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Women, Tech Conferences and the Bullshit Surrounding It

290 points by krisroadruck 14y ago

katherineparker 14y ago
Making sure a certain % of speakers are women is ridiculous. I'm a woman and a programmer and I'd be offended they just threw a few women on to even it out vs. to make sure the best of the best speakers are there. If some happen to be women - great! If not, who cares. Women are not being excluded, so what's the problem? Why include women who may be mediocre just for the score? Too much sensitivity these days...
- krisroadruck 14y ago
  Agreed. This women 2.0 thing has been super annoying. Meanwhile every women I know who kicks ass at their craft doesn't have any problems with "marginalization". People who are competitive and competent tend to just fine in competitive careers. I never knew anyone who deserved to be at the top who got their by asking someone to make some rules so they could get there instead of you know... just being awesome.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    You may be interested in research into how some groups are more productive when they work collaboratively rather than competitively, and how women are disproportionately better in collaborative environments. I don't want a team full of the best indiviual performers. I want the best performing team.
- colmvp 14y ago
  Indeed. I'm Asian. There's a lot of Asian men in tech. I don't see many Asian men on speaking panels. And I don't really care.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    In that case, I will take it upon myself to be offended on your behalf. No need to thank me. ;)
  - mtext 14y ago
    Actually...You should care...Americans are fucking racist, but they think being racists with asians it's not trully racism. ( just look at movies like gran torino )
  - pwang 14y ago
    This is a point I wish more people would make. There are a huge number of Asians in tech, and we are grossly underrepresented at tech conferences. But no one even thinks to look at diversity numbers there. I've seen discussion about racial diversity for black and even Hispanic people, but nobody thinks twice about Asians (which are even fewer in number in the general population). Such is life.
- deleted 14y ago
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- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  This is the same quota issue we deal with in all sorts of fields for all sorts of minorities. In my opinion the only effective course of action is to continually improve equality of opportunity, not by promoting some people at the expense of others because of minority status, but by concentrating and encouraging/requiring others to concentrate on qualifications to the exclusion of ethnic, sexual, etc. factors. Yes, definitely, too much (over)sensitivity. There will always be people who discriminate, and there will always be someone out there -- no matter who you are -- that will actively discriminate against you given the opportunity. Those people will never change. For the rest of us, what the world needs is to lighten up and give things some time: In the grander scheme of things, all this equality talk started up relatively recently. People don't change overnight, and the institutions we build change far more slowly. Patience, people. Patience, tempered expectations, and realism. Not all of this will ever be "fixed," and that which is will pretty much asymptotically approach our best case expectations, so learning to be happy with what we get and work to improve things without pissing everyone off all the time seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
  - soup10 14y ago
    The only people that complain that there aren't enough women in tech are men. Women complain about female unfriendly work environments and conferences. But tech people don't understand the difference between "female unfriendly" and "needs more women". All there needs to be is a smart woman whose input is taken seriously when organizing conferences and establishing workplace culture.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      This is not true, in practice. Women report having better experiences when there are many women around, vs being the only one in the group.
      - soup10 14y ago
        It's the same thing in practice. It's harder to have a female friendly workplace when its a brofest.
- wyclif 14y ago
  That's correct, as is the author. People are advocating for affirmative action for women instead of advocating for the best speaker pitches and letting the chips fall where they may. Don't make women tokens, expect the same excellence you do from men and they will rise to the occasion. I have no doubt that the visibility of women will rise at conferences while they are competing successfully in tech jobs and representing a greater share of programmers and engineers.
ignostic 14y ago
-The author claims that criticism is misguided, because we don't know the ratio of men to women who pitched or work in the industry. -The author doesn't seem to know either. -Insofar as criticism of conference excluding women is uninformed, the defense that the author provides is equally uninformed. If there are fewer women speaking, applying to speak, or in the industry as a whole, there's a reason why. It seems to me we should spend less time going back and forth with vague abstractions, and more time looking for the underlying cause. Anything else is just cheap uninformed opinion. In this case, it's probably just linkbait.
