Women, Tech Conferences and the Bullshit Surrounding It
sugarrae.com
sugarrae.com
Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach, your CFP is poor, you're not promoting the CFP in a diverse way, etc. You work and improve, and then in year two you might notice you ended up at, say, 30%. Hurrah!
Both approaches involve percentages and measurements, yet the second is not an attempt at fulfilling a "quota" (even if there's a target % to reach) and should be more palatable to everyone while still ensuring efforts are made to increase diversity.
May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.
I agree wholeheartedly! I think that this is the sort of attitude which would be conducive to moving the state of affairs along. In these fights it's often lost that the problem at hand is that treating people in a way that makes them feel like they're not welcome and not respected is at the root of the issue.
Because it's kind of strange when I think of it. I've interviewed a lot of people in my life already and I can't remember a single time grades were brought forward or mattered. Is it an US thing?
On top of that, even if the company didn't consider them, their classmates probably knew where everyone fell in relation to each other. They would know if they got passed over for someone who had better grades than themselves.
I'm not saying that's definitely the case here, just that grades alone don't tell the whole story.
I don't care if you were pampered and that's why you got A's. If you have the necessary knowledge and are a hard worker, you have my vote.
What I said was nothing but perception.
If you work hard to get good grades, you are likely to work hard at your work place too.
Though its true not every hard working student gets good grades.
So what? It's not like those men are going to find all employment doors shut to them. They weren't guaranteed jobs at IBM, and the assumption that they should have a say in the firm's hiring criteria and strategic goals demonstrates an almost laughable sense of entitlement.
Just make sure you don't do it to anyone, like straight, white males who have the political strength to resist it or you'll never hear the end of it.
genuine/serious questions:
would you be okay with quotas in sports? music? movies? something like "30% of olympic 100m finalists should be allocated to minorities" etc?
I've seen students with laughable grades (no, I am not making this up) get into medical schools, because they are from underprivileged group. Would you be okay with them performing surgery on you?
</questions>
Quota system is a very dangerous game to play - it usually goes downhill quickly, even if the intentions are good and even if people who run it are super competent. There are numerous other ways to help the under privileged.
They'll not even notice after decades of this.
History has lots of people from the privileged class who ended up working to improve society as a whole. Bill Gates is great living example.
Before the schedule was announced.. did the organizers get the speakers they wanted or did some decline?
Before that.. when CfP responses were rated, did the submitters provide relevant supporting material like a resume of previous speaking appearances (to demonstrate speaking skill) and blog posts, articles, etc (to demonstrate expertise in the topic).
Before that.. did the submitters have writing and speaking skills that made them comfortable to submit?
Before that.. was the CfP well-publicized to relevant groups, companies, etc?
Before that.. was the CfP entirely open? Was it invite only? Was it a blend of the two with only some of the slots open to the CfP?
Before that.. did the person believe they had the skills and expertise to submit?
Before that.. did the person actually have the skills and expertise to submit?
Before that.. did the person have a job or interests to give them the opportunity to learn those skills?
Before that.. did they get encouragement and support along the way?
Before that.. did they receive the education to get the job or choose those interests?
Before that.. did they believe they could learn and work in the industry?
Before that.. did the person have the aptitude for those skills?
If the number at the beginning of this process is small and every one of those steps chips away at the entire group - let alone those with particular genders, ethnicities, etc - of course the output is going to be low.
For example, my undergradate engineering school adopted a bunch of Girl Scout troops to encourage and grow interest in STEM. It has taken years but female enrolment has increased by 50%.. and they're not just shuffling from other schools. They're growing the pool of qualified candidates.
So I disagree with you. The blame does lie with "the people at the end".
> did they get encouragement and support along the way?
> did the person have a job or interests to give them the opportunity to learn those skills?
> did the person believe they had the skills and expertise to submit?
These reasons are exactly why quota systems are used.
If there isn't anyone from your particular group at a highly demanding conference panel, or visible in your industry, you're much less likely to become a part of it... even though you're more than capable of performing at that level if you put the time in.
Also: Why are women more valuable than stutterers at conferences?
Being on stage in front of an audience who are tweeting about your physical attributes, not what you are saying; who are snarkily commenting about you being the token blonde; who are assuming you got there because of your birth, not your brains -- that's not a hindrance to speaking?
Even if none of those things are true, they can be running through the speaker's head, just as a stutterer is incredibly self-aware of their impediment. We create our own barriers.
The definition of stuttering involves having problems with physical speech. The definition of woman doesn't involve having problems with physical speech.
Stutterers are underrepresented in most conferences; even if you could get them up on stage, it would be a difficult presentation to listen give eloquently (and probably hard to listen to). Women are underrepresented at conferences, but it's not because they would have a problem presenting. Some people might have a problem listening to it, but that'd be largely because of their own issues.
Comparing stutterering - a physical (or perhaps mental) impediment - to females is insulting.
I've seen few female presenters bomb, and the ones that did - there were much easier explanations - no or little experience public speaker, didn't understand the topic, etc. The ones I've seen who know the topic and the audience and have spoken before in public are fine - no better than men. I do have occasion to listen to male speakers who stutter, and while I know they're smart people - they know their subject well - they can not present.
The basic answer to that is that they're not - if you know someone who stutters, I would like to think that you'd encourage them to present at a conference if they had something valuable to present.
