy goal, and can only commend efforts like selecting conference talks blind.
My only beef is with the intentions behind it, primarily because we need to debug this whole diversity thing before we can deal with actual racists, rather than you guys who appear to be just trying to rule yourselves out of the witch-hunt.
> I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society.
Very well then, but this leads to some interesting questions:
* Roughly 90% of the UK population is classed as "White" or "White (Other)". Therefore, 9/10 attendants to a ruby conference in the UK should be white (they won't be). If you're totally focused on making the demographics match the general population, doesn't that mean you should be stopping non-whites at the door to make sure you have a high enough quotient of white people so that they're not just going along with the status quo? Is it conceivable that BritRuby would have been cancelled for not having enough white people?
* The largest age group in the UK is between 40 and 55, therefore the majority of attendees to a ruby conference in the UK should be in this range (they won't be, they're outnumbered by the 20-something year old programmer). Doesn't that mean you should be trying to balance the numbers out by stopping younger programmers from coming to conferences?
(These suggestions are of course absurd).
> If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.
This is not 'all well and good'. In the UK, where state education is compulsory (and legally enforced for crying out loud!) it's condescending paternalism at best. The results kind of speak for themselves here, us minorities are doing a pretty spectacular job in the UK without your help, in all sorts of fields, way out of proportion of what we should be for our numbers. If you need convincing of this, turn on your TV to any news channel or take a ride on any tube line that runs through the City. Have a walk around the campus at UCL or Imperial College and tell me with a straight face that 9/10 people you see there are "White" or "White (Other)". When the BNP worry that foreigners are taking all the good jobs, they kind of have a point (we are).
Save that paternalism for people in countries like Pakistan where there is no social mobility at all at the lowest rungs of society. Living in the UK is Star Trek levels of utopian in comparison. Some of my relatives who come over for the first time literally cry when they realize (in their own words) that "This is a country where we treat each other like human beings!". When you/we go over there with your big ideas about democracy, equality, freedom of speech etc, you're right, they're wrong, and you/we are totally correct to be paternalistic and condescending about it.
What I think you allude to and what I believe would make a hell of a lot more sense here is to encourage people from difference economic demographics to participate in technology in general, regardless of race or gender. The benefits of this to both individuals and society are easy to intuit. You'd do this through outreach at schools and other community centres etc and I believe there is already a movement underway in the UK promoting programming in schools[2]. Randomly selecting talks at a technical conference in order to account for the cognitive biases of the organisers is a noble goal, but totally inconsequential in comparison.
Good thing the OP didn't do anything of the sort, or else you would be quite offended.
That's another issue, but not the one we are talking about. There was a lack of diversity in some important areas. Maybe there was a lot of diversity in other areas, but that doesn't contradict the first assessment.
I think Americans are taking this white/minority thing a bit too far. Granted other countries do it too little, but you can exaggerate.
I know first hand that people get funding for inviting minorities to speak in the united states. If that ain't messed up I don't know what is.
For example, "Matz" could've been a "white guy" working out of Japan at the time of creating Ruby. Including this hypothetical white-Matz in a Ruby panel is totally justifiable, even if the rest of the panel is white.
But in reality, Matz is ethnically Japanese, as are at least several of the core committers. So it's especially awkward in yesterday's Brit Ruby post on HN for the organizer to say that if they had brought in a minority, it would've been seen as tokenism. In Ruby's case, it would not at all seem strange to have a few ethnic-Japanese at the conference, given the language's origins.
This argument reminds me of the classic scene from The Blues Brothers: "We got both kinds of music here: country AND western!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZfUnCK5qk
I mean, it's a tech conference. Diversity should equal a wide range of views on technology-related things, right? I find it absolutely believable that the magnitude in the difference of opinions between two (members of gender A & race X) is no different than two people of differing genders and nationalities.
> If you choose not to do something because the group you'd be joining are different to you, then I'd say you're the one with the problem regarding race or gender or whatever.
That tweet about one of the women not wanting to be the token one or whatever...what a load of crap. That's her personal problem if she THINKS she's going to be perceived that way, not the organization's. Has it ever crossed anyone's mind that perhaps those original 15 speakers had the best and most fitting presentations...and maybe that is why it was coincidentally all white males? It really is quite pathetic that all it takes is one wannabe righteous whistle-blower to say something about race and an event can be derailed...in this case, completely.