- Smudge 14y ago
  In my mind, the author is the one pointing out the lack of industry data. Just because she doesn't provide it does not mean her core argument -- that quotas undermine the empowerment of women by devaluing their hard work and talent -- is invalid. It just means that, ultimately, we still need more data.
- inokon 14y ago
  I vote for link bait though I believe the author is authentic in her frustration. I like the suggestions at the end of her article. To share a personal reflection, I just applied to speak at a conference in June. I submitted two ideas and I have many more I could share. I would love if the conference organizers were interested in diversity of viewpoints and gave me feedback that would allow my topic to be accepted. I think there is a nuance here between a handout and a handup. It's the same experience I have applying to accelerators. I want to make it into the next YC class but I may not, not because of my race and gender but that I don't know the technique. Teach me to fish. I will be the captain of fishing.
Morendil 14y ago
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because quotas are a wrong solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process". One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Do you think a name blinded review process would yield a different result? I've never run a tech conference but it would not surprise me if ~95% of submitted technical talks were from men. If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women. The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    This boils down to the age-old question; "equitable vs. equal".
  - juridatenshi 14y ago
    Blinding combined with active outreach to get more people to submit to a CFP has helped several conferences improve their numbers. GoGaRuCo is the one that immediately comes to mind.
  - j_s 14y ago
    I never did follow up to see how DjangoCon 2013 turned out... looks like you're about right. http://2013.djangocon.eu http://2013.djangocon.eu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036457 > Everybody can vote for DjangoCon 2013 presentations (Github required) > The voting is deliberately anonymous at this first stage.
  - theoretick 14y ago
    I have sat on organizational committees and name-blinding would not work for some of us for one key reason: We use speaker's name/identity as a criteria for talk selection. Two main examples are whether they have presented before and how "strong" of a speaker they are. We DO use names to discriminate but that often allows us to have "fresh" speakers and keep the lineup somewhat varied. It also allows us to filter for all the other spam-talks; i.e. marketers. It is an issue of priorities but I would easily place quality of presentations over guaranteed blinding to prevent gender-bias selection.
petercooper 14y ago
One way to look at percentages is as a quota. "20% of our speakers this year shall be women!" Right or wrong, a lot of people don't like this. Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach, your CFP is poor, you're not promoting the CFP in a diverse way, etc. You work and improve, and then in year two you might notice you ended up at, say, 30%. Hurrah! Both approaches involve percentages and measurements, yet the second is not an attempt at fulfilling a "quota" (even if there's a target % to reach) and should be more palatable to everyone while still ensuring efforts are made to increase diversity.
- vijayr 14y ago
  This "forced quota" thing rarely works well - on large or small scale. Back in my college days, IBM came to campus - they announced their intention to hire more women than men, to have diversity in their workforce. While it was good for the girls who got hired (edging out guys who were more qualified), it annoyed a lot of guys who had better grades. May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.
  - wuest 14y ago
    >May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay. I agree wholeheartedly! I think that this is the sort of attitude which would be conducive to moving the state of affairs along. In these fights it's often lost that the problem at hand is that treating people in a way that makes them feel like they're not welcome and not respected is at the root of the issue.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    By the way, are "grades" still considered as a worthy predictor of one's performance in the workplace? Because it's kind of strange when I think of it. I've interviewed a lot of people in my life already and I can't remember a single time grades were brought forward or mattered. Is it an US thing?
Smudge 14y ago
The author's assertion is simply that enforcing quotas does not empower women, and that instead it devalues the work and talent of the women who are ultimately represented at the conference. And I agree with her. Women shouldn't need quotas in order to be offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Of course, percentages matter, and the fact that far fewer women are represented in a conference may be a symptom of something else, as opposed to a direct bias by the conference organizers. What we need is more of the underlying data. To start, I'd like to know how many women submitted technical talks to begin with.
jtbigwoo 14y ago
I don't pretend to know if the conferences mentioned in the story are exclusionary or just choosing the best speakers. The only thing I'll say is that speaking or joining a panel at a small conference often leads to speaking at bigger conferences and keynote appearances. If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot. I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.
- Evbn 14y ago
  In this day and age, why not watch a YouTube video or read slideshare, instead of snowballing the judgement of people you have never met?
