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Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. This ignores cultural diversity that is not related to

Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. This ignores cultural diversity that is not related to skin colour, but place of birth and nationality, and other forms of identity. Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference, I can make the assumption that a line up of Spanish, South African, German, Icelandic and Russian speakers - who are all white - isn't diverse. I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.

knowtheory 14y ago
> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin. That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about. You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post). What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended. > Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.
- alinajaf 14y ago
  > diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is) Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1]. As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people. [1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.
  - CJefferson 14y ago
    The reason is that many of us believe, backed up by various studies (unfortunately I am on a bus now, but I can go and find them when I get home if you like, but look up job advertisements with changed names, and women applying for orchestras), that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good. I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Because things are so heavily biased at the moment, some help to begin moving things towards balanced can be greatly beneficial, to help people trying to move into the field. I was recently in the unusual position of being the only man at a computing conference, and was surprised to find it an exhausting experience, even though almost everybody there made me feel very welcome.
    - alinajaf 14y ago
      > but I can go and find them when I get home if you like Yes please! > that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good. If the problem is that you're associating with small groups of people, the solution should not be to make sure that this particular group of people gets artificially more diverse to satisfy a lacking in your experience. You should just get out of the house and meet more types of people. > I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Why? Do you believe that the Ruby community should have people who are good at programming and bad at programming? Racists and non-racists? Pacifists and militarists? Pro-choice and pro-life people? People who like gruyere cheese and those who don't? Why do we stick to race and gender in particular as an axis of diversity? Specifically, why aren't we arguing the corner of racist, cheese-eating pacifists? > to help people trying to move into the field As I've said in other comments, I find this attitude to be quite condescending. I do not need your help to move into any field. In Western civilisation at least, my own efforts will be good enough.
      - CJefferson 14y ago
        Blind orchestra auditions better for women, study finds http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/ http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/ Employer's replies to racial names http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html One thing I personally like about these surveys is that they appear to tell us people do these things subconsiously. You don't want my help or to be condescended to. I (and other white males) don't want to be called out as racist and sexist. There always will be people who "beat the odds". It sounds like you have. I am from a poor background, yet I went to Cambridge University. My wife is one of the top AI researchers in the UK, if not the world. My wife also brings in another perspective to me. Having helped run a couple of conferences, we didn't have to lower our standards to be more diverse. We just had to look more widely than we might have done if we were lazy, and just asked our close friends.
ceol 14y ago
> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin. Good thing the OP didn't do anything of the sort, or else you would be quite offended.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
lomegor 14y ago
> Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. That's another issue, but not the one we are talking about. There was a lack of diversity in some important areas. Maybe there was a lot of diversity in other areas, but that doesn't contradict the first assessment.
smacktoward 14y ago
Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. This argument reminds me of the classic scene from The Blues Brothers: "We got both kinds of music here: country AND western!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZfUnCK5qk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZfUnCK5qk
- jordan0day 14y ago
  That's a funny anecdote, but I fear since it seems so apt, it's might just overshadow what I think is a perfectly valid point being made by FuzzyDunlop. I mean, it's a tech conference. Diversity should equal a wide range of views on technology-related things, right? I find it absolutely believable that the magnitude in the difference of opinions between two (members of gender A & race X) is no different than two people of differing genders and nationalities.
danso 14y ago
I completely agree with you. I think the most well-intentioned of the detractors are using race/gender as a proxy: it's one of the faster ways to initially judge the makeup of a group, and it's becoming less and less accurate as globalization increases. For example, "Matz" could've been a "white guy" working out of Japan at the time of creating Ruby. Including this hypothetical white-Matz in a Ruby panel is totally justifiable, even if the rest of the panel is white. But in reality, Matz is ethnically Japanese, as are at least several of the core committers. So it's especially awkward in yesterday's Brit Ruby post on HN for the organizer to say that if they had brought in a minority, it would've been seen as tokenism. In Ruby's case, it would not at all seem strange to have a few ethnic-Japanese at the conference, given the language's origins.
rjzzleep 14y ago
i too find it funny. in the states i'm just a white guy(a good thing tbh), but where i grew, i'm everything but a white guy. I think Americans are taking this white/minority thing a bit too far. Granted other countries do it too little, but you can exaggerate. I know first hand that people get funding for inviting minorities to speak in the united states. If that ain't messed up I don't know what is.

