16 ms·

Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013?

25 points by luigi 14y ago

whalesalad 14y ago
You can't assume that this was intentional. The author writes that when he tried to inquire about why there weren't any women asked to speak, he wasn't given a very detailed response. This can mean anything! If these guys deliberately decided to exclude anyone who wasn't a white male: that sucks. But it's extremely possible that this is a coincidence. I know a handful of super-smart female designers and hackers. I'd ask them to join my team any day of the week. I see no difference in their ability due to their gender. That being said: all of them, now that I think of it, are on the extreme end of shy. Not "nerdy basement dweller anti social shy" but the kind of shy that would prevent them from speaking at a conference, let alone volunteer to do so. I really don't think there is enough ground to say this is one way or another. It's a toss up. Why are we jumping to such harsh conclusions? In my 5-6 year career I've yet to experience gender discrimination. I've worked in Hawaii, LA, DC and Sweden: all of which I've worked alongside respected and talented female coworkers. I really feel like this recent gender inequality stuff is an example of the 80/20 rule. A few edge cases are making us feel like everyone is out to get the girls. Relax! We aren't!
- jonathanyc 14y ago
  You used the term "guys"! That's blatant cissexism! You should reflect on your life and check your privilege. Your existence offends me. (parody, in case anyone is wondering...)
- felideon 14y ago
  > In my 5-6 year career I've yet to experience gender discrimination. Maybe you just haven't noticed it. It can be very subtle when not overly "that can't be true". In any case, you may need to re-read the post, which I fully agree with. The author's issue is not with the seemingly inexplicable lack of diversity. He is not jumping to any conclusions, his issue is with the overly-defensive response. What's wrong with a simple — and I'm just typing what first comes to mind — "You know what, that was completely not intentional," and work from there.
- rorrr 14y ago
  Agreed, we actually would love to hire more females at my last job, but there are just not enough qualified women in tech. Most candidates are white young guys. I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average.
  - spacemanaki 14y ago
    > I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average. Easier majors like mathematics, physics, biology, the other "real sciences", medicine, etc? Those fields apparently don't have quite the same gender imbalance that computer science does. I don't think it's that useful it is to be looking for someone to place blame on, but I doubt the reason there are fewer women than men in tech is because they are choosing easier majors than computer science.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      "Easier" is probably a bit of a troll. But it certainly seems the case that women are attracted to certain majors. Sciences is a funny one, when I was at university I met plenty of female students studying Biology, Psychology and Medicine but very few in Chemistry , Physics or CS. I wonder if there is some intrinsic reason that women are attracted to certain types of science more than others?
      - kscaldef 14y ago
        But then there's also relatively more women in Mathematics and Astronomy. There's definitely not a simple relationship between how "hard" the science is and how many women are in the field.
        jiggy2011 14y ago
        True, I wouldn't necessarily think there is a difference in difficulty. But sciences that have a hard time attracted women seem to be those that might be considered "lower level". I'm wondering if there is some reason for this which might be either cultural or just a product of biological differences?
- arrrg 14y ago
  So maybe it wasn’t intentional. Still not great. I don’t think intention is what matters here. Results are.
anonzmouse 14y ago
Would you rather them have less qualified speakers for the sake of equality? give it a rest.
- raganwald 14y ago
  I find the assumption behind this statement offensive, deeply offensive. Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers," people are saying "Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old." If you could find someone beige AND fifty with 40,000 points on hacker news, a popular blog, and experience keynoting conferences, that would be great, wouldn't it?
  - jonathanyc 14y ago
    How is the assumption behind your statement any less offensive? You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased. Give it a rest.
    - raganwald 14y ago
      "You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased" Whoa, nellie! That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak. I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world. Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride. Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends. I have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.
  - ryguytilidie 14y ago
jacalata 14y ago
Funny, looks like britruby will be held in spirit after all.