- jlees 14y ago
  One of the problems in the hierarchy underlying this is simply that women (empirically) don't take that first step of reaching out to a small conference to speak. It's similar to data about self-nomination rates for promotion. Simply raising awareness of the promotion case managed to even the rates out, so arguably anything that raises the visibility of the lack of conference submissions by women could have a similar knock-on effect.
stefantalpalaru 14y ago
There's too much common sense in this article.
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rcirka 14y ago
This is the concept of affirmative action at it's core. Do we base admission partly on demographics instead of merit? On one hand it may help promote the minority, though there are downsides as well.
- eplanit 14y ago
  Sadly, in modern times Dr. King's dream of basing ones judgement of others solely on character (including merit) rather than on skin color is considered by many to be passé. I must quickly add that I am not of that modern group -- I still cling to the notion of a color-blind society as being the 'right' approach. Clearly we need "gender blindness", too. However, counting colors and genitalia and striving for parity across all colors and parts has proved, over and over, to cause as many errors as it solves. I'd pose the same question to professional women as has been posed to black males for decades now: "Are you wanting to define yourself as a great lawyer/doctor/engineer, or a great _black_ (or in this case _woman_) lawyer/doctor/engineer?" Personally, I have far, far greater respect when the gender and race is not part of the definition. Otherwise it seems there is a message of "I get extra points due to the mistake of my birth". Is that not just another form of 'privilege'?
  - Crake 14y ago
    I saw Neil Degrasse Tyson speak a few months ago. In his talk, he mentioned how strange it was that he was always referred to as "a black physicist," since he had always thought of himself as just "a physicist." I feel much the same way.
- dasil003 14y ago
  Yes I'm surprised there's not more mention of affirmative action since that debate raged heavily in much wider circles decades ago, and many of the talking points are the same. Personally I think affirmative action is more justifiable in something like college admissions where it's a critical gateway that a majority of people are expected to pass through on the way to success, versus conference speakers who are ostensibly there to talk about something they've already done rather than some future potential. In other words, if you let more minorities into college, I think it's a credible argument that many will fulfill their potential and that will help correct structural problems over time, whereas I don't see how getting more women speakers at tech conferences does anything to solve the larger gender imbalance other than paper over the problem at the edges.
jacalata 14y ago
It's pretty annoying to read articles like this about any topic - someone who doesn't appear to have thought through much of anything, let alone done a little research, bringing up 'thought provoking' ideas like 'did they consider that most of the submissions may have been from men?'. Well gee golly, if only anyone ever had looked at submission patterns across gender and ways to change them. Or there's the 'you think they dismissed awesome presentations from people who happen to wear a bra?' question, which is saying 'you must be accusing everyone involved of outright misgyny!'. Gee whillikers, if only anyone ever had studied the unconscious changes in reaction to a proposal submitted under a male name or a female name! etc etc. Do everyone a favour and do a little research before diving in to a controversial topic that already suffers so much from 'I'm a man/woman, I must know about this!' layman syndrome.
- dreamfactory 14y ago
  > Gee whillikers, if only anyone ever had studied the unconscious changes in reaction to a proposal submitted under a male name or a female name! According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5554390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5554390, women actually come off worse in this case.
- jorgenev 14y ago
  > Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. http://ateson.com/ws/r/www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full http://ateson.com/ws/r/www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full
  - jacalata 14y ago
    That is interesting, and I hadn't read that - I was thinking of the hiring study that dreamfactory linked. I'd be interested in seeing some analysis showing whether the new study is considered flawed, or how else to understand the two together (on a superficial level, they seem totally contradictory results).
jongold 14y ago
For a vastly different take on the same subject… (no comment) https://medium.com/about-work/405b2d12d213 https://medium.com/about-work/405b2d12d213
- joyeuse6701 14y ago
  Rant/Manifesto, but more rant.
- jerrya 14y ago
  Wow. Very misguided take at that. Interesting how she characterizes it throughout her piece as a very violent gender war, but at the end claims it to be a class war at then end. I think that's the crux of many of the problematic perspectives of contemporary feminism, that what are class differences are jammed into the square box of gender war.