knowtheory 14y ago

> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin. That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about. You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post). What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended. > Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.

alinajaf 14y ago
> diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is) Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1]. As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people. [1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  The reason is that many of us believe, backed up by various studies (unfortunately I am on a bus now, but I can go and find them when I get home if you like, but look up job advertisements with changed names, and women applying for orchestras), that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good. I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Because things are so heavily biased at the moment, some help to begin moving things towards balanced can be greatly beneficial, to help people trying to move into the field. I was recently in the unusual position of being the only man at a computing conference, and was surprised to find it an exhausting experience, even though almost everybody there made me feel very welcome.
  - alinajaf 14y ago
    > but I can go and find them when I get home if you like Yes please! > that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good. If the problem is that you're associating with small groups of people, the solution should not be to make sure that this particular group of people gets artificially more diverse to satisfy a lacking in your experience. You should just get out of the house and meet more types of people. > I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Why? Do you believe that the Ruby community should have people who are good at programming and bad at programming? Racists and non-racists? Pacifists and militarists? Pro-choice and pro-life people? People who like gruyere cheese and those who don't? Why do we stick to race and gender in particular as an axis of diversity? Specifically, why aren't we arguing the corner of racist, cheese-eating pacifists? > to help people trying to move into the field As I've said in other comments, I find this attitude to be quite condescending. I do not need your help to move into any field. In Western civilisation at least, my own efforts will be good enough.
    - CJefferson 14y ago
      Blind orchestra auditions better for women, study finds http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/ http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/ Employer's replies to racial names http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html One thing I personally like about these surveys is that they appear to tell us people do these things subconsiously. You don't want my help or to be condescended to. I (and other white males) don't want to be called out as racist and sexist. There always will be people who "beat the odds". It sounds like you have. I am from a poor background, yet I went to Cambridge University. My wife is one of the top AI researchers in the UK, if not the world. My wife also brings in another perspective to me. Having helped run a couple of conferences, we didn't have to lower our standards to be more diverse. We just had to look more widely than we might have done if we were lazy, and just asked our close friends.

ceol 14y ago

> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin. Good thing the OP didn't do anything of the sort, or else you would be quite offended.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

lomegor 14y ago

> Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. That's another issue, but not the one we are talking about. There was a lack of diversity in some important areas. Maybe there was a lot of diversity in other areas, but that doesn't contradict the first assessment.

smacktoward 14y ago

Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. This argument reminds me of the classic scene from The Blues Brothers: "We got both kinds of music here: country AND western!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZfUnCK5qk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZfUnCK5qk

jordan0day 14y ago
That's a funny anecdote, but I fear since it seems so apt, it's might just overshadow what I think is a perfectly valid point being made by FuzzyDunlop. I mean, it's a tech conference. Diversity should equal a wide range of views on technology-related things, right? I find it absolutely believable that the magnitude in the difference of opinions between two (members of gender A & race X) is no different than two people of differing genders and nationalities.

danso 14y ago

I completely agree with you. I think the most well-intentioned of the detractors are using race/gender as a proxy: it's one of the faster ways to initially judge the makeup of a group, and it's becoming less and less accurate as globalization increases. For example, "Matz" could've been a "white guy" working out of Japan at the time of creating Ruby. Including this hypothetical white-Matz in a Ruby panel is totally justifiable, even if the rest of the panel is white. But in reality, Matz is ethnically Japanese, as are at least several of the core committers. So it's especially awkward in yesterday's Brit Ruby post on HN for the organizer to say that if they had brought in a minority, it would've been seen as tokenism. In Ruby's case, it would not at all seem strange to have a few ethnic-Japanese at the conference, given the language's origins.

rjzzleep 14y ago

i too find it funny. in the states i'm just a white guy(a good thing tbh), but where i grew, i'm everything but a white guy. I think Americans are taking this white/minority thing a bit too far. Granted other countries do it too little, but you can exaggerate. I know first hand that people get funding for inviting minorities to speak in the united states. If that ain't messed up I don't know what is.