However, imagine that that conference is a brofest - they're not going to feel very included, are they? Bros are assholes after all, and they probably won't want to participate if they feel that they're going to be mocked or not listened to.
Technical conferences don't exist to engender your preferred social change, they exist to impart knowledge to attendees, all of whom paid considerable sums to be there.
That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.
There's not much controversy there, and like it or not, most people feel the same way.
You are not a technical conference. You are a person.
At a technical conference, focused on technical content: if you sacrifice the quality of that technical content for quotas, then you've produced objectively worse conference.
> That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.
What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?
Well spotted. The point is that the status quo is a choice, just as being more inclusive is a choice. Which is the better choice?
And your post has a couple of assumptions that I feel compelled to point out:
1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.
2. That conferences include talks based on some absolute value of merit.
3. That conferences are so amazing that everyone wants to go to them.
> What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?
Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."
Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.
> 1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.
No, judging content on the basis of anything other than direct merit will lead to inferior papers and talks.
> Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."
What do you want them to do exactly? They put out a call for papers, they get the papers they get. Of the roughly 200 accepted speakers (authors of papers) presented at Usenix, about 5% were female.
Usenix is well known. It's not new. The call for papers goes out every year. Research arms of corporations and universities send their employees.
So what, in your book, does Usenix do so wrong?
https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/tech-schedule/usenix...
Say that you put out a call for conference papers, but due to a bug in your mailing list software, only every other email is sent - 50% of potential participants are excluded. What do you think will happen to the quality of your conference?
Now let's say you find the bug after you've decided on your talk schedule. Should you should fix the bug and include the 50% of papers that you've missed? Isn't that unfair to the people who've already been selected?
So where is the problem, exactly?
That's only partly true, and even that part depends on what you mean by "better technical content"
It also depends on whose perspective you're measuring from.
If a conference is run purely as a business, then the "better choice" for the organiser is the one that has the highest return on investment (presumably "highest net profit"). And there are lots of things, over and above the merits of the content itself, that contribute to that. If your target audience is 30% women, but your speaker line-up is only 5% women, that might be a problem for you. It might cause some percentage of those women to decide not to attend. The alternative - creating an artificial quota of having women make up 30% of speakers, regardless of quality - might cause an even larger drop in attendance. There's a balance that's needed, and it takes work.
But even if we don't worry about that, "technical content" isn't a simple measure. If your conference has even a moderately broad scope, then you need to worry about the breadth of talks. Clearly a Ruby conference where all the talks are on Rails, is not an ideal lineup even if the best submissions (on individual merit) were all for taks on Rails. In terms of content, if nothing else, you need to worry about diversity.
So, if you're planning a Ruby conference, and you know that only 50% of your target audience are Rails users, but 90% of the papers submitted are for Rails talks, then it would appear that something has gone wrong in your process. It look like people have pegged you a a Rails conference, even though that's not your intent.
I'd argue that same applies to speaker demographics as well. If you think that 30% of your target audience are women, but only 5% of your submissions are from women, then there's a reasonable chance that something in the process caused the women not to submit papers. If that's the case, then your conference is going to suffer for it.
There a lots of things that conference organisers can do that either increase or decrease the diversity in their submissions/selection process. E.g.
- Placing too high an emphasis on previous speaking engagements in an industry segment where diversity has been lacking in the past.
- Having a selection panel that is overly skewed towards one group of people (selection bias)
- Putting out your call for papers in the wrong places (one that is skewed)
- Having a call for papers that contains biased language
Even if you are firmly decided on selecting speakers based purely on their content (even though, for some conferences, that might not produce the "best" result), there is work that can be done to make sure you're at least considering the widest selection of papers in the most effective way.
Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge', so they are a fundamentally social event. The 'hallway track' as it is known. If it weren't for the networking, conferences would be pointless as you could just do a local course or read up on the niche publications.
Open-source is not simply egalitarian. PostgreSQL (for example) doesn't try to apply egalitarian ideals to patch acceptance. Bad code is bad code, no matter who wrote it.
In the ideal, open-source is meritocratic, which also happens to be the ideal criteria applied to selecting conference papers.
> Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge' ...
Why do you think these are different things? Some of the best collaborations I've had have resulted from meeting the smart people presenting at conferences, and sharing knowledge.
If conferences break the signal-to-noise ratio by attempting to fill quotas rather than selecting noteworthy papers, then the smart people will stop attending; the social value AND the associated knowledge sharing will be diminished.
I'm pretty sure that pifflesnort got it correct. Egalitarian means that people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. But open source communities do not treat people equally. If you've never learned to write a good bug report, you're marginalized. If you've learned to program and have time to contribute, you're likely to be able to have a significant impact on the project that you're interested in.
It is true that the economic barriers to entry are fairly low. I've personally known multiple homeless people who found open source to be their gateway to learning a useful skill and getting a good job. (Most who know the ones that I am thinking of do not know this detail of their lives...) But there are other types of barriers to entry. Language skills, intelligence, interest, etc.
It is easy to ignore those requirements. But stop and think about the fact that significantly less than half of adults in the USA can read, write, and do math at a grade 8 level. A lot of the reasons why have to do with unequal opportunities (bad schools, families that discount learning, etc). The fact that open source communities ignore those people rather than actively seeking to give them access is a demonstration that open source is a meritocracy, not an egalitarian society.
Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal. A dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian in need of advice on wood will still seek a carpenter over a weaver.
