Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013? | Hacker News Reader

Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013?

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25 pointsluigi62 comments

You can't assume that this was intentional. The author writes that when he tried to inquire about why there weren't any women asked to speak, he wasn't given a very detailed response. This can mean anything! If these guys deliberately decided to exclude anyone who wasn't a white male: that sucks. But it's extremely possible that this is a coincidence. I know a handful of super-smart female designers and hackers. I'd ask them to join my team any day of the week. I see no difference in their ability due to their gender. That being said: all of them, now that I think of it, are on the extreme end of shy. Not "nerdy basement dweller anti social shy" but the kind of shy that would prevent them from speaking at a conference, let alone volunteer to do so.

I really don't think there is enough ground to say this is one way or another. It's a toss up. Why are we jumping to such harsh conclusions? In my 5-6 year career I've yet to experience gender discrimination. I've worked in Hawaii, LA, DC and Sweden: all of which I've worked alongside respected and talented female coworkers. I really feel like this recent gender inequality stuff is an example of the 80/20 rule. A few edge cases are making us feel like everyone is out to get the girls. Relax! We aren't!

You used the term "guys"! That's blatant cissexism! You should reflect on your life and check your privilege. Your existence offends me.

(parody, in case anyone is wondering...)

> In my 5-6 year career I've yet to experience gender discrimination.

Maybe you just haven't noticed it. It can be very subtle when not overly "that can't be true".

In any case, you may need to re-read the post, which I fully agree with. The author's issue is not with the seemingly inexplicable lack of diversity. He is not jumping to any conclusions, his issue is with the overly-defensive response.

What's wrong with a simple — and I'm just typing what first comes to mind — "You know what, that was completely not intentional," and work from there.

Agreed, we actually would love to hire more females at my last job, but there are just not enough qualified women in tech. Most candidates are white young guys.

I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average.

> I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average.

Easier majors like mathematics, physics, biology, the other "real sciences", medicine, etc? Those fields apparently don't have quite the same gender imbalance that computer science does.

I don't think it's that useful it is to be looking for someone to place blame on, but I doubt the reason there are fewer women than men in tech is because they are choosing easier majors than computer science.

"Easier" is probably a bit of a troll. But it certainly seems the case that women are attracted to certain majors.

Sciences is a funny one, when I was at university I met plenty of female students studying Biology, Psychology and Medicine but very few in Chemistry , Physics or CS.

I wonder if there is some intrinsic reason that women are attracted to certain types of science more than others?

But then there's also relatively more women in Mathematics and Astronomy. There's definitely not a simple relationship between how "hard" the science is and how many women are in the field.

True, I wouldn't necessarily think there is a difference in difficulty. But sciences that have a hard time attracted women seem to be those that might be considered "lower level". I'm wondering if there is some reason for this which might be either cultural or just a product of biological differences?

To clarify, I meant "hard" in the sense of more fundamental or "lower level". In that ranking, mathematics is more "hard" than any of physics or chemistry or biology. Astronomy is a little less clear but I think it's fair to say that it's a "harder" science than biology, and more-or-less on par with physics and chemistry.

I would really consider mathematics to be extremely high level because it deals very much with the abstract, but I suppose that could depend on your point of view. Difficult to comment on astronomy because I not sufficiently familiar with the topic.

Maybe my point is more that when people think of biology/medicine/psych they will often put it in a context of people,animals,plants which is more stereotypical "women stuff". Whereas physics/chemistry/CS is more often thought of in the context of "things" like buildings,bombs,cars,computers etc which is stereotypical "guy stuff".

Mathematics is difficult to generalise because it has such a wide range of applications.

> Easier majors like mathematics, physics, biology, the other "real sciences", medicine, etc?

You do realize it takes about a decade to become a doctor, do you? Also, remember that Math and Physics continue well beyond the parts comp-sci majors have to endure. One day, try to read a real paper on Math or Physics (or Biology) taken from a reputable journal. Get back if you can figure it out.