jayzalowitz 14y ago
Alright, Got to weigh in here. I used to work at the ft, and spent a good deal of time dealing with the labs division. Andrew probably went out of his way to ask for diversity, seriously, he is awesome like that. I think the issue may be time constraints and the fact that within 3 companies, no females/minorities/etc offered to speak and had the relevant high level of expertise.
- felideon 14y ago
  Not to turn this into an entire drama[1] or to single Andrew out, but if he is so awesome, why the arrogant "I don't feel need to defend this" response? [1] Not that sexism/racism/*-ism should be taken lightly.
  - ahh 14y ago
    Because he has more important things to do than argue with peasants? http://sebastianmarshall.com/arguing-with-peasants-shows-a-lack-of-self-discipline http://sebastianmarshall.com/arguing-with-peasants-shows-a-l...
- mattpointblank 14y ago
  Hi, article author here. I did state in the blogpost that I know Andrew is a good chap and I respect him and his intentions, and I don't for a minute think he set out to make this event 100% male. My issue is in his response to my challenge on it, and the lack of acknowledgement by the organisers that an 100% male lineup isn't ideal. I also find it quite hard to believe that amongst companies like Google and Facebook, there aren't enough highly-qualified female/minority devs who could've spoken. And besides, the speaker roster isn't exclusive to those three companies, either. thanks!
  - jayzalowitz 14y ago
    I dont disagree about paragraph 3, what I am saying is the very specific, very fast mobile serving technology experts may have very few women, or at least few who wish to travel to london.
betterunix 14y ago
My experience in university CS and EE programs is this: schools are under enormous pressure to bring more women into tech, yet none of the "typical" techniques for doing so seem to work. At my alma mater, the EE department could not attract any qualified female applicants in my year; they published flyers showing women in class, they sent female students to speak at high schools as representatives of the school, etc., but nothing seemed to work. Where I am now, we are told to use female pronouns in our lectures and research papers and to be as gender inclusive as possible, and professors struggle to find ways to make CS seem more interesting to people who did not spend their teenage years hacking; still, women remain a small minority in the CS and computer engineering programs. There is something happening here that is beyond what schools can do; somehow, high school girls are being convinced that technical fields are not something they can or should pursue.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  It seems to me plausible but not obvious or certain that the explanation could be found in high schools.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  This was my experience too, when I did my CS degree the brochures etc made sure to prominently show female students and the testimonials were balanced to provide around the same amount of female quotes as male. The end result was still the same though, out of maybe ~90 students there were about 6 females at the start. By the end of the course I think only 2 remained, the numbers were slightly better for the "business computing" courses rather than the hardcore CS but not by much. There was roughly the same experience at the job fairs towards then end. The companies recruiting were desperate to talk to the female students about technical roles. Even so from what I'm aware most of the female students ended up taking non tech roles.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Where I graduated, the brochures had a well balanced (and not a representation of our society) mix of genders and races, all beautiful, healthy people. Time has shown that real students were neither well distributed across gender and race, but also not pretty (and presented a much more diverse set of body shapes than the brochure would lead you to believe). As tests approached, they didn't look healthy either.
icegreentea 14y ago
I would think that part of the organizer's response is due to the use of 'inexcusable' in what looks like the initial contact. If a stranger contacted me and used that word in reference to my actions, I would certainly immediately be on the defensive. This could have definitely led to the future lack of communication.
invalidOrTaken 14y ago
"The population is not uniform, yet our sample is? SOMETHING IS WRONG." http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness-look-like/ http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness... Finding a cluster doesn't necessitate a bias.
- naftaliharris 14y ago
  Well, possibly. Let's compute some simple p-values: Suppose that some fraction p of potential speakers are female. Then the probability that all 22 of the speakers are male would be (1-p)^22. For p = 0.1, we have a p-value of 0.098, which could reasonably arise by chance. But for p = 0.20, we have a p-value of 0.0074, which is not so likely to arise by chance. So if you assume that at least 20-25% of potential, qualified speakers were female--a reasonable assumption, I think--then this "cluster" does indeed suggest a bias.