  - Crake 14y ago
    Well, according to Feminism 101, everything in society that is bad is because of the Patriarchy. So even if it is a class war, men are still to blame for it. I...don't agree with this, but they make the same jump in "logic" over and over again, so it's fairly predictable. It's frankly a little alarming. College should be about learning diverse methods of evaluating a position, and critical thinking, not blaming everything on X root cause. (Any given problem is quite likely to have several variables affecting it.)
    - casiotone 14y ago
      Yeah, they should do more of that "critical thinking" where you deliberately mischaracterise an entire ideology and dismiss concepts out of hand. You realise that the theory of patriarchy has been extensively discussed and refined throughout the years. More 'critical thinking' has gone into it than you could even dream of. I am willing to wager that you've never even picked up a book about it, let alone read one. So, explain to us your theories of 'critical thinking'...
      - 14y ago
altero 14y ago
There was tech conference in eastern europe where was 15% quota for womans. Organizers solved it by organizing afterparty and hiring stripers.
ditojim 14y ago
who is john galt?
- psychometry 14y ago
  An unrealistic, one-dimensional character in a second-rate novel by a second-rate philosopher. Next question?
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    You know, if you had called her a third-rate philosopher the sentence would have a beautiful linear 1-2-3 progression to it. Consider that for next time.
    - SPSteinbeck 14y ago
      Haha, yeah I'm gonna use that line sometime with your modification :)
  - yarrel 14y ago
    Ideologue, not philosopher.
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brianbreslin 14y ago
As someone who has organized several conferences, and countless events in the tech space, let me just say that it is REALLY hard to find and get top-tier/well-known women to speak at your event. I reached out to over a dozen women execs from 10+ startups that were well known and all of them turned us down for this last conference I helped organized in Miami in February. Part of the issue is that you need well known speakers to sell more tickets, that coupled with the fact that the % of women working in tech is a minority, you're left with a shallow pool of possible speakers. Furthermore, if you're looking for certain skill-sets in tech to be speakers, you're further diminishing your pool of available candidates.
- dspeyer 14y ago
  Did you have similar problems recruiting make execs? If not, do you have any idea why the difference?
  - brianbreslin 14y ago
    Male executives obviously gave us a much higher acceptance rate (lol anything over 0% acceptance would be higher). But we also had a larger pool of guys to invite/recruit (more males and more visibility of these guys).
tomjen3 14y ago
This is bad taste we have people getting blow up in Boston, we don't need another circle jerk right now.
- krisroadruck 14y ago
  This was submitted before that. I know because I was the guy who submitted it.
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  We have people getting blown up all over the world. We don't need your pious bullshit right now.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "we don't need another circle jerk right now" Then don't introduce one more to your liking.
- deleted 14y ago
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groby_b 14y ago
It's a tricky question to address. It doesn't help that the people addressing it are obviously not entirely clear on the concept of an unbiased sample. To quote the fine article: But let’s say a larger percentage of the pitches came from women. Then people are also assuming that of the pitches that came from women, 100% of them were awesome pitches that organizers passed up solely because the presenter would be wearing a bra. No, people are assuming that pitches from women and men are on average of equal quality. It's an assumption borne out by experience. So we do need to ask the question why there are less women. If indeed 95% of the proposals were from male speakers, it's not a problem with the conference. If there were more than 5% of the proposals coming from women, but the final selection looked like it did, the organizers should take a look at their process - something is likely to be off if that's the case.
septerr 14y ago
I don't get why this is made to be a big deal. Gender or race shouldn't matter in choice of speakers, it should be their talent, track record, relevance of their work etc. What woman would want to be invited to speak if they knew it was because the organizers want to be representative of both sexes.
- laichzeit0 14y ago
  There is this perverse notion that there is something like "fair discrimination". As a South African this is something I've been forced to accept. Actually what it does is breed extreme discontent and disillusionment in those on the opposite side of the fence. No amount of rationalization can make this palatable. They even do it in sports. What this does is discredit people because everyone is thinking "Oh look, a quota player" and any actual merit this person might have possessed is discredited because of the bias in the selection process.
kens 14y ago
Out of curiosity, what's the acceptance rate for these tech conferences? Are these like academic conferences where < 20% of the talks are accepted after months and months of work, or do mere mortals have a reasonable chance of acceptance?