I was being sarcastic. My point was that there are higher proportions of women in those fields than in CS [0], and the reason why might be interesting, but it's definitely not because those fields are easier; I'm not going to engage in a pissing match about which are harder but I think it's safe to say they those fields are just as hard as CS. (medicine is harder, for the reason you pointed out, however that just makes my point stronger, if there's actually more women in pre-med than CS. not sure if that's true and didn't have time to do the research)

Anyway, there's no need to be rude, we're in agreement.

[0] "... women earn only 17 to 18 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science, and just over 40 percent in the physical sciences and math." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/where-the...

> there's no need to be rude

Sorry if I came across like that

I stand corrected, "easy" was not the right word.

Where exactly did you work?

Maybe it's just New York City or maybe it's just my company but we have no problem maintaining diversity in our tech team as a byproduct of interviewing and acquiring qualified candidates. We have multiple races, genders, religions, and a range of ages.

So maybe it wasn’t intentional. Still not great. I don’t think intention is what matters here. Results are.

"... I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women."

This suggestion is a bad one. It is blatant tokenism.

Try this instead: http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake...

Key takeaway: "The easiest way I saw for getting more women on stage at the actual event was to get as many women to submit speaking proposals as possible. Selecting presentations was done without speaker information associated with the titles and pitches, so I wasn’t able to “reserve” spaces in the program for anyone based on aspects of their identity — and I wasn’t interested in that sort of reservation system for this event, anyway."

Telling people that an unintentionally all-male conference is "inexcusable" is an unproductive (and incorrect, in my opinion) way to address the problem. The industry has a diversity problem, but it's not wrong for someone to not take action to address it. It'd be nice if they did, though. When I try to get people to do things that would be nice, I never use that sort of tone. People who improve diversity issues in the tech industry are doing us a favor. Treat them that way.

Maybe ‘inexcusable’ was a bad word choice. Maybe it is 'excusable’ – but the organizer doesn’t even try to excuse.

As you can see from your link, getting women speakers was very hard work. It wasn’t easy. Did the organizer go that extra mile? If yes, then the result is excusable (though unlikely I would say). If no, then the result really is inexcusable. That’s all.

"If no, then the result really is inexcusable."

I explained why I disagree with that. Being in the tech industry doesn't obligate one to fix its problems. It'd be nice if people tried to. "Inexcusable" doesn't apply. You even called it "the extra mile," which typically implies optional.

Yes, they are obligated. Everyone is. Because it’s an untenable situation.

If you refuse to go the extra mile, expect to be called out as reinforcing sexism.

Getting different perspectives is always a positive and gender differences will certainly bring in different perspectives.

If you were holding a general non-language-specific web development conference and 17 out of the 22 possible speakers were focusing on Ruby development, would you not want some of the remaining 5 to not be focusing on Ruby, for diversity? I don't see this example as being all that different.

I don't quite agree with the OP in terms of how 'inexcusable' the situation was, but I do think that sometimes a bit of tokenism is fine if it serves towards reaching a critical mass of inclusiveness that isn't already naturally present.

Gender and race are orthogonal to one's merit as a speaker. Content is very relevant to one's merit as a speaker. There's a huge difference. Choosing speakers based on gender and/or racial diversity is a bad idea. It's disrespectful to the people being chosen and to the people who are trying to attend a quality conference.

It's also uncomfortable when you can tell that a speaker has been chosen for diversity's sake, and it reflects poorly on the other underrepresented folks speaking at the conference. If you have a transparent process that judges speakers independently of those culturally sensitive traits, that problem can be avoided. Everyone knows that all the speakers are there because they submitted the best proposals.

Diversity can be achieved without tokenism.

Article author here. Thanks for the feedback.

