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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, where did I say that?

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.

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You dance around it, but that's what you're saying. What else would explain the < 5% female speaker rate at conferences? Obviously the good women are making it, and the rest... just aren't very good.

"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.

Does anybody know the proportion of women in tech? If there is a lower proportion of women speaking at conferences than in the industries that the conferences are about, you may have a point.

Or maybe there are just more men than women in tech to start off with (in which case it's hardly surprising there are also more men at conferences).

The problem needs to be fixed at the middle school level (or earlier) where girls are discouraged from technical subjects.

The worst I've seen is Mechanical Engineering course in my engineering.

In all my four years of Engineering course. There wasn't one single girl in all four batches of Mechanical Engineering branch.

Women do not constitute 50% of the people in tech it makes sense for them to be a minority when presenting.

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?

I will call for a reservation policy if you show me instances where a good well deserved talk from a women was rejected at a conference just because she is a woman.

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.

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