Are you really focusing in on a single tweet as the cause of a conference being canceled? You think that they decided to fold up months of work and organizing just because Sarah expressed her disappointment and dissatisfaction?
Blaming her for the organizers' decision seems super weird to me.
Also... Iain's quote there misunderstands what it's like to be a minority. The problem is not being different (we're all different in various ways), it's being singled out for being different. That's also why BritRuby couldn't fix the problem by tacking on diversity speakers at the end, the damage was already done by then.
My humble opinion is that they should have tried to weather the storm, issue a mea culpa and endeavored to do better next time. Instead we have flame wars.
So it would have been better if they singled people out for being different and tacked on diversity speakers from the beginning?
You either single people out for being different or you pick the best speakers and let the racial/sexual chips fall where they may. There really isn't a middle ground.
The crucial part of the linked article is when he talk to Josh Susser, one of the initial tweeters who triggered the issue, and who organizes GoGaRuCo, which receives plaudits for diversity. GoGaRuCo very pointedly reaches out to evangelists in the community who will bring in a diverse selection of speakers, and then do a blind judging of submitted papers. The result is that, by making sure the pool of speakers is diverse to start with, they can pick the best papers blindly to gender and race, and still get diversity.
By your logic, as a caucasian person I shouldn't submit a presentation to GoGaRuCo because they are determining the pool of speakers based on diversity (read: gender/race/taste), before they determine what I have to say. Since I somehow have a lighter shade of skin and because I have these dangly bits between my legs, I'm no longer eligible for inclusion into the speaker list.
I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.
Edit: Since I can't reply directly to fatbird, I'll reply here. I see we're using "diverse" and "diversity" differently here. Looking at your comment again, I can see how you are thinking. I personally don't know how BritRuby opened their CFP process. I assumed (ass - u - me, I get it) that they would just open up the CFP to the Interwebs and papers would just roll in. Maybe they did something differently, and narrowed their advertising for papers, there's not enough information to know whether they did that.
I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.
The linked article goes into the sausage making that got the BritRuby guys in trouble. I encourage you to read it fully because it's a really good read on how these things happen without malice or conscious racism or sexism on anyone's part. Short version is that they drew up a list of 15 initial invitees who were white males, without ever contacting prominent Rubyists in the area who weren't white or male, who would have been happy to attend and speak, and who were certainly of a stature to deserve to be invited. It's a classic example of systemic bias.
Moreover, there is a hugely important signalling role in the selection: it is advertising, "here is our community, here's who we are, here are the problems we work on and the cool techniques we use". So the selection also takes into account things like: "people doing X should get to meet people doing Y", "we think more people should work on Z", and so on. Diversity among the speakers is part of this! Just as surely as you wouldn't want a program of people all from the same company - like it or not, the makeup of the speakers does send a message, and part of the responsibility of organizing an event is deciding what that message will be. It's also communicated by all sorts of other things, including the process for soliciting and choosing submissions, details of language and graphic design, etc. All of these things contribute to a general impression of what the community is like.
The claim of "coincidence" in this instance would be a lot more convincing if the procedures and language were there to back it up. I'm not even talking about affirmative action. I only mean that if you want to claim to be meritocratic, you have to do the work, not just cross your fingers.
May I make a conservative bet and say that you are a white man, much like Iain is? I am too. And on an instinctive level, I agree with what Iain said, and you echo. But that's because I haven't had to deal with systemic discrimination in my life- neither I, nor you, nor Iain know what life is like when, at all stages and in all environments, you are part of a minority. This is not the same as Iain's laughable example of having made multiple visits to nightclubs that contain black people.
Given that we have never experienced that life, we probably shouldn't tell minorities how they should feel, and what they should be afraid of, or if we're not careful we're going to get a reputation for being oppressive.
If I want to speak at a ruby conference, I don't need to see other brown people there to 'motivate' me to do so. I especially don't need to see white people flagellate themselves publicly in my defence either. If the goal is to have a mixed colour-palette at the conference, change the fucking wallpaper.
> Given that we have never experienced that life, we probably shouldn't tell minorities how they should feel, and what they should be afraid of
And yet, here we are. This whole issue is telling me that I should feel discriminated against and underrepresented in the UK ruby community[1]. I didn't feel any of these things before, but a bunch of white people on the internet are pretty sure I should be feeling this way.