I perhaps didn't word that paragraph as well as I could -- my point there wasn't to introduce quotas, but to attempt to nip the problem in the bud. If I'd been organising EdgeConf, and had got to ~80% of my speakers being male with no female representation, I would've dropped everything and made sure that the rest were women. I guess when you include the numbers then this feels like tokenism, but it was mostly arbitrary. My point here was that they should have realised they had a problem before it reached 100%, not start out with the intention to recruit x% women (no matter how relevant or qualified they were) -- that's tokenism, right?

Choosing people primarily because they add diversity is tokenism. There are processes that are effective in obtaining underrepresented speakers that are effective and don't require choosing people because they're a minority. We should use those.

I really don't think we should label conferences failures because they do a poor job on the diversity front. Instead, we should encourage them to do a better job next time and show them how.

My experience in university CS and EE programs is this: schools are under enormous pressure to bring more women into tech, yet none of the "typical" techniques for doing so seem to work. At my alma mater, the EE department could not attract any qualified female applicants in my year; they published flyers showing women in class, they sent female students to speak at high schools as representatives of the school, etc., but nothing seemed to work. Where I am now, we are told to use female pronouns in our lectures and research papers and to be as gender inclusive as possible, and professors struggle to find ways to make CS seem more interesting to people who did not spend their teenage years hacking; still, women remain a small minority in the CS and computer engineering programs. There is something happening here that is beyond what schools can do; somehow, high school girls are being convinced that technical fields are not something they can or should pursue.

It seems to me plausible but not obvious or certain that the explanation could be found in high schools.

This was my experience too, when I did my CS degree the brochures etc made sure to prominently show female students and the testimonials were balanced to provide around the same amount of female quotes as male.

The end result was still the same though, out of maybe ~90 students there were about 6 females at the start. By the end of the course I think only 2 remained, the numbers were slightly better for the "business computing" courses rather than the hardcore CS but not by much.

There was roughly the same experience at the job fairs towards then end. The companies recruiting were desperate to talk to the female students about technical roles. Even so from what I'm aware most of the female students ended up taking non tech roles.

Where I graduated, the brochures had a well balanced (and not a representation of our society) mix of genders and races, all beautiful, healthy people. Time has shown that real students were neither well distributed across gender and race, but also not pretty (and presented a much more diverse set of body shapes than the brochure would lead you to believe). As tests approached, they didn't look healthy either.

"The population is not uniform, yet our sample is? SOMETHING IS WRONG."

http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness...

Finding a cluster doesn't necessitate a bias.

Well, possibly.

Let's compute some simple p-values: Suppose that some fraction p of potential speakers are female. Then the probability that all 22 of the speakers are male would be (1-p)^22.

For p = 0.1, we have a p-value of 0.098, which could reasonably arise by chance.

But for p = 0.20, we have a p-value of 0.0074, which is not so likely to arise by chance.

So if you assume that at least 20-25% of potential, qualified speakers were female--a reasonable assumption, I think--then this "cluster" does indeed suggest a bias.

this topic is so complex that i am left convinced that anyone who has a strong enough opinion as to write a blog post on the topic, doesn't respect it's complexity.

what is particularly offensive about this post is that the author infers the question "why are there no women speaking at this conference?", yet they completely ignore the possibility that no qualified women applied to speak at the conference. statistically speaking, would this really blow anyone's minds? by doing this you are defaming the organizers by calling their character into question.

the responsibility is left up to the organizers because they did not go out of their way to find women to seed the speaker list. but putting this responsibility solely on the organizers without even exploring other possibilities is irresponsible.

i think i can make my point best with some rhetorical questions directed at the author: why didn't you recommend any of your female peers for consideration as a speaker? what good do you hope to bring to the argument by outright ignoring possible causes of the effect that concerns you?

Hello, blogpost author here.

I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write about it don't "respect" it?). My goal with writing this (as stated in the article) isn't to launch some Twitter hate mob or cancel a conference, but to start a dialogue (which I couldn't continue with the organisers). I don't claim to understand every facet of the issue but I'm most definitely an interested "amateur" if that makes snese.

