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Comment by pifflesnort | Hacker News Reader

> The function being used to evaluate speakers is broken - that much is clear from the rate of women being selected.

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?

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The number being that low is suspicious. In my vague, personal experience, the upper tiers of computing are about 10% female. The odds of 1 in 23 are 0.315. Plausible, but worth investigating.

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.

The odds of 1 in 23 are 0.315. Plausible, but worth investigating.

That doesn't sound like something to reject the null hypothesis over.

Not reject, but kind of squint suspiciously at.

When "their qualifications" results in a selection rate of men approaching 100%, I think that's prima facie case that one of the most important qualifications is being a man.

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.

> When "their qualifications" results in a selection rate of men approaching 100%, I think that's prima facie case that one of the most important qualifications is being a man.

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.

>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?

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).

I can't comprehend why you're arguing that these complex "upstream" cultural issues should force me to evaluate conference papers on any other grounds other than their technical merit -- something that would be the to the detriment of speakers, attendees, our industry, and my own sense of ethics and fairness to others.

Because studies have shown that people who think they are evaluating conference papers (or pretty much anything else ever) on technical merit alone often are not doing anything of the sort, and are reinforcing their existing gender biases through their selection process. Two quick examples off the top of my head: - http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/ - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...

It's not some kind of man-hating reverse discrimination, it's an attempt to correct very real and very pervasive institutional inequalities.

> 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".

It only solves the problem if women submit papers at close to the same rate (or even a proportional rate) as men, which is not the case. That is, of course, ignoring the yardstick—who gets to decide what has merit?

The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.

> 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.

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