aaronsnoswell 14y ago
Only if we keep talking about it...
catshirt 14y ago
this topic is so complex that i am left convinced that anyone who has a strong enough opinion as to write a blog post on the topic, doesn't respect it's complexity. what is particularly offensive about this post is that the author infers the question "why are there no women speaking at this conference?", yet they completely ignore the possibility that no qualified women applied to speak at the conference. statistically speaking, would this really blow anyone's minds? by doing this you are defaming the organizers by calling their character into question. the responsibility is left up to the organizers because they did not go out of their way to find women to seed the speaker list. but putting this responsibility solely on the organizers without even exploring other possibilities is irresponsible. i think i can make my point best with some rhetorical questions directed at the author: why didn't you recommend any of your female peers for consideration as a speaker? what good do you hope to bring to the argument by outright ignoring possible causes of the effect that concerns you?
- mattpointblank 14y ago
  Hello, blogpost author here. I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write about it don't "respect" it?). My goal with writing this (as stated in the article) isn't to launch some Twitter hate mob or cancel a conference, but to start a dialogue (which I couldn't continue with the organisers). I don't claim to understand every facet of the issue but I'm most definitely an interested "amateur" if that makes snese. I don't think it's fair to say I "ignore the possibility" that women could've been invited / applied. My whole point is that we have no idea about this process because the organisers are being opaque about their methods, and in my opinion, if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why that ended up being the case, otherwise we're left to assume that you think there's nothing wrong with that. If they genuinely tried every approach they could to make things more diverse and weren't able to, good -- I'm happy to be proven wrong. But we have no idea whether they did and we can only assume from the communication that it isn't an issue for them -- that's bad. No need for rhetorical questions: In the "Postscript" below the entry itself I recommended a good amount of local-or-close-to-London female devs who could've spoken. For all I know, they were approached. But I don't know (see above). I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it, and starting this discussion. It needs to be on everyone's minds. thanks!
natrius 14y ago
"... I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women." This suggestion is a bad one. It is blatant tokenism. Try this instead: http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-my-tech-conference/ http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake... Key takeaway: "The easiest way I saw for getting more women on stage at the actual event was to get as many women to submit speaking proposals as possible. Selecting presentations was done without speaker information associated with the titles and pitches, so I wasn’t able to “reserve” spaces in the program for anyone based on aspects of their identity — and I wasn’t interested in that sort of reservation system for this event, anyway." Telling people that an unintentionally all-male conference is "inexcusable" is an unproductive (and incorrect, in my opinion) way to address the problem. The industry has a diversity problem, but it's not wrong for someone to not take action to address it. It'd be nice if they did, though. When I try to get people to do things that would be nice, I never use that sort of tone. People who improve diversity issues in the tech industry are doing us a favor. Treat them that way.
- arrrg 14y ago
  Maybe ‘inexcusable’ was a bad word choice. Maybe it is 'excusable’ – but the organizer doesn’t even try to excuse. As you can see from your link, getting women speakers was very hard work. It wasn’t easy. Did the organizer go that extra mile? If yes, then the result is excusable (though unlikely I would say). If no, then the result really is inexcusable. That’s all.
  - natrius 14y ago
    "If no, then the result really is inexcusable." I explained why I disagree with that. Being in the tech industry doesn't obligate one to fix its problems. It'd be nice if people tried to. "Inexcusable" doesn't apply. You even called it "the extra mile," which typically implies optional.
    - 14y ago
chestnut-tree 14y ago
Here's a take on getting more female conference speakers from a female blogger (who is a copywriter): http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-your-consideration/ http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-your... I'd say many of the points in the above link are equally useful to all speakers and attendees (regardless of gender or colour). So perhaps some simple forethought in planning and prepaparation can go a long way in encouraging a wider range of attendees and speakers.