I don't think it's fair to say I "ignore the possibility" that women could've been invited / applied. My whole point is that we have no idea about this process because the organisers are being opaque about their methods, and in my opinion, if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why that ended up being the case, otherwise we're left to assume that you think there's nothing wrong with that. If they genuinely tried every approach they could to make things more diverse and weren't able to, good -- I'm happy to be proven wrong. But we have no idea whether they did and we can only assume from the communication that it isn't an issue for them -- that's bad.

No need for rhetorical questions:

In the "Postscript" below the entry itself I recommended a good amount of local-or-close-to-London female devs who could've spoken. For all I know, they were approached. But I don't know (see above).

I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it, and starting this discussion. It needs to be on everyone's minds.

thanks!

>>> I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write about it don't "respect" it?)

you're right. i was being too broad and my intent was to suggest that anyone who places the blame on one thing does not understand the complexity. your tone here feels less accusatory than the blog post.

>>> if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why that ended up being the case

i agree in that i think this would be the proactive thing to do. i disagree in that i don't think this is a requisite. and that's my point of contention: your post is criticizing and questioning a group of people for not being as proactive as you think they should be. this seems arbitrary. and by this definition, hardly anyone is as proactive as they could be. and that is certainly a problem. but i don't think the way to approach that discussion is by singling out (for most intents and purposes) one guy.

>>> I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it

what is the injustice you perceive, while admitting you don't know any of the details? is the injustice that the speaker process is not transparent? if they had a 50% female roster, would you be ok with it not being transparent? what about 20%? again, your flag for concern seems arbitrary and hyper-directed.

I would think that part of the organizer's response is due to the use of 'inexcusable' in what looks like the initial contact. If a stranger contacted me and used that word in reference to my actions, I would certainly immediately be on the defensive. This could have definitely led to the future lack of communication.

Here's a take on getting more female conference speakers from a female blogger (who is a copywriter):

http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-your...

I'd say many of the points in the above link are equally useful to all speakers and attendees (regardless of gender or colour). So perhaps some simple forethought in planning and prepaparation can go a long way in encouraging a wider range of attendees and speakers.

Would you rather them have less qualified speakers for the sake of equality? give it a rest.

How does that follow from any of this?

I got the same impression from the article, actually. As a minority in CS, I find it offensive that people just want to toss us in there to add "diversity." I have no reason to think the event's organizers were being sexist or racist (and I don't suspect it), but if they deliberately set out to find women or Hispanics to speak and set a quota for it like the author suggested I would certainly find that offensive. Just my two cents.

Edit: Just want to clarify that I think diversity in this field is a huge problem, and I care a lot about it, but the author's tone (he was immediately critical of organizers who may be innocent) and suggestion did not sit well with me.

Where does the author make that suggestion? I see no accusation of sexism or racism.

I’m sorry, but an all-male lineup really is not so great. It may not be literally ‘inexcusable’, but it’s pretty damn close. When you then get a hostile response that doesn’t even attempt to excuse (maybe there is a valid excuse of some sort), then that behavior is literally inexcusable.

Yes, I do expect conference organizers to put extra effort into making sure the lineup is at least somewhat balanced. Just not being actively sexist (by, say, denying qualified female speakers) is most certainly not enough. When an all-male lineup is the result of their normal process then I do expect organizers to go the extra mile, looking for qualified female speakers. That’s all, and it’s really not that much to expect.

I expect no one to relax their criteria for selection, but I do expect people to search harder. I think that’s very much needed.

I find the assumption behind this statement offensive, deeply offensive. Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers," people are saying "Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old."

If you could find someone beige AND fifty with 40,000 points on hacker news, a popular blog, and experience keynoting conferences, that would be great, wouldn't it?

How is the assumption behind your statement any less offensive? You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased.

Give it a rest.

"You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased"

Whoa, nellie!

That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak.

I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world.

Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride. Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends.

I have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.