What is a 'starting point'? Open source certainly doesn't provide equal starting points, because each individual is evaluated on merit, the acquisition of which is often tied to social and economic background.
Conferences don't provide equal starting points, for the same reason.
> Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal.
They are orthogonal. An egalitarian meritocratic society would give each member equal opportunity to achieve, but would judge the achievements of each member according to their merit.
Open source only concerns itself (like any sane organization whose mission is not social advancement) with merit, not with egalitarian questions of how merit was acquired.
Right, and if their CFP is systematically discouraging some people from applying, or their review process is systematically undervaluing proposals from some people, and those people would give great presentations, then the conference is not going to be as good as it otherwise would be. Conferences that fail to take questions of gender representation seriously are depriving their attendees of great presentations from women. If you care about the quality of technical conferences, you should want to attend those which have a policy that tries to ensure good proposals won't be missed simply because of the gender of the presenter.
At 'serious' technical conferences, presentations are based on papers, papers are based on work already done. The conference itself is an end game of months or years of work that already happened.
At less serious conferences, talks, presentations, and panels are selected to maximize interest by choosing people of significant stature and interest in the community. Again, this is the end game of months or years of work that already happened.
Where is it the conferences responsibility (and to what advantage) to extend themselves to garnering talks and presenters from a minority industry segment (and which minority segments?). Do you actually have demonstrable evidence that presenters and papers of merit are being excluded from conferences? This would serve as evidence that conferences were failing in the missions to provide top tier content.
It seems that your position is focused more on who is presenting content than what the content actually is.
Did this actually improve the technical content of the conference, or did it simply redefine the objective measure by which PyCon determines "success" to include non-technical metrics? The latter seems to be the case, in which case, it's not a particularly valuable stratagem for a merit-focused technical conference.
This has an obvious correction: put a counterweight on it in the form of a quota. Does this fix the illness? No. It is a pill, medicine to manage the symptoms of the illness while the illness is fought. The malady is diffused, the remedy is not, so it is easy to pick on the remedy - but it's better than doing nothing.
We have some guesses about what the "right" number would be, and a quota of 20% or 25% is hardly getting us there - it is ensuring a lower bound. How much injustice is really resulting from having a lower bound?
What numbers do you have to demonstrate that the function is broken? What percentage of our industry is made up of women, and what percentage of them are interested in presenting at a conference?
> This has an obvious correction: put a counterweight on it in the form of a quota. Does this fix the illness? No. It is a pill, medicine to manage the symptoms of the illness while the illness is fought. The malady is diffused, the remedy is not, so it is easy to pick on the remedy - but it's better than doing nothing.
Why do you believe that enforcing the selection of speakers on a basis other than their qualifications is better than doing nothing?
Furthermore, (% of industry that is women) x (% of women interested in presenting at a conference) is exactly what I was referring to when I talked about "outsourcing" the discrimination - the filter was set upstream.
Why is this a prima facie case proof of sexist qualification requirements? What evidence do you actually have?
At the 2012 American Academy of Nursing Conference, the expert panels were roughly 100% female. Is this prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications was being a woman?
[1] http://www.aannet.org/assets/docs/ConferenceMaterials/2012/c...
> Furthermore, (% of industry that is women) x (% of women interested in presenting at a conference) is exactly what I was referring to when I talked about "outsourcing" the discrimination - the filter was set upstream.
I fail to see the issue here. Conferences have to work with the pool of speakers that they have.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree, because yes, I easily read that as prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications is being a woman. I think it's a great example of the filter being set upstream - men face hurdles when trying to become a nurse, and face bizarre challenges when practicing as a nurse (although I believe they are still favored for promotions and prestigious placing).
It's not some kind of man-hating reverse discrimination, it's an attempt to correct very real and very pervasive institutional inequalities.
Your position also assumes that the parties performing evaluations have existing gender biases -- itself a form of stereotyping, discrimination, and bias.
Evaluating papers anonymously solves the problem you claim, while avoiding any issues with quotas or "man-hating reverse discrimination".
The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
What does this have to do with evaluating papers? Why would we divert ourselves from a technical mission to pick up an unrelated social cause?
> The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
The place to worry about correcting structural discrimination isn't at the point where it's already happened. That correction would be artificial and as such, detrimental to furtherance of our art and science.
The time to correct structural discrimination is long before anyone is submitting papers to present research they've already done.
Are the speaker selectors favoring men? That should be possible to test for. If so, it needs to get clamped down on hard.
Are women less inclined to try to speak at these conferences? If so, why? It's likely that making presenting more female-friendly would be worth it.
Is this subfield just that male? If so, it's not the conference-organizers' place to deal with it, but someone should sniff around for active biases.
In short, this is suspicious enough to justify a real investigation, and I'd be very interested to read the results of one.
That doesn't sound like something to reject the null hypothesis over.
Having said that, a human bias in gender does need to be removed if it exists. If this bias is for or against the inclusion of women, it should be removed.
Applying a counterweight to achieve some superficial quota based on a societal demand just degrades the quality of the function and it's integrity.
How ironic it would be to apply such a fix for a 'tech' conference.
Let's assume for the sake of this line of reasoning that the function for evaluating a speaker's ability is accurate. If you are looking to invite ten speakers to your conference and there is only one woman among the top ten speakers, it would make perfect sense if you only invited one woman. That makes you good at your job, not sexist.