25 points by luigi 14y ago

You can't assume that this was intentional. The author writes that when he tried to inquire about why there weren't any women asked to speak, he wasn't given a very detailed response. This can mean anything! If these guys deliberately decided to exclude anyone who wasn't a white male: that sucks. But it's extremely possible that this is a coincidence. I know a handful of super-smart female designers and hackers. I'd ask them to join my team any day of the week. I see no difference in their ability due to their gender. That being said: all of them, now that I think of it, are on the extreme end of shy. Not "nerdy basement dweller anti social shy" but the kind of shy that would prevent them from speaking at a conference, let alone volunteer to do so. I really don't think there is enough ground to say this is one way or another. It's a toss up. Why are we jumping to such harsh conclusions? In my 5-6 year career I've yet to experience gender discrimination. I've worked in Hawaii, LA, DC and Sweden: all of which I've worked alongside respected and talented female coworkers. I really feel like this recent gender inequality stuff is an example of the 80/20 rule. A few edge cases are making us feel like everyone is out to get the girls. Relax! We aren't!

jonathanyc 14y ago
You used the term "guys"! That's blatant cissexism! You should reflect on your life and check your privilege. Your existence offends me. (parody, in case anyone is wondering...)
felideon 14y ago
> In my 5-6 year career I've yet to experience gender discrimination. Maybe you just haven't noticed it. It can be very subtle when not overly "that can't be true". In any case, you may need to re-read the post, which I fully agree with. The author's issue is not with the seemingly inexplicable lack of diversity. He is not jumping to any conclusions, his issue is with the overly-defensive response. What's wrong with a simple — and I'm just typing what first comes to mind — "You know what, that was completely not intentional," and work from there.
rorrr 14y ago
Agreed, we actually would love to hire more females at my last job, but there are just not enough qualified women in tech. Most candidates are white young guys. I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average.
- spacemanaki 14y ago
  > I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average. Easier majors like mathematics, physics, biology, the other "real sciences", medicine, etc? Those fields apparently don't have quite the same gender imbalance that computer science does. I don't think it's that useful it is to be looking for someone to place blame on, but I doubt the reason there are fewer women than men in tech is because they are choosing easier majors than computer science.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    "Easier" is probably a bit of a troll. But it certainly seems the case that women are attracted to certain majors. Sciences is a funny one, when I was at university I met plenty of female students studying Biology, Psychology and Medicine but very few in Chemistry , Physics or CS. I wonder if there is some intrinsic reason that women are attracted to certain types of science more than others?
    - kscaldef 14y ago
      But then there's also relatively more women in Mathematics and Astronomy. There's definitely not a simple relationship between how "hard" the science is and how many women are in the field.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        True, I wouldn't necessarily think there is a difference in difficulty. But sciences that have a hard time attracted women seem to be those that might be considered "lower level". I'm wondering if there is some reason for this which might be either cultural or just a product of biological differences?
arrrg 14y ago
So maybe it wasn’t intentional. Still not great. I don’t think intention is what matters here. Results are.

anonzmouse 14y ago

Would you rather them have less qualified speakers for the sake of equality? give it a rest.

raganwald 14y ago
I find the assumption behind this statement offensive, deeply offensive. Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers," people are saying "Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old." If you could find someone beige AND fifty with 40,000 points on hacker news, a popular blog, and experience keynoting conferences, that would be great, wouldn't it?
- jonathanyc 14y ago
  How is the assumption behind your statement any less offensive? You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased. Give it a rest.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    "You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased" Whoa, nellie! That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak. I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world. Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride. Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends. I have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago

jacalata 14y ago

Funny, looks like britruby will be held in spirit after all.