I have to say, I disagree a bit. The author seems to throw a fit at the organizer and says "really? you couldnt find any qualified (insert non white male description here)?" It is a complete strawman. The organizer thought "hey let me invite the best people in the field, who are all very qualified" and the author assigned him the mindset of "I only want white males". This is what they came up with. If they sprinkle in a few women and minorities to appease people like the author, it is vastly more offensive imo.

* I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women. *

Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers" but what this seems to be saying essentially is "Nominate women because they are women". And nobody is saying Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old they're saying look at your speaker lineup and balance it out based on race/gender and age. They're advocating a purely aesthetic exercise which unfortunately just further stigmatizes those it's trying to help (i.e. "She's here because they just needed some women to balance out the lineup").

First Round Capital's "people" section always makes me think of this exactly. Note the people, then note the job titles. This might be the most blatant trying to look like you're minority friendly thing possible, short of maybe pasting a black face on a white partner.

Pic: http://cl.ly/image/0X0r0D090l0X

No one cares what color or age you are raganwald. That's the entire point. If you identify yourself by your skin color, then you are in fact racist.

Yeah, if I look away hard enough racism and sexism will just magically disappear!

You people make me despair. It’s always the same shit.

The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities is foolish and offensive. This is similar to I believe a couple summers ago when Square had their summer intern program going, and all of the interns were male (because no females applied) and Jack Dorsey was attacked on Twitter for it. Square did not discriminate against people, but of course people leap to turning these people into the villain instead of thinking that it may be possible that no qualified minorities/women were able to speak at the conference for one reason or another. The organizer of this event is right to ignore this straw-man argument of trying to call him a racist/sexist because he knows that the allegation is ridiculous.

"automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities..."

Whoa, nellie!

That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak.

Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride.

Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends.

OI have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.

So I raise my hand and ask, "Could this process be improved?" No accusation of deliberate malice or even incompetence, just asking how we can do this better.

"The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an INTENTIONAL act by the event organizers..."

You're missing the point. The concern expressed about the predominantly white-dude lineups at popular conference IS NOT that individual conference organizers are purposefully excluding non-white-dude speakers. The people talking about these issues generally go out of their way to explain the difference between INDIVIDUAL bias and SYSTEMIC bias. The latter is not a matter of a conference organizer saying, "Hey! Let's make sure we don't have black speakers!" Instead, systemic bias is the way the status quo of a particular group or culture leads members to make assumptions or automatic decisions that UNINTENTIONALLY exclude certain people.

Think of a web developer building a new site. All of their friends use iOS, they use iOS, and although they don't have anything against Android, their unexamined default assumptions will steer them towards building the mobile version of the site with iOS in mind. Some Android users might still use it, and even get a lot out of it, but many will also be lost to bad UX collisions, mistaken assumptions about browser feature support, and so on. The result can easily turn into a spiral: Android users don't use our site, so working to support them would just be platform zealotry!

A stretched analogy? Perhaps. But it's an example of how unintentional assumptions can leave important groups of people -- with lots of really valuable stuff to contribute -- out in the cold unless work is done up front. It's not about tokenism, or quotas, or assuming bad faith and evil intentions. It's about keeping our eyes open, and listening when people say we're missing something important.

"If you identify yourself by your skin color, then you are in fact racist."

That is the most offensively ignorant thing I've ever read on HN. And I've been around a good long while.

Identifying yourself by your skin color means you perceive the color of your skin to imply something about you.

Anyone who asserts that the color of an individual's skin implies something about that individual is a quintessential racist. It implies nothing about you as an individual. Anyone who says it does (including you), accepts the premises that every racist accepts: that a color somehow defines the identity or nature of that individual.

"Offensively ignorant" #1) I can't control what offends you, that's your choice. If you are offended, then choose not to be. #2) Ignorance means lack of knowledge or information. What specific information am I lacking in this context?

"I've been around a good long while." Again, no (rational) person in this forum cares how long you've been around. What does that have to do with my argument?