- Udo 14y ago
  I think it depends on the conference, but my general impression is that mere mortals cannot expect to get speaker spots. In most cases, the organizers or at least the community in general want well-known speakers. There is no way random people are allowed to just walk up there and present. That's probably for the best, since as an organizer you want to have some kind of quality control. I do suspect that's part of the gender ratio problem though. When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).
  - kunai 14y ago
    Paradox. You need speaking experience to speak, but you can't speak unless you have speaking experience.
    - Udo 14y ago
      Yes. From what I can tell there are several funnels that can get you speaker gigs. The most common is probably when your company arranges it or at least puts some weight behind your application and sends you to do a presentation explicitly as an employee of that company. That's what "worked" for me, and I see it often at tech conferences. The other way would be if you personally know some movers and shakers. I think that's also quite common. From time to time it's so obvious you're going to see speakers talking about projects or subjects that couldn't possibly have gotten up there on their own merits. They're not terrible, but they're sure not doing stuff that's significantly cooler than what most other people in the community do. The third option is that you're so well known in your community that you technically don't need corporate sponsorship or personal connections, but those probably go together anyway more often than not. Everybody else is going to have a bad time. Im uncertain if this is a bad thing per se, but it's also easy to see how that precludes the participation of a lot of people who could make a nice contribution. But if speaking is what you absolutely want to do, you could conceivably work your way up from smaller to ever-bigger conferences.
GhotiFish 14y ago
I wonder how these pitches are reviewed and accepted. It's well possible for an unconscious bias to seep in and taint your perception of someone's work. It brings to mind things like this: http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/1999/JANUARY1999/BehindTheScenes.html http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/1999/JANUARY1999/BehindTheSce... Then again, with the kind of heat conference heads have on them now, I bet they ARE doing something like this, if not actively making quotas.
rachelbythebay 14y ago
Do male speakers tend to get a lot of weird stalkers after they do a conference? Honest question.
- rdouble 14y ago
  Sort of. I have a friend on the conference / book circuit and he gets a lot of weird email and social media comments and questions.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Stalking proper happens to both men and women, and is done by both men and women. I suspect you mean something other than stalking. I guess, but I have nothing to support this, that the answer is "Women probably have more men acting weird and creepy after the woman has spoken at a conference".
  - rachelbythebay 14y ago
    I suspect you're right. I wasn't sure how to word it. I could probably talk about a great many things but have done no conferences. There's something a little too "real world" about it. Does that make any sense?
tunesmith 14y ago
For all the people who rail against quotas, the reason they exist is because of institutional sexism (or racism, in other matters). An overly simplified way to explain it is where there isn't any one instance or person that is sexist, but where the overall result of the system is sexist. A quota is a non-ideal blunt tool but it is one way to try and make up for the institutional sexism - not with the intent of giving improper advantages to a particular person who may be unqualified in a limited view, but by shocking an overall system to reduce the overall levels of sexism.
- olivier1664 14y ago
  Thanks for your comment, I was afraid to be alone to thinks that quota (while not perfect) can be a good pratical solution: - it allows the expected situation to become unsurprising/usual. - at the team level, it encourages to select the non-white-guy to be the speaker (in order to maximize the chance to pass the selection)
- mtext 14y ago
  Finally. Exactly. Of course quotas aren't the solution, but no one (except for populist governments) say they are!
- Crake 14y ago
  This isn't the way to do it. I'd be really offended if someone explicitly added me to the speaking roster just because of my genitals, just as much as I'd be annoyed if they explicitly denied me because of them.