Now how do we go about changing this? Well, one approach is what you're suggesting--affirmative action. There are certainly pros and cons to introducing such a minimum quota, but I find the article's assessment that the cons seem to substantially outweigh the pros to be very persuasive. Inviting inferior speakers in an effort to increase the representation of a specific group at a conference is problematic for two main reasons: (1) it results in a conference that is expected to be worse quality and (2) it deprives women who actually are evaluated to be in the top ten speakers from knowing, and from having other people know, that their value to the conference came from their speaking ability rather than their second X chromosome. Additional ways in which the quota approach is problematic are that (3) it discriminates against the many other groups that are under-represented at tech conferences, as well as the oft-debated argument that (4) inviting a worse female speaker over a better male speaker is unfair for the man.
If we suppose the quota system does more harm than good, what alternatives do we have? That's the million dollar question! The only answer I've got is to focus our efforts on addressing the sources of women's under-representation in computing in general, such as encouraging female students to study computer science, getting schools to examine whether their classroom environment discourages female students from pursuing CS, and help software companies identify whether their workplace atmosphere discourages women and what steps they can take to address that. Forcing conferences to invite more women or businesses to hire more women is a highly problematic and very short-term hack. Identifying and fixing the structural barriers to women in computing is a highly difficult but very long-term solution.
Outreach to encourage more submissions from women, and looking at downstream ("lesser") conferences, to help those also encourage more submissions from women, seem like the right steps to me. It can be self-perpetuating though. You go to a conference and no women are speaking, you subconsciously think you don't belong there.
But hey; if you go to a conference and 20% of the speakers are women, yet 5% of the attendees are, isn't that a different kind of red flag?
You present it as different things but it's exactly the same flawed idea.
"An estimation of your outreach" would only be different from quota if the number of good conference pitches sent in by men was equal or near equal to the number of pitches sent in by women.
Since the number of women in programming are far less than the men, that is obviously not the case (their respective total number of pitches would be unequal and hence their respective total of good pitches would be unequal).
Unless men and women Python programmers are something like 50-50, you cannot have something like 50-50 men and women Python conference speakers. At best, a fair outreach should be M-F, where M/F the respective male and female Python programmers ratio.
And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it.
Which might not be the case at all (it doesn't even have to be because women are, say, less nerdy and obsessive with coding: just assume, which is very plausible, that male bosses in the workplace don't assign them interesting enough problems in their Python work, and prefer males to be project leaders etc. Then, following that, fewer women will have interesting conference pitches to make). And there are 1000s of other factors like that.
Finally, not every field needs to have 50-50 representation anyway. We don't lament that there are far fewer women boxers or rugby players than men. Or that there are far fewer women coal miners or truck drivers than men. Or that there are far more women in fashion that men. Or than there are far more women in biology than men, etc etc.
We don't lament that there are far fewer women $foo than men
We don't, because we're in technology.
Some of my other hobbies are also male dominated and unrelated to technology, there's definitely an awareness of the situation and active efforts to recruit more women. On the flipside, I've seen some arguments about the biology situation, theorising that the reason there are more women in biology is cultural conditioning for girls interested in science (it certainly happened to me, but that's hardly solid data).
No, I'm not taking this for granted.
I even stated: "And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it."
>(Or, the inflammatory counter, what if women just aren't good at math and should be shopping instead - shifting it the other way?)
Could be entirely plausible too. Don't have any numbers though (could also be the inverse, women better at math).
But more plausible to me is an alternative explanation. What if not enough women (due to either nature or nurture) don't have the obsessive nature that being a coder and doing conference worthy stuff requires? I know men working meticulously on some stuff (from hacking to wood-working) for ages. Far less women doing so. I'm not judging, if anything it could be far smarter, personal-development-wise, than programming 10 hours straight at work and then again at home, in your "cave", as a hobby. So, perhaps women favor work-life balance more. Or men coders compensate with coding for other stuff (for example a lot that I know have subpar sex lives and are not exactly "party animals").
Women do plenty of obsessive hobbies. I know women who can spend an entire day (12+ hours) baking, for example. Sure, our brains are wired differently, but I think the idea that you have to be obsessive to present at a conference (and that females might not be as obsessive for whatever reason) doesn't quite hold up. There are plenty of conference-worthy subjects which might not be deeply meticulous coding topics, for example.
I don't want a team full of the best indiviual performers. I want the best performing team.
;)
Such is life.
Yes, definitely, too much (over)sensitivity. There will always be people who discriminate, and there will always be someone out there -- no matter who you are -- that will actively discriminate against you given the opportunity. Those people will never change. For the rest of us, what the world needs is to lighten up and give things some time: In the grander scheme of things, all this equality talk started up relatively recently. People don't change overnight, and the institutions we build change far more slowly.
Patience, people. Patience, tempered expectations, and realism. Not all of this will ever be "fixed," and that which is will pretty much asymptotically approach our best case expectations, so learning to be happy with what we get and work to improve things without pissing everyone off all the time seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
Here's my input on the "need more women"/"female unfriendly" work environment in IT debate:
There's nothing wrong with working with and coding with only men. That's been my only experience so far as a noob who's had two programming internships.
