Girl Tickets to ng-conf
reverse-disoma.tumblr.com
I was a bit surprised to see this in my inbox today. Am I the only one to find this a bit offensive?
reverse-disoma.tumblr.com
2. Not all girls -- especially adult professional girls -- subscribe to traditional princess gender roles. Offer a variety of pretty pastel and rainbow colors beyond staid and confining old pink. Maybe men could also have some nice alpha earth tones for their lanyards for contrast so that nobody with a gender dimorphic identity could ever feel welcome.
3. Conference fees in the $1000 range are usually paid by employers. Try rewarding the actual girls who might come instead of just lowering the price for the boss who won't share with them anyway. For example, girls could be rewarded with many $5 bills generously slipped into their pants by passersby.
4. If this system prospers, it is certain not to inspire any kind of backlash from non-girls who feel the price differential is unfair to them.
Also, the bar/nightlife industry has had great success with discounted "girl tickets" increasing female and male attendance.
Seriously.
If you're attempting to reach a group of people of which you're not a member, you really need to be doing it in consultation with someone who is. Otherwise you're just going to make obvious outsider mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot. That goes just as much for women as it does for hardcore gamers or scotch enthusiasts.
I think you do have a good point, though: it feels like there's a lot of negativity around tech feminism sometimes without much positive to aspire to. As the article says, the organisers were well-intentioned but doing it wrong - which is, at least, a good start. It's a shame we don't see many articles praising the conferences that do a good job encouraging women to participate, or sharing best practices and advice. I feel like that would do more to prevent mistakes like this and ultimately improve the community.
I see lots of positive messages because I follow tech feminists on Twitter and subscribe to tech feminist email lists - they post happy updates about the latest conferences that have adopted anti-harassment policies, links to conferences that make genuine efforts at inviting diversity (so many tweets about PyCon!), and so on. There's not much actual basis for a "tone argument" (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument) - HN is just a weird place.
After your comment I went looking for information on PyCon and it really does seem like they're doing a lot right. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd definitely vote up a post that went into a bit of detail about it.
I'm not sure I understand your link. Are you accusing me of being a "concern troll" or engaging in "derailment" to "ruin conversations and silence people"? I thought I was being pretty civil, but I'm happy to modify my behaviour if you can point out something specific.
I didn't get the sense that you were asking for positive examples in a silencing/derailing way, but it's a pattern that happens with this stuff in general.
Agreed, they did this in a clumsy way, but hey, they are trying something.
It could make sense for boy tickets (perhaps with a better name) to exist in conferences in women-dominated fields, but it would be up to each conference to decide if gender parity is something they want and if they want to encourage it in this way.
I'd judge this as a success or not based on how many of these tickets are used, which will be found out after the conference. Hopefully they do a post on the statistics at the end so we can make proper conclusions.
By the way, conjuring up imaginary "other women" to argue against the author just doesn't come across well to me. You want to argue the point just do it.
"As a random person with no stake at all in this yet a strong opinion on it, I can tell you that if your opinion is the opposite of mine then it doesn't matter even if this issue directly affects you".
That's the kind of lazy, passive-agressive, statement that has no place in proper discussion.
In other words: trying to make your event more welcoming to women, in an effort to compensate somewhat for the industry's systemic sexism - sure, that's a good idea, and there are experts and nonprofit organizations who can advise you on how best to do that. There are also lots of blog posts about good strategies. Handling this clumsily, with pink stuff and calling women "girls" - not so good execution.
No reason to try to get your ratio up artificially.
If they do this they may attract more girls (ladies, women?) to Angular which will improve the Angular ecosystem overall. Perhaps there are a number of women who have been tempted to go but aren't that committed to Angular and this might tip them over the edge.
I don't think we can acknowledge that there is a problem attracting women to our industry and not provide these sorts of concessions and special treatment, at least in the short to medium term. In the long term the industry culture and perceptions should be such that this isn't needed but that isn't where we are yet.
No need to talk about the max three people with epicene names and faces who maybe could have abused this, they don't matter.
Using a generic ticket for every woman is more simple than assigning a name to each ticket... so no.
I totally get the whole "don't treat me any differently because I have a vagina" thing, but the conference organizers really do seem to have good intentions.
Yes, making the lanyard pink prompts a momentary mental picture of someone putting a pink lanyard over my head while babbling incoherent baby talk, but then I realize that maybe the person who decided on pink really just has that culturally ingrained boys = blue, girls = pink thing. Or maybe the person who picked the color is a woman who likes the color pink. Or maybe, there are so many other details to plan for the conference that picking the color of the discounted lanyard didn't get a whole lot of consideration.
Yes, someone should have told them we don't call women above a certain age "girls". They do say woman and women a couple times in the email, and I can see how maybe Woman Tickets or Lady Tickets or Gal Tickets just sound awkward compared to Girl Tickets. I don't get the sense they mean girl in a derogatory fashion at all.
Or, I could be totally wrong, and they could all be misogynist jerks.
And, to answer your question, the top three discounts/free money for women I can think of are: Bars and clubs Auto insurance Scholarships
Instead of calling them "girl tickets" they should perhaps be called "women in tech" tickets or the conference should partner with one or more women in tech groups and name the tickets after them (i.e. PyCon could offer PyLadies tickets.) Conferences could even use membership in the women in tech groups as a way of certifying that people deserve the discounts similar to how a student ticket might require proving that one attends a university.
(These are just some ideas; one problem may be that some women in tech groups may also allow males to join, although it could be enough of a hurdle to prevent abuse.)