  - tunesmith 14y ago
    While I don't know many of the particulars, I believe that one possible good example is Etsy. Etsy started a deliberate effort to employ more female engineers, and they did it by hiring junior female engineers and training them. They don't call it a quota, but it certainly fits the loose definition - they wanted more females, and so they hired junior female engineers when they could have hired more senior male engineers. I'm sure that at some point, a team of theirs was considered at full capacity and some male resume was passed over that might have otherwise been considered. But it's really, really hard to argue that they did something offensive there. They created more engineering talent, got some good press out of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had some sort of small effect in making programming a more viable-seeming career choice for women.
peripetylabs 14y ago
When you submit a paper to an academic journal, the reviewers do not know the name or origin of the authors, and make a decision based on the contents only. Conferences should select talks using a similar process. This would prevent potential bias against women, and also shield the conference from allegations of bias.
- briancurtin 14y ago
  This has come up a few times for PyCon, but we get a very wide range of proposal qualities from a wide range of people that would make it hard to come up with the best schedule we can, which is the ultimate goal of the Program Committee. Some of the best speakers submit relatively poor proposals if you read them without their name and experience. Those things obviously aren't everything, but they do hold some weight in the review process. Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
- vickytnz 14y ago
  Conversely, the difference is that women are incentivised just as much as men to apply and be accepted as (in the UK at least) it's tied to research outcomes. At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.
  - claudius 14y ago
    Oh yay, let’s fight assumed sexism with more obvious sexism. That will surely work!
Alex3917 14y ago
"Another 10% of people between the age of 18-64 in the United States have a disability." According to the CDC, 27.1% of Americans between the ages of 18-64 have at least one disability. Anyone know why the census numbers are different?
smoyer 14y ago
A few years ago I heard someone push the premise that women were simply too smart to acquire or keep a career in the tech industry. While sweeping generalizations like that usually set off my spidey-senses, this hypothesis might actually have merit. The short version is that women won't put up with the (lack of) work-life balance, long hours and constant on-call status. The successful women I've worked with all stayed because they simply love it (like I do) but it's entirely possible that this is something that even young girls notice when they avoid IT related curricula. To get back to the topic at hand, I think the best way to get women involved in more conferences is to have more "tenured" women in the industry. And the best way to do that is to that is to recruit more into the industry and to make the industry more aligned with their desires. I'm actually not opposed to quotas for female participation at conferences ... I simply want to learn something from anyone that's put in front of me.
- stephenbez 14y ago
  This is probably what you remember reading: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
trg2 14y ago
I've seen Rae speak at multiple conferences and she's freaking awesome. Couldn't agree more with this article - gender quotas for panels are a.) a slippery slope and b.) detract from both the quality of the conference and the accomplishments of the speakers that have made it there without them
charlieflowers 14y ago
Where is the + 10,000 button?
kamaal 14y ago
I am from a country(India) where reservations and quotas are as rampant as breathing. Quotas and reservations are disastrous to any community over the longer run. The only place where reservations make any impact is areas where there are too many good candidates and somebody from the lesser privileged sections of the society who is equally good can't make it due to the limited availability of opportunities. In such cases it makes some sense to offer the minorities a degree of reservation as the culture is unwelcoming to a meritorious minority person. Any thing apart from this and what you will see is, the social problems remain totally unchanged. Reservations and quotas means some one from privileged class who is deserving of a position will be denied the opportunity, and some one oppressed class who is not deserving will get the opportunity instead. The net result is the whole system will be poisoned. Work never gets done, more and more hard working people are denied opportunities. At the same undeserving people get the same opportunities and make a big waste out of them. If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't. Our job is to create a level playing field. So that anybody who want's to, can deliver.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  Ah, right. No women in tech because they're not very good at it. Gotcha.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    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.
    - anthonyb 14y ago
mtext 14y ago
Tech Conferences these days are just terrible. It's always the same people saying the same things, it's just a plain repetition of the same straight white male men saying the same boring things. I always think i'm just loosing my time. If i had dedicated the same amount of time to study seriously, it would be more benefical.
nullc 14y ago
It's unsurprising that the "SEO" industry is taking gender equality seriously: They obviously wouldn't want to besmirch their reputation for ethical conduct.