I think most men are easy to get along with and I enjoy their friendships. The only female unfriendly experiences I've had on the job have been due to sexual harassment (as in someone actively trying to sleep with a person, not a stupid off-handed joke). In class it's been the more condescending "you only got that job because you're a girl and you look like this". I think that needs to stop. It's completely fucked up behaviour. But being on an all male team is fine. I think to say we need to get tech to a completely even score is pointless. Most nurses are women and a few are men and they carry on fine? Not a lot of girls are into coding (at least as of yet) and that's fine too. They're being influenced at a younger age to have an interest in tech now by different organizations and that is great, but if after campaigns such as those are completed and women still don't get to 50% of IT - meh, who cares. Given most women who get into tech enjoy tech related hobbies (video games etc.) it's easy to be friendly to coworkers and others in the industry. It's not like women in tech all feel completely disconnected from the men. The women in my class and I have spoke about this and we generally have all had the same experience (unfortunately that includes the sexual harassment too though).
tdlr; most women are not overly sensitive like Adria Richards and we'll be fine. We're too busy coding up stuff to care about this (minus the sexual harassment - which is commenting on boobs and trying to sleep with the girl etc., not dongle jokes lol but actual serious stuff)
/rant
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5554390, women actually come off worse in this case.
"Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings."
and what's with the spammy intermediate link? direct link:
Of course, percentages matter, and the fact that far fewer women are represented in a conference may be a symptom of something else, as opposed to a direct bias by the conference organizers. What we need is more of the underlying data. To start, I'd like to know how many women submitted technical talks to begin with.
The only place where reservations make any impact is areas where there are too many good candidates and somebody from the lesser privileged sections of the society who is equally good can't make it due to the limited availability of opportunities. In such cases it makes some sense to offer the minorities a degree of reservation as the culture is unwelcoming to a meritorious minority person.
Any thing apart from this and what you will see is, the social problems remain totally unchanged. Reservations and quotas means some one from privileged class who is deserving of a position will be denied the opportunity, and some one oppressed class who is not deserving will get the opportunity instead. The net result is the whole system will be poisoned. Work never gets done, more and more hard working people are denied opportunities. At the same undeserving people get the same opportunities and make a big waste out of them.
If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't.
Our job is to create a level playing field. So that anybody who want's to, can deliver.
I only say there must be a level playing field so that hard working women get same chances as men.
Reservations create a scenario where you are lower the entry bar for A group of people. While keeping it high for B group of people. Net result is there will no motivation for A set of people to try anything extra since they are guaranteed an entry anyway. At the same a certain set of people from B will stop doing any good work because regardless of their work, A's are going to get their chances.
The whole system collapses.
India has tried this for the past 60 years. The situation has only gone worse.
Work should be done to help women win without reservations.
"Reservations" or whatever you want to call them are lowering the bar to the same level as other people, but of course the "B"s are going to scream blue murder because they now have to work instead of cruising.
The problem needs to be fixed at the middle school level (or earlier) where girls are discouraged from technical subjects.
In all my four years of Engineering course. There wasn't one single girl in all four batches of Mechanical Engineering branch.
Why are they a minority in tech in the first place? Well video games got me and most of my friends into tech, and when I was in high-school in the mid 90s most girls abhorred games and considered them childish and geeky. It was a serious social faux pas to be a tech geek who loved hacking around with computers and playing video games. I never met a single girl in the 90s who was into it beyond playing an occasional game of Mario Kart.
Who are we to blame for that?
Are there cases where a talk from a woman was judged not because of its merit but because the speaker's gender?
If all woman who have good talks are getting their chances, I don't even see a problem here.
Not only is it a strawman argument, but it also reiterates sexist claims about women. At best, your comment gets ignored and worst, the comment will work against creating gender equality.
> If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't.
The conclusion from that is that the lack of women in tech is because they're not very good at it. If women were good at tech, then from his statement there would be more of them (they would "win anyway").
This is clearly absurd - hence he's wrong, or at least needs to support/make his argument a little better.
Do I really need to stick </sarcasm> tags on everything?
Compare this with the general merit category where even true meritorious students are denied their due.
In India there are protests by groups asking the government to name them as backwards classes.
For more information read examples like : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Gurjar_unrest_in_Rajasthan
Pure unadulterated bullshit or trolling.
Er.. I'm from India too.. and kamaal.. you seem to be stuck in the small college student protests about reservation around 7 - 8 years ago.
Nobody wants to be born in a lower caste. In the end, such comments are just jokes. India's social playing field is still more important to the ordinary people. Especially when castes play a big role in marriages in India, the next most important thing after society as a whole.
So, i have to ask... whats your angle kamaal. Convincing HN that reservations are bad is going to make no difference on the politics of India. You seem to be ranting about it every chance you get (and against poor people from the last comment i read).
Also, your rant here is only against the backward sections of society, which have been denied equal opportunities for ages and have now become a political pawn in the reservations fiasco.
I question this, because India, as you know has reservations for women too, already in many educational institutions, pending in the parliament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_Reservation_Bill
So, instead of quoting something relevant like the impact of various reservations the country has implemented for women, you seem to just pout out your own agenda.
Don't wanna make the world a better place? Please don't try to make it worse.
How? You really need to explain.
>>Er.. I'm from India too.. and kamaal.. you seem to be stuck in the small college student protests about reservation around 7 - 8 years ago.
Yeah, may be. Most people who come from a middle class general category are going to suffer from reservations. Because they will be doing all the hard work only to watch someone who scored some thing like half their marks eat all their opportunities.