My take in United States culture is that young women are too afraid of looking nerdy if they go after math and engineering. Those who are brave enough to not care about stereotypes get pissed off by this kind of artificial "culture fixes".
To provide, at least, an objective answer, airlines will discount tickets if they have a given level of certainty that the passenger is female -- except, interestingly, on Thanksgiving and Mother's Day, when female demand is higher than male demand.
I've just come back from co-running my conference last week. We were way up on female attendance and speakers compared to last year, which I'm really glad with. Women don't need discounted tickets to decide whether or not to come to a con. They definitely don't need their own colour lanyards and if they had one it doesn't need to be pink.
Most importantly, what women need are reasons to come, not discounts. We're limited in what we can do at 44CON[1] to change the sausagefest nature of the industry by the number of women, but we're happy to help where we can. We should focus on improving the conference experience for women (and everyone) so they'll tell their colleagues and friends in industry to come along. Women buy tickets too, is it so hard to listen to customers instead of singling them out?
I've also seen these forms of practical support from conferences that want to encourage participation from women:
* Enacting a harassment policy and/or code of conduct to provide a signal that the organizers care about maintaining a healthy conference environment, which can help women feel more comfortable attending (see http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/).
* Helping make arrangements for childcare, such as setting up inexpensive group childcare for children of attendees, since women tend to have more responsibility for children than men do.
* Offering advising for qualified people interested in submitting talks who don't have much speaking experience, or having lightning talk opportunities for less-experienced speakers, to help fix the self-reinforcing cycle of few women speakers at conferences.
And pleasantly enough, those policies also benefit attendees of all genders and support other kinds of diversity as well.
While it is true that many studies have shown that there is a disproportionate difference amongst the average between men and women, people working in information security are generally paid above average to start with. Furthermore, quite a lot of people who come to 44CON come through their employer.
To be honest I'd rather we gave a bigger discount to those who are paid less, but I don't know how to do that.
if you don't like the idea of giving a specific sex a discounted ticket for simply having been born with different genitalia , right on. I totally agree.
"... the major expansion in the use of gender followed its adoption by feminists to distinguish the social and cultural aspects of differences between men and women (gender) from biological differences (sex). Since then, the use of gender has tended to expand to encompass the biological, and a sex/gender distinction is now only fitfully observed" [emphasis mine.]
"... gender has come to be adopted as a simple synonym, perhaps a euphemism, for sex by many writers who are unfamiliar with the term’s recent history."
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And the paper makes the point that new writers to the field often use gender in place of sex because they don't understand the full complexity of the word.
Or you know....delete your comment:
"I would love for you to explain what it is that I failed to understand about the paper, since I do enjoy learning new things. I'm not holding my breath though."
You ascribe the conflation to writers who "..don't understand the full complexity of the word." I also attribute it to pretentiousness (gender sounds more "academic") and a good dose of prudishness (sex sounds dirty.)
Our only goal with this is simple: promote the cause of women in tech. We all work with extremely talented women and recognize their value in our industry. For example where I work (Domo) one of our VP's just won the "Women in Tech" award, which is awesome. We just want the women in the Angular community to know that they're appreciated, needed, and welcome at ng-conf.
To that end, we wanted to make sure that those interested would have a ticket available. Today we sold all our early bird tickets in less than 2 minutes. Next week we are opening up the next round of discounted tickets for the general public. We anticipate these and all other tickets will also sell out quickly. So to succeed in our goal - despite the inevitable statistics - we decided to reserve a number of these tickets for women. This way, women that wanted to attend wouldn't have to worry about the luck of the Eventbrite draw. So the primary benefit is the guarantee (not the discount) of the ticket. We felt that was the least we could do to show our thanks and appreciation.
The pink lanyard does seem a bit silly out of context, we should have explained that idea better. As we've seen with other conferences with limited availability (JSConf, Google I/O, etc.) competition for a ticket can become intense. We didn't want men to buy up all the women's tickets using their significant other's name, or the whole thing would be pointless. We figured if the lanyard was clearly for women, that would deter most abuse of the initiative.
We really do appreciate the feedback on our execution. Let me recap what we're received so far:
- Most generally agree with the idea that getting more women out to ng-conf is a worthwhile initiative. - Pink lanyards was a terrible idea. - Some prefer to be referred to as women, not girls. That's understandable. We took our cues from some of the organizations championing this same cause: "Girl Develop It", "Girl's Who Code", "Black Girls Code", "Girls Write Now", etc. In our minds it was "guys and girls", not "boys and girls". Both are valid semantics of the word, but we hear you.
This has been a great learning experience, and it's clear that we need to brainstorm this a bit more. If you have other ideas that accomplish the same goals in a less polarizing fashion we're all ears. Thanks for the positive feedback, we appreciate it. We really want to do this right - it's too important not to. Thanks!
Dave Geddes @geddski
I get that lots of groups use the term girl, though I think some of them actually deal with teaching girls (actual school aged ones) to code. In general I dislike being called "girl" in a professional setting. (But maybe I am in the minority for this opinion)
Although, the idea in general doesn't sit too well with me since it's a little bit unfair for guys since they have less of a chance of getting in (and have to pay more).
But, I guess the priority ticketing system is an okay fix for possibly getting more women who are interested in angular to go to this conference. (If that is an important goal, which I guess it apparently is)
The way to attract more women, stike, people to your conference is not through tokenizing them...it's by making the conference interesting (having some diversity in the organization group would be a start!)
"If you don't look like our idea of a girl, we'll throw you out of our conference for identifying as one."
(No, being a jock and a nerd is not mutually exclusive. I feel like I have to point that out because of how so many seem to get easily offended in this thread. And it's mostly a joke.)