belorn 14y ago
Affirmative action are troublesome, and its good that someone are directly speaking against it. There are all from social to statistical problems, and those problem need to not be ignored. Take Sweden education system. In the 1990s, they thought it would be a good idea to encourage minority groups by giving them an bonus when applying to a area of study where the applying individual would be a minority. It was a very simple rule, and it backfired, got scraped by the early 2000, and declared illegal. What the Swedish Education board found out was, that in 90% of the time where a applying individual would become a minority in a class, it was a white male trying to enter a female dominated area of study. The concept was scraped short after, with statements that the initial goals was not achieved, and that affirmative action was found as counterproductive to the concept of education. The second part was also reaffirmed in the courts and is now made illegal. There are also much better alternatives to affirmative action which has been proven to be effective. Outreach programs works. Just a few months ago, there were a article describing how they reached around 50% or above female speaker participation through just doing outreach. They even made it a large point that they did no distinction what so ever when picking speakers, and the only work towards equality was outreach. There are also social studies. We need more of those. As a scientific society, we should even demand it before listening to anyone arguing about problems within this society, and more importantly, when the discussion turns to causes or suggested solutions. If we do not demand it, those studies won't happen, as there will be no pressure to do so or money invested into it.
rwmj 14y ago
It becomes absurd if you substitute tall and short people for men and women. Tall people have higher earnings[1] and are better off in many other ways, so should we not be satisfied if a conference panel doesn't include at least one short person? [1] http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2008/05/the-height-prem.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
azurelogic 14y ago
Generally speaking, I agree with the author of this post. While the language is at times intentionally inflammatory, the core point still stands: people who have talents, skills, and ideas should get to float to the top. We work in a hyper-logical field (the only thing more logical is math). Why can't people involved in the field see that the only thing that truly matters is furthering the progress of our craft/art/discipline/whatever-you-call-it. I don't care who wrote my framework/language/IDE/whatever. I just want it to be quality. This is the same problem that plagues things like education. No child seems to be allowed to be special or exceptional anymore. Everyone wants a damn participation ribbon. Screw your participation ribbon.

290 points by krisroadruck 14y ago

Making sure a certain % of speakers are women is ridiculous. I'm a woman and a programmer and I'd be offended they just threw a few women on to even it out vs. to make sure the best of the best speakers are there. If some happen to be women - great! If not, who cares. Women are not being excluded, so what's the problem? Why include women who may be mediocre just for the score? Too much sensitivity these days...

krisroadruck 14y ago
Agreed. This women 2.0 thing has been super annoying. Meanwhile every women I know who kicks ass at their craft doesn't have any problems with "marginalization". People who are competitive and competent tend to just fine in competitive careers. I never knew anyone who deserved to be at the top who got their by asking someone to make some rules so they could get there instead of you know... just being awesome.
- Evbn 14y ago
  You may be interested in research into how some groups are more productive when they work collaboratively rather than competitively, and how women are disproportionately better in collaborative environments. I don't want a team full of the best indiviual performers. I want the best performing team.
colmvp 14y ago
Indeed. I'm Asian. There's a lot of Asian men in tech. I don't see many Asian men on speaking panels. And I don't really care.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  In that case, I will take it upon myself to be offended on your behalf. No need to thank me. ;)
- mtext 14y ago
  Actually...You should care...Americans are fucking racist, but they think being racists with asians it's not trully racism. ( just look at movies like gran torino )
- pwang 14y ago
  This is a point I wish more people would make. There are a huge number of Asians in tech, and we are grossly underrepresented at tech conferences. But no one even thinks to look at diversity numbers there. I've seen discussion about racial diversity for black and even Hispanic people, but nobody thinks twice about Asians (which are even fewer in number in the general population). Such is life.