>>Nobody wants to be born in a lower caste. In the end, such comments are just jokes.
Have you ever visited a local Taluk office? Say some where in Bangalore? Do you even know how much bribe is given simply to obtain a OBC certificate because some one needs a job, or to get a seat and doesn't have the required marks to get one?.
>>So, i have to ask... whats your angle kamaal.
Let me put it the other way, what's your angle. I've put my views clear.
You should elaborate how denying the hardworking general category students their due chance is helping the country.
>>Also, your rant here is only against the backward sections of society, which have been denied equal opportunities for ages and have now become a political pawn in the reservations fiasco.
So is this now a revenge cycle? Are we supposed to make the general category suffer because some 20 generations back a ancestor of their made a mistake.
>>I question this, because India, as you know has reservations for women too, already in many educational institutions, pending in the parliament.
Last time I checked most women who stand for elections in my area were the wives of most prominent rowdies/mafia types.
>>So, instead of quoting something relevant like the impact of various reservations the country has implemented for women, you seem to just pout out your own agenda.
>>Don't wanna make the world a better place? Please don't try to make it worse.
Sorry you need to give your agenda, not me.
And how are you making the world a better place by denying the hardworking their due chance. And taking all their opportunities and giving to some one who probably didn't do 1/10th the work they do.
You are arguing, just make it a level playing field and the hardworking woman will eventually show up. But that takes generations for change to happen.
In a lot of our eyes, that is not good enough. Change needs to happen now. Quota systems may deny an opportunity to a deserving person (as the quota is full). But it is morally equivalent to being denied an opportunity due to some other kind of bias (i.e because you are a woman).
So really, quotas is just a new (not prejudicial) form of bias. The only difference is, it will eventually change the whole system (for the better). Where as prejudicial bias just makes the system worse.
I would say that by keeping the status quo (i.e. 90+% men in tech) you are poisoning the system.
Again, I have to come down to giving the example of Indian society[Sorry can't help it, but 60 years of these experiments make India the perfect case study for these sort of problems].
In India, there are cases where some one got a medical seat through reservations. The person generally goes on to become a pretty good doctor, earns well and is now pretty much empowered to do anything he/she wants. But yet you will see their children claim seats though reservations. What's more ridiculous? You can even get a post graduation seat through reservations. Why does one need a reservation when a transparent ranking process exists through a competitive exam? The exams are often objective multiple choice questions and the candidates identity is anonymous and known only through a serial number.
While all this is happening, some guy in the general category watches his well deserved seat go to some other guy who makes it through on just qualifying marks.
At one point of time, before the free market reforms in the 90's. This problem was the big reason, why so many Indian's left India to settle abroad.
>>The only difference is, it will eventually change the whole system (for the better).
It won't.
Quota/Reservations systems at best work like socialist/communist set ups.
Sooner or later- The deserving guy finds no motivation to continue contributing to the system. The undeserving guy never contributes because regardless of his work the rewards are assured.
So what's your proposal here? I would love that each generation we had the wealth allocated on a purely merit basis but the world does not work like that, I know a fair share of mediocre people with fortunes who can send their children to better schools and some smarter poor fellas that can't, and besides I live in Brazil and ignoring the past did not produced a really better alternative.
EDIT: Text was bad
There is a provable, significant difference is earning/wealth between different castes in India[1]. If you believe that there is no difference between people depending on their caste, this is situation you want to remedy.
If there has been systematic discrimination against a class of people, spanning centuries, they can not compete without providing affirmative action. Quota's are a way to level the playing field.
"If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't."
Not if the means of productions, wealth and power is hoarded by a few.
[1] http://www.ras.org.in/income_inequality_and_caste_in_village...
I was born and raised in rural India and have seen numerous Dalits benefit from reservations. Reservations in India is a complex sociological arrangement and deeply linked with Casteism and systematic repression for centuries. Just citing few examples of candidates from non-deserving backward castes is not enough to invalidate reservations. There have been attempts to hijack the issue for political political gains, but that's the problem with the political class, not with the Reservations.
B: Number of people who suffer because of reservations.
Over the years B has been far too larger than A.
Thanks to the IT boom in the 90's. One of the biggest reasons best people from India left to the west was because their much deserved opportunity went to some one who didn't do 1/10th the work they did.
That's actually a great way of doing things and i'm surprised it's not used more.
A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process".
One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.
If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women.
The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036457
> Everybody can vote for DjangoCon 2013 presentations (Github required)
> The voting is deliberately anonymous at this first stage.We DO use names to discriminate but that often allows us to have "fresh" speakers and keep the lineup somewhat varied. It also allows us to filter for all the other spam-talks; i.e. marketers.
It is an issue of priorities but I would easily place quality of presentations over guaranteed blinding to prevent gender-bias selection.
I only wish it was possible for smaller organizations to take advantage of blind review processes for speakers.
What's interesting is when people do the opposite. When they A/B test the name. Same content. Half the people have male names, half female. Now, if gender doesn't matter, and people are judged purely on their achievements, and we are in a real meritocracy, then there should be no difference, right? If there a statistically significant difference in how people treat the male vs. female applicant, then there's some bias going on.
Turns out if you do that (e.g. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201... ), you get men getting more job offers and getting offered more money. And this is scientists judging applicants for a science job!
Something is wrong here....
