Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

When you look only at the % of speakers who have a particular attribute, you're looking at the output of a very long process spanning years.

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.

And for the record, that doesn't mean I like the result. I just think we need to look at this as a systemic problem and address it as such.. not blame the people at the end.

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.

Every single person making all those decisions (the encouragers, the skill builders, the aptitude developers, the educators, the inviters) are "people at the end". We're all the end of the line when they come across us. Your kindergarten teacher was the person at the end when you entered their classroom.

So I disagree with you. The blame does lie with "the people at the end".

You disagree that this is a systemic problem, while finding people to blame throughout the system...?

> did they believe they could learn and work in the industry?
> 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.

You just summed this whole thing up in a nutshell.

Let's improve Hacker News by adding an empowering point multiplier to women's posts. The overwhelming majority of posts are by men, so isn't this the only just action?

Also: Why are women more valuable than stutterers at conferences?

There are more potential women participants than potential stutterer participants? Also being a woman isn't like having a speech impediment.

Stutterers are disproportionately unrepresented as speakers at conferences, despite potentially having extremely valuable information to share, just like women.

Stuttering is, by definition, a hindrance to speaking. Being a woman isn't.

It isn't?

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.

Stuttering: "Talk with continued involuntary repetition of sounds, esp. initial consonants"

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.

You've missed my point entirely. To restate it more bluntly, being a presenting female at a conference can cause a mental impediment. Would I prefer to listen to a female speaker than a stutterer? Not if she were so paralysed by self-doubt that she gave a halting, unconfident, impossible to listen to talk.

I didn't miss it at all. It's just not a good point. What about male presenters who get paralysed or nervous or have self-doubt in front of crowds?

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.

In your example, it seems obvious that the speaker's gender isn't the source of the hindrance - instead, shouldn't it be the audience of misogynists that are at fault as the hindrance?

The gender infers the audience whether it in fact exists or not.

Can you please show some statistics to back that up? I've been at a conference with a stuttering speaker, and I'm not sure that it's true that the preponderance of stutterers in conference speakers as compared to the general public is as disproportionate as that of women.

I'll ignore the first line, since I'm parsing that as trolling, but the second line bears some thought.

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.

I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not trolling. What's wrong with empowerment points?

I think you're trolling, nonetheless... I have a Stutterer friend, and he does present himself at conferences. And I think it may have others, because actually when Stutterers are very concious of their talk (like in a conference) they stutter a lot less, so it becomes more subtle...

That first part would be a hilarious application of ~affirmative action.~ Most people like AA until you apply it equally to other things, which is when the sense of how ridiculous it is becomes hard for even the most determinedly discriminatory person to ignore.

> 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.

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.

Well I don't exist to facilitate your preferred status quo.

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.

> Well I don't exist to facilitate your preferred status quo.

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?

> You are not a technical conference. You are a person.

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."

> 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?

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...

Let's try a different tack.

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?

I admit that I don't understand your analogy. There isn't a bug in the call for papers -- it's fair. There isn't a bug in the review of papers -- the selections model the actual distribution of the larger population.

So where is the problem, exactly?

Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.

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.

well said

That's not the case for open-source tech conferences. Open source has a preference for social change at its fundamental level - "anyone can edit". This at least leans towards promoting an egalitarian environment.

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.

> That's not the case for open-source tech conferences. Open source has a preference for social change at its fundamental level - "anyone can edit". This at least leans towards promoting an egalitarian environment.

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.

You are misunderstanding what "egalitarian" means.

Please explain what you mean.

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.

You're being overly pedantic on your definitions. Egalitarian means giving everyone an equal starting point free of cultural background. It doesn't mean that the cardiac health advice of a consultant cardiologist is weighed the same as a random person on the street with no medical training. It's not "all opinions are equal", but "opinions should start free of cultural bias". If you want your bug report accepted more easily, then experience with writing bug reports matters - what doesn't matter is if you're a woman, or a south asian or whatever.

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.

> Egalitarian means giving everyone an equal starting point free of cultural background.

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.

Also "meritocracy".

http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/01/quote-metritocracy-unquote....

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/columnists/eli...

Conferences are for mingling. Education is far off the low end of the agenda.

"they exist to impart knowledge to attendees"

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.

You're going to need to be more specific than that. What, exactly, do they need to do differently, and why?

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.

Pycon this year -> outreach and encouragement -> 20% of attendees were women: http://www.forbes.com/sites/women2/2013/04/09/record-number-...

If by "outreach and encouragement" you mean outright subsidizing the trip for a specific target gender.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com