5 ms·

> 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 subconscious

> 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.
- alinajaf 14y ago
  I agree with everything you've said, but this still doesn't address why you think that diversity is good in and itself apart from blind faith. As I've alluded to in other comments, I have a feeling it's more to do with alleviating some sort of cultural guilt about racism. If it's not about that, then why aren't we complaining about the other ways in which the ruby community is not diverse? With numbers as they are, it's just as likely that the organizers could pick a random sample of people qualified to give talks and still come up with an all white male audience. If you were to pick an entirely white-male sample out of a bag, would you resample because the results weren't sufficiently diverse? If so, I'm trying to find out why.
  - CJefferson 14y ago
    If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers. The runners of the conference seem to have made no attempt to say that is what has happened, but it is hard to see what has gone wrong. Personally, it is not an issue of cultural guilt. Personally, I knew people as a young child who were poor, and I believe would have made excellent computer scientists if they had had better opportunity. My wife knows females who gave up on computer science because they could not fight through the male-dominated area (there is a whole other long discussion to have about the issues they faced, this is perhaps not the place). In general, given my experiences with women and the poorer members of society, I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society. I think computing is great, and people should not be held back from it for real or imagined reasons (or course, some people might not like computing. That's fine to). If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good. If computing was already (for example) 50% women, then I would feel much less need to push particular conferences or events.
    - alinajaf 14y ago

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.

alinajaf 14y ago
I agree with everything you've said, but this still doesn't address why you think that diversity is good in and itself apart from blind faith. As I've alluded to in other comments, I have a feeling it's more to do with alleviating some sort of cultural guilt about racism. If it's not about that, then why aren't we complaining about the other ways in which the ruby community is not diverse? With numbers as they are, it's just as likely that the organizers could pick a random sample of people qualified to give talks and still come up with an all white male audience. If you were to pick an entirely white-male sample out of a bag, would you resample because the results weren't sufficiently diverse? If so, I'm trying to find out why.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers. The runners of the conference seem to have made no attempt to say that is what has happened, but it is hard to see what has gone wrong. Personally, it is not an issue of cultural guilt. Personally, I knew people as a young child who were poor, and I believe would have made excellent computer scientists if they had had better opportunity. My wife knows females who gave up on computer science because they could not fight through the male-dominated area (there is a whole other long discussion to have about the issues they faced, this is perhaps not the place). In general, given my experiences with women and the poorer members of society, I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society. I think computing is great, and people should not be held back from it for real or imagined reasons (or course, some people might not like computing. That's fine to). If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good. If computing was already (for example) 50% women, then I would feel much less need to push particular conferences or events.
  - alinajaf 14y ago