jayzalowitz 14y ago

Alright, Got to weigh in here. I used to work at the ft, and spent a good deal of time dealing with the labs division. Andrew probably went out of his way to ask for diversity, seriously, he is awesome like that. I think the issue may be time constraints and the fact that within 3 companies, no females/minorities/etc offered to speak and had the relevant high level of expertise.

felideon 14y ago
Not to turn this into an entire drama[1] or to single Andrew out, but if he is so awesome, why the arrogant "I don't feel need to defend this" response? [1] Not that sexism/racism/*-ism should be taken lightly.
- ahh 14y ago
  Because he has more important things to do than argue with peasants? http://sebastianmarshall.com/arguing-with-peasants-shows-a-lack-of-self-discipline http://sebastianmarshall.com/arguing-with-peasants-shows-a-l...
mattpointblank 14y ago
Hi, article author here. I did state in the blogpost that I know Andrew is a good chap and I respect him and his intentions, and I don't for a minute think he set out to make this event 100% male. My issue is in his response to my challenge on it, and the lack of acknowledgement by the organisers that an 100% male lineup isn't ideal. I also find it quite hard to believe that amongst companies like Google and Facebook, there aren't enough highly-qualified female/minority devs who could've spoken. And besides, the speaker roster isn't exclusive to those three companies, either. thanks!
- jayzalowitz 14y ago
  I dont disagree about paragraph 3, what I am saying is the very specific, very fast mobile serving technology experts may have very few women, or at least few who wish to travel to london.

betterunix 14y ago

My experience in university CS and EE programs is this: schools are under enormous pressure to bring more women into tech, yet none of the "typical" techniques for doing so seem to work. At my alma mater, the EE department could not attract any qualified female applicants in my year; they published flyers showing women in class, they sent female students to speak at high schools as representatives of the school, etc., but nothing seemed to work. Where I am now, we are told to use female pronouns in our lectures and research papers and to be as gender inclusive as possible, and professors struggle to find ways to make CS seem more interesting to people who did not spend their teenage years hacking; still, women remain a small minority in the CS and computer engineering programs. There is something happening here that is beyond what schools can do; somehow, high school girls are being convinced that technical fields are not something they can or should pursue.

sopooneo 14y ago
It seems to me plausible but not obvious or certain that the explanation could be found in high schools.
jiggy2011 14y ago
This was my experience too, when I did my CS degree the brochures etc made sure to prominently show female students and the testimonials were balanced to provide around the same amount of female quotes as male. The end result was still the same though, out of maybe ~90 students there were about 6 females at the start. By the end of the course I think only 2 remained, the numbers were slightly better for the "business computing" courses rather than the hardcore CS but not by much. There was roughly the same experience at the job fairs towards then end. The companies recruiting were desperate to talk to the female students about technical roles. Even so from what I'm aware most of the female students ended up taking non tech roles.
rbanffy 14y ago
Where I graduated, the brochures had a well balanced (and not a representation of our society) mix of genders and races, all beautiful, healthy people. Time has shown that real students were neither well distributed across gender and race, but also not pretty (and presented a much more diverse set of body shapes than the brochure would lead you to believe). As tests approached, they didn't look healthy either.

icegreentea 14y ago

I would think that part of the organizer's response is due to the use of 'inexcusable' in what looks like the initial contact. If a stranger contacted me and used that word in reference to my actions, I would certainly immediately be on the defensive. This could have definitely led to the future lack of communication.

invalidOrTaken 14y ago

"The population is not uniform, yet our sample is? SOMETHING IS WRONG." http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness-look-like/ http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness... Finding a cluster doesn't necessitate a bias.

naftaliharris 14y ago
Well, possibly. Let's compute some simple p-values: Suppose that some fraction p of potential speakers are female. Then the probability that all 22 of the speakers are male would be (1-p)^22. For p = 0.1, we have a p-value of 0.098, which could reasonably arise by chance. But for p = 0.20, we have a p-value of 0.0074, which is not so likely to arise by chance. So if you assume that at least 20-25% of potential, qualified speakers were female--a reasonable assumption, I think--then this "cluster" does indeed suggest a bias.