Manufactured diversity of the sort people are advocating here is unnecessary at best. I don't know where the desire for it comes from, but if I had to guess, I'd put forward that it's based on middle-class white peoples collective guilt for pre 21st century racism. The reducto-ad-absurdum against manufactured diversity is that I don't see anyone arguing that transgenders, veterans, BNP members or left-handed people are underrepresented in the UK ruby community.
[1] Go to an LRUG meetup and I'll think you'll find that WASPs are the only group that are underrepresented in terms of the UK population as a whole.
God, you're so spot on. When someone comes along that's supposedly from the same group of people that whites are trying to coddle and foster and tells them to fuck off (kindly), they don't know what to do.
By this argument why isn't anyone arguing the corner of transgenders, Native Americans and people who think that the original Battlestar Galactica was better than the re-imagined series?
In other words, they sat down to draw up a list, and out of a large and diverse community of Rubyists, invited only the white male ones. No one is saying they did it consciously or deliberately, but they did it, and got some push back on it, and /ragequit their own conference. So, no, you wouldn't have been given the opportunity to talk.
(And btw, fuck you for the phrase "white people's collective guilt" ;)
That's some quality pre-martyring there, that is.
I'm gonna take the liberty of copy and pasting something I wrote on the other thread about this since I think it's relevant to what Avdi said:
----
There's some text up on the main http://2013.britruby.com/ - among other things it says:
"We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? "
I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal?
In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their sex.
Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota.
I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049). Plenty of female speakers on the other stages too.
At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year (http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013...) and the survey has already produced some great possible speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women.
Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major conference.
I'd be reaching out to folk like http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/, or http://www.womenwhotech.com/. I'd be looking to how other folk got more great women speakers at their conferences like http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake...
Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding good speakers is not as effective as it should be.
----
As another data point - I notice that the London Perl Workshop - a one day event next weekend - has two women speakers running three sessions. Surely the Ruby folk have as many smart women speakers as the Perl folk ;-)
If anything, the responses by the community only prove there's still a problem with diversity.
"@BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female?"
This seems to contradict itself - if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people. Which is wrong for both the token speakers and those who missed out.
JSConf EU handled this very well and managed to get 25% female speakers - pick the best talk, but pick them blind. This stops both implicit bias towards 'people like me' AND token selections of 'people not like me'.
The intent is to take diversity into account - which involves effort and having it as a goal.
Yes - select your speakers on merit.
But unless you had diversity as one of your goals in where you put your CFPs and how you reach out to possible speakers, etc. then you won't have a diverse pool of great speakers to pick the best sessions from.
Wearing my conference organising hat. If all the sessions I have available to pick my programme from are are white guys in their 20s then I've failed already.
> But note that Josh didn’t say “I contacted all the female developers I knew”. Instead, Josh reached out to the existing community networks that RailsBridge and DevChix had created. You don’t have to have a complete mental Rolodex of the Ruby community to make diversity happen. You just have to get the ball rolling, and lean on the community.
Obviously BritRuby didn't reach out to these types of groups, because as the OP found out, most of them didn't even know it existed.
But women should not be among them, surely? According to the Office for National Statistics (see http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estima...), in 2011 the population of England and Wales was 50.8% female and only 49.2% male. So the bizarre statistical anomaly would be a BritRuby panel of fifteen speakers with no women, or even one woman.
In the extreme example, if 0% of female in England were programmer then it wouldn't matter if 99% of the population were female, you were still not going to expect 99 speaker out of 100 to be female. Now adjust the example back to reality, 50.8% female population doesn't tell you anything about how much female programmer should be expected.
You can agree with that or not. The fact that someone voicing concerns caused the whole thing to be called off indicates this is still an issue people are mostly not equipped to discuss.
I agree that there's a problem with diversity but believe that it's a white persons problem. Once they're done convincing themselves that they're not racist, the rest of us can carry on talking about ruby.
Dealing with something like this requires a lot more tact than it seems was brought to bear, exactly because it is such an explosive issue. Its very difficult to be on the receiving end of something like that and not feel very personally attacked, no matter how logical the arguments ... the air of negativity surrounding something they worked so hard to bring to fruition would be too much to take. So I do empathize with BritRuby on some level.
I think in the future, it might not be a bad idea to try to try to handle something like that a little more privately and only move to twitter when it is clear there is a concerted effort to exclude people.
This 'public shaming' ideal that the rise twitter seems to have encouraged, just seems to be a little lazy (it doesn't require a lot of thought to be snarky) and counter productive in most situations, as it automatically puts the target on the defensive.
And to see my distress about it casually written off makes me feel like shit.