I wish somebody woyuld at least look into possible reasons. Personally I suspect the elephant in the room is motherhood. If there is an x% chance for the recipient of your grant to quit the profession after a couple of years, it lowers the value of your investment quite a bit.
You think women can't be sexist against women? Of course they can be! A member of the marginalised group can easily continue that marginalisation. I watched a recent current affairs programme about same sex marriage, and they'd found a gay man to speak out against gay marriage.
The paper assumes independence between the gender of the applicant and the gender of the students of the professor, which isn't the case unless you hide the applicant in a room away from the current grad students.
Furthermore, the paper mentions that they used both Student's t-test and an ANOVA, both of which assume that the underlying data is normally distributed; there was no mention of a normality test anywhere in the paper. If the data is not normally distributed, which could be the case, then it's violating the normality assumption of both tests, which could potentially make them invalid.
Finally, are there other confounding factors in the study? For example, if the applications were sent in different batches, the time at which they arrived does have an influence. For example, a recent paper evaluated the decision of judges for parole and found out that judges were more lenient right after lunch and were much more strict right before[1].
As they say, further study is required.
The balance of evidence is that she is dismissive of the problem. She says she disagrees with Debra Mastaler, she uses scare-quotes around the word "bias", all but one of her "solutions" are aimed at female speakers individually, of the "do more to get noticed" variety. (The one standout is her accusation against Forbes Woman.)
Nowhere does she acknowledge that a) a number conferences have managed to get much, much closer to parity, without resorting to quotas, and b) a conference that still ends up with 95% males therefore very much has a problem.
This is known as "not doing your homework".
Part of the issue is that you need well known speakers to sell more tickets, that coupled with the fact that the % of women working in tech is a minority, you're left with a shallow pool of possible speakers. Furthermore, if you're looking for certain skill-sets in tech to be speakers, you're further diminishing your pool of available candidates.
Take Sweden education system. In the 1990s, they thought it would be a good idea to encourage minority groups by giving them an bonus when applying to a area of study where the applying individual would be a minority. It was a very simple rule, and it backfired, got scraped by the early 2000, and declared illegal. What the Swedish Education board found out was, that in 90% of the time where a applying individual would become a minority in a class, it was a white male trying to enter a female dominated area of study. The concept was scraped short after, with statements that the initial goals was not achieved, and that affirmative action was found as counterproductive to the concept of education. The second part was also reaffirmed in the courts and is now made illegal.
There are also much better alternatives to affirmative action which has been proven to be effective. Outreach programs works. Just a few months ago, there were a article describing how they reached around 50% or above female speaker participation through just doing outreach. They even made it a large point that they did no distinction what so ever when picking speakers, and the only work towards equality was outreach.
There are also social studies. We need more of those. As a scientific society, we should even demand it before listening to anyone arguing about problems within this society, and more importantly, when the discussion turns to causes or suggested solutions. If we do not demand it, those studies won't happen, as there will be no pressure to do so or money invested into it.
The short version is that women won't put up with the (lack of) work-life balance, long hours and constant on-call status. The successful women I've worked with all stayed because they simply love it (like I do) but it's entirely possible that this is something that even young girls notice when they avoid IT related curricula.
To get back to the topic at hand, I think the best way to get women involved in more conferences is to have more "tenured" women in the industry. And the best way to do that is to that is to recruit more into the industry and to make the industry more aligned with their desires.
I'm actually not opposed to quotas for female participation at conferences ... I simply want to learn something from anyone that's put in front of me.
-The author doesn't seem to know either.
-Insofar as criticism of conference excluding women is uninformed, the defense that the author provides is equally uninformed.
If there are fewer women speaking, applying to speak, or in the industry as a whole, there's a reason why. It seems to me we should spend less time going back and forth with vague abstractions, and more time looking for the underlying cause. Anything else is just cheap uninformed opinion. In this case, it's probably just linkbait.
To share a personal reflection, I just applied to speak at a conference in June. I submitted two ideas and I have many more I could share. I would love if the conference organizers were interested in diversity of viewpoints and gave me feedback that would allow my topic to be accepted. I think there is a nuance here between a handout and a handup.
It's the same experience I have applying to accelerators. I want to make it into the next YC class but I may not, not because of my race and gender but that I don't know the technique. Teach me to fish. I will be the captain of fishing.
When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).
The other way would be if you personally know some movers and shakers. I think that's also quite common. From time to time it's so obvious you're going to see speakers talking about projects or subjects that couldn't possibly have gotten up there on their own merits. They're not terrible, but they're sure not doing stuff that's significantly cooler than what most other people in the community do.
The third option is that you're so well known in your community that you technically don't need corporate sponsorship or personal connections, but those probably go together anyway more often than not.
Everybody else is going to have a bad time. Im uncertain if this is a bad thing per se, but it's also easy to see how that precludes the participation of a lot of people who could make a nice contribution. But if speaking is what you absolutely want to do, you could conceivably work your way up from smaller to ever-bigger conferences.
For 2014 we're more than likely going back to 95 slots, and I'd expect the number of proposals submitted to be roughly the same or higher. That'll put us closer to 20%.
Plenty of mere mortals get on stage at PyCon. Speaking experience does hold some weight with reviewers, but a well organized and interesting topic will take you pretty far.
We always schedule at least some first time speakers, because, well, that's how you get your next batch of experienced speakers.