aaronsnoswell 14y ago

Only if we keep talking about it...

catshirt 14y ago

this topic is so complex that i am left convinced that anyone who has a strong enough opinion as to write a blog post on the topic, doesn't respect it's complexity. what is particularly offensive about this post is that the author infers the question "why are there no women speaking at this conference?", yet they completely ignore the possibility that no qualified women applied to speak at the conference. statistically speaking, would this really blow anyone's minds? by doing this you are defaming the organizers by calling their character into question. the responsibility is left up to the organizers because they did not go out of their way to find women to seed the speaker list. but putting this responsibility solely on the organizers without even exploring other possibilities is irresponsible. i think i can make my point best with some rhetorical questions directed at the author: why didn't you recommend any of your female peers for consideration as a speaker? what good do you hope to bring to the argument by outright ignoring possible causes of the effect that concerns you?

mattpointblank 14y ago
Hello, blogpost author here. I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write about it don't "respect" it?). My goal with writing this (as stated in the article) isn't to launch some Twitter hate mob or cancel a conference, but to start a dialogue (which I couldn't continue with the organisers). I don't claim to understand every facet of the issue but I'm most definitely an interested "amateur" if that makes snese. I don't think it's fair to say I "ignore the possibility" that women could've been invited / applied. My whole point is that we have no idea about this process because the organisers are being opaque about their methods, and in my opinion, if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why that ended up being the case, otherwise we're left to assume that you think there's nothing wrong with that. If they genuinely tried every approach they could to make things more diverse and weren't able to, good -- I'm happy to be proven wrong. But we have no idea whether they did and we can only assume from the communication that it isn't an issue for them -- that's bad. No need for rhetorical questions: In the "Postscript" below the entry itself I recommended a good amount of local-or-close-to-London female devs who could've spoken. For all I know, they were approached. But I don't know (see above). I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it, and starting this discussion. It needs to be on everyone's minds. thanks!

natrius 14y ago

"... I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women." This suggestion is a bad one. It is blatant tokenism. Try this instead: http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-my-tech-conference/ http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake... Key takeaway: "The easiest way I saw for getting more women on stage at the actual event was to get as many women to submit speaking proposals as possible. Selecting presentations was done without speaker information associated with the titles and pitches, so I wasn’t able to “reserve” spaces in the program for anyone based on aspects of their identity — and I wasn’t interested in that sort of reservation system for this event, anyway." Telling people that an unintentionally all-male conference is "inexcusable" is an unproductive (and incorrect, in my opinion) way to address the problem. The industry has a diversity problem, but it's not wrong for someone to not take action to address it. It'd be nice if they did, though. When I try to get people to do things that would be nice, I never use that sort of tone. People who improve diversity issues in the tech industry are doing us a favor. Treat them that way.

arrrg 14y ago
Maybe ‘inexcusable’ was a bad word choice. Maybe it is 'excusable’ – but the organizer doesn’t even try to excuse. As you can see from your link, getting women speakers was very hard work. It wasn’t easy. Did the organizer go that extra mile? If yes, then the result is excusable (though unlikely I would say). If no, then the result really is inexcusable. That’s all.
- natrius 14y ago
  "If no, then the result really is inexcusable." I explained why I disagree with that. Being in the tech industry doesn't obligate one to fix its problems. It'd be nice if people tried to. "Inexcusable" doesn't apply. You even called it "the extra mile," which typically implies optional.
  - 14y ago

chestnut-tree 14y ago

Here's a take on getting more female conference speakers from a female blogger (who is a copywriter): http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-your-consideration/ http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-your... I'd say many of the points in the above link are equally useful to all speakers and attendees (regardless of gender or colour). So perhaps some simple forethought in planning and prepaparation can go a long way in encouraging a wider range of attendees and speakers.