These arguments have been going on for nearly a century, and you're trotting out the same tired old arguments. Either you're trolling me, or are ignorant of the ongoing debates/discussions/history of this issue. That's specifically what I mean when I say you're ignorant. Your words display zero awareness of the larger context.

The "We aren't racist or sexist, we're colour-blind and gender-agnostic, we're a meritocracy, and it just happens to be the case that our country club is full of white people isn't important, and you people are racists/sexists for constantly trying to disrupt our happy existence" is old. If you know that, you need to do more than whip it out, you need to acknowledge the many, many arguments against it and explain why you don't think they apply.

If you don't know that, you are ignorant of the subject matter. If you know it but do not address it, you are trolling. Some people call that being "intellectually dishonest," but I prefer to say trolling.

Of course I identify myself by all of the my characteristics that have a significant contribution to my life's experience. I have size 11 feet, but that has never meant much to me, so I don't think of myself as a "Size 11 Guy." I've been assaulted on the street and called a "Nigger" and "Spook" by strangers, so guess what? My skin colour does contribute to defining my experience.

When you call that racist, you're either ignorantly redefining the word "racist" or trolling me. I prefer to think you're ignorant of the implications. Conflating having a life experience that has been affected by his skin colour with white supremacism and Jim Crow laws is wrong. It's also deeply offensive.

I'm offended. I choose to be offended. I choose to speak out against it. That's not the same thing as being "Jerry Springer" angry with you, or curling up in a fetal ball and sobbing, but it is enough to motivate me to act.

And let me tell you flat out, this "I'm not being offensive, you're just choosing to be offended" argument is nonsense, it's like that Simpson's episode where Bart windmills his arms and says "I'm just windmilling my arms, and walking forward, if you get hit that's your problem."

Do yourself a favour, and remove it from your toolbox of arguments.

I posted this comment below, but I wanted it to respond to yours as well. Which would you feel less offended by:

A group of white males that were picked soley based on their ability and nothing else.

Orrrr....Something like this: http://cl.ly/image/0X0r0D090l0X, recruit a minority female, give her a lower job title and lump her in with the white males to look diversity friendly. Yay!

False dichotomy. I'd feel less offended if the organizer responded to the question by saying "Here is our fully transparent process that involved reaching out to a large number of qualified people across various cultural lines, and this is the result."

And speaking of false dichotomies, it's INCREDIBLY sexist to suggest that if a woman was be chosen, she was of lower quality than the men and was only picked for her gender. You're implying that women are not qualified to speak at conferences.

Alright, Got to weigh in here.

I used to work at the ft, and spent a good deal of time dealing with the labs division.

Andrew probably went out of his way to ask for diversity, seriously, he is awesome like that.

I think the issue may be time constraints and the fact that within 3 companies, no females/minorities/etc offered to speak and had the relevant high level of expertise.

Not to turn this into an entire drama[1] or to single Andrew out, but if he is so awesome, why the arrogant "I don't feel need to defend this" response?

[1] Not that sexism/racism/*-ism should be taken lightly.

Because he has more important things to do than argue with peasants?

http://sebastianmarshall.com/arguing-with-peasants-shows-a-l...

Hi, article author here.

I did state in the blogpost that I know Andrew is a good chap and I respect him and his intentions, and I don't for a minute think he set out to make this event 100% male. My issue is in his response to my challenge on it, and the lack of acknowledgement by the organisers that an 100% male lineup isn't ideal.

I also find it quite hard to believe that amongst companies like Google and Facebook, there aren't enough highly-qualified female/minority devs who could've spoken. And besides, the speaker roster isn't exclusive to those three companies, either.

thanks!

I dont disagree about paragraph 3, what I am saying is the very specific, very fast mobile serving technology experts may have very few women, or at least few who wish to travel to london.

Funny, looks like britruby will be held in spirit after all.

Only if we keep talking about it...

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