On top of this, anybody whose talk isn't scheduled tends to be encouraged to give a lightning talk (5 minutes), and anybody who gave a particularly memorable lightning talk one year is almost certainly going to be accepted the following year.
I would expect that a lot of non-profit community conferences end up along these lines; the expensive commercial ones much less so.
But let’s say a larger percentage of the pitches came from women. Then people are also assuming that of the pitches that came from women, 100% of them were awesome pitches that organizers passed up solely because the presenter would be wearing a bra.
No, people are assuming that pitches from women and men are on average of equal quality. It's an assumption borne out by experience. So we do need to ask the question why there are less women. If indeed 95% of the proposals were from male speakers, it's not a problem with the conference. If there were more than 5% of the proposals coming from women, but the final selection looked like it did, the organizers should take a look at their process - something is likely to be off if that's the case.
If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot.
I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.
Interesting how she characterizes it throughout her piece as a very violent gender war, but at the end claims it to be a class war at then end.
I think that's the crux of many of the problematic perspectives of contemporary feminism, that what are class differences are jammed into the square box of gender war.
It's frankly a little alarming. College should be about learning diverse methods of evaluating a position, and critical thinking, not blaming everything on X root cause. (Any given problem is quite likely to have several variables affecting it.)
You realise that the theory of patriarchy has been extensively discussed and refined throughout the years. More 'critical thinking' has gone into it than you could even dream of. I am willing to wager that you've never even picked up a book about it, let alone read one. So, explain to us your theories of 'critical thinking'...
Oooh, it's one of those tumblr-style feminists. You always know you're in for a psychotic, incoherent rant when they start dropping the f-bomb repeatedly. (not to mention blaming everything from car engine troubles to a stubbed toe on the nebulous yet infamous "Patriarchy"...)
Oh wait, there aren’t any laws banning women from entering fire brigades and ambulance services or to take up apprenticeships in car workshops? Then it is obviously again the patriarchy’s fault to affect women in such a way that they don’t join those areas anyways.
It means she's serious! and angry! Take her seriously! Now!
Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.
I'd pose the same question to professional women as has been posed to black males for decades now: "Are you wanting to define yourself as a great lawyer/doctor/engineer, or a great _black_ (or in this case _woman_) lawyer/doctor/engineer?"
Personally, I have far, far greater respect when the gender and race is not part of the definition. Otherwise it seems there is a message of "I get extra points due to the mistake of my birth". Is that not just another form of 'privilege'?
I feel much the same way.
Personally I think affirmative action is more justifiable in something like college admissions where it's a critical gateway that a majority of people are expected to pass through on the way to success, versus conference speakers who are ostensibly there to talk about something they've already done rather than some future potential.
In other words, if you let more minorities into college, I think it's a credible argument that many will fulfill their potential and that will help correct structural problems over time, whereas I don't see how getting more women speakers at tech conferences does anything to solve the larger gender imbalance other than paper over the problem at the edges.
We work in a hyper-logical field (the only thing more logical is math). Why can't people involved in the field see that the only thing that truly matters is furthering the progress of our craft/art/discipline/whatever-you-call-it. I don't care who wrote my framework/language/IDE/whatever. I just want it to be quality.
This is the same problem that plagues things like education. No child seems to be allowed to be special or exceptional anymore. Everyone wants a damn participation ribbon. Screw your participation ribbon.
- it allows the expected situation to become unsurprising/usual.
- at the team level, it encourages to select the non-white-guy to be the speaker (in order to maximize the chance to pass the selection)
They don't call it a quota, but it certainly fits the loose definition - they wanted more females, and so they hired junior female engineers when they could have hired more senior male engineers. I'm sure that at some point, a team of theirs was considered at full capacity and some male resume was passed over that might have otherwise been considered.
But it's really, really hard to argue that they did something offensive there. They created more engineering talent, got some good press out of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had some sort of small effect in making programming a more viable-seeming career choice for women.
Which is very similar what institutional sexism is - except that women deal with it to a much greater degree than men.
Please be more cautious in assuming things about people on the internet.
1) Quotas for both genders, in the form that no more than, say, 60% of the employees of a company and no more than 60% of the employees in a given position may be of a given gender (with a threshold of maybe five persons in said positions before the quota kicks in).
2) Extension of said quotas to government agencies, tax-exempt societies and associations and students per university class.
3) Enforcement of the quota insofar as that ‘surplus’ members/employees of the ‘wrong’ gender have to leave the agency/society/company.
4) Empowerment of local governments to draft people from an under-represented gender into security relevant agencies (such as fire brigades, the military and the police) where necessary.
5) Empowerment of universities to draft under-represented students into classes requested by local businesses (such as science & technology, where necessary).
6) Enjoy the brave new world.
[1] http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
I suspect you mean something other than stalking. I guess, but I have nothing to support this, that the answer is "Women probably have more men acting weird and creepy after the woman has spoken at a conference".
I could probably talk about a great many things but have done no conferences. There's something a little too "real world" about it. Does that make any sense?
It's well possible for an unconscious bias to seep in and taint your perception of someone's work.
It brings to mind things like this: http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/1999/JANUARY1999/BehindTheSce...
Then again, with the kind of heat conference heads have on them now, I bet they ARE doing something like this, if not actively making quotas.
According to the CDC, 27.1% of Americans between the ages of 18-64 have at least one disability. Anyone know why the census numbers are different?
Then don't introduce one more to your liking.