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obviouslygreen 14y ago
This is the same quota issue we deal with in all sorts of fields for all sorts of minorities. In my opinion the only effective course of action is to continually improve equality of opportunity, not by promoting some people at the expense of others because of minority status, but by concentrating and encouraging/requiring others to concentrate on qualifications to the exclusion of ethnic, sexual, etc. factors. Yes, definitely, too much (over)sensitivity. There will always be people who discriminate, and there will always be someone out there -- no matter who you are -- that will actively discriminate against you given the opportunity. Those people will never change. For the rest of us, what the world needs is to lighten up and give things some time: In the grander scheme of things, all this equality talk started up relatively recently. People don't change overnight, and the institutions we build change far more slowly. Patience, people. Patience, tempered expectations, and realism. Not all of this will ever be "fixed," and that which is will pretty much asymptotically approach our best case expectations, so learning to be happy with what we get and work to improve things without pissing everyone off all the time seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
- soup10 14y ago
  The only people that complain that there aren't enough women in tech are men. Women complain about female unfriendly work environments and conferences. But tech people don't understand the difference between "female unfriendly" and "needs more women". All there needs to be is a smart woman whose input is taken seriously when organizing conferences and establishing workplace culture.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    This is not true, in practice. Women report having better experiences when there are many women around, vs being the only one in the group.
    - soup10 14y ago
      It's the same thing in practice. It's harder to have a female friendly workplace when its a brofest.
wyclif 14y ago
That's correct, as is the author. People are advocating for affirmative action for women instead of advocating for the best speaker pitches and letting the chips fall where they may. Don't make women tokens, expect the same excellence you do from men and they will rise to the occasion. I have no doubt that the visibility of women will rise at conferences while they are competing successfully in tech jobs and representing a greater share of programmers and engineers.

ignostic 14y ago

-The author claims that criticism is misguided, because we don't know the ratio of men to women who pitched or work in the industry. -The author doesn't seem to know either. -Insofar as criticism of conference excluding women is uninformed, the defense that the author provides is equally uninformed. If there are fewer women speaking, applying to speak, or in the industry as a whole, there's a reason why. It seems to me we should spend less time going back and forth with vague abstractions, and more time looking for the underlying cause. Anything else is just cheap uninformed opinion. In this case, it's probably just linkbait.

Smudge 14y ago
In my mind, the author is the one pointing out the lack of industry data. Just because she doesn't provide it does not mean her core argument -- that quotas undermine the empowerment of women by devaluing their hard work and talent -- is invalid. It just means that, ultimately, we still need more data.
inokon 14y ago
I vote for link bait though I believe the author is authentic in her frustration. I like the suggestions at the end of her article. To share a personal reflection, I just applied to speak at a conference in June. I submitted two ideas and I have many more I could share. I would love if the conference organizers were interested in diversity of viewpoints and gave me feedback that would allow my topic to be accepted. I think there is a nuance here between a handout and a handup. It's the same experience I have applying to accelerators. I want to make it into the next YC class but I may not, not because of my race and gender but that I don't know the technique. Teach me to fish. I will be the captain of fishing.

Morendil 14y ago

Fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because quotas are a wrong solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process". One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Do you think a name blinded review process would yield a different result? I've never run a tech conference but it would not surprise me if ~95% of submitted technical talks were from men. If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women. The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  This boils down to the age-old question; "equitable vs. equal".
- juridatenshi 14y ago
  Blinding combined with active outreach to get more people to submit to a CFP has helped several conferences improve their numbers. GoGaRuCo is the one that immediately comes to mind.
- j_s 14y ago
  I never did follow up to see how DjangoCon 2013 turned out... looks like you're about right. http://2013.djangocon.eu http://2013.djangocon.eu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036457 > Everybody can vote for DjangoCon 2013 presentations (Github required) > The voting is deliberately anonymous at this first stage.
- theoretick 14y ago
  I have sat on organizational committees and name-blinding would not work for some of us for one key reason: We use speaker's name/identity as a criteria for talk selection. Two main examples are whether they have presented before and how "strong" of a speaker they are. We DO use names to discriminate but that often allows us to have "fresh" speakers and keep the lineup somewhat varied. It also allows us to filter for all the other spam-talks; i.e. marketers. It is an issue of priorities but I would easily place quality of presentations over guaranteed blinding to prevent gender-bias selection.

petercooper 14y ago

One way to look at percentages is as a quota. "20% of our speakers this year shall be women!" Right or wrong, a lot of people don't like this. Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach, your CFP is poor, you're not promoting the CFP in a diverse way, etc. You work and improve, and then in year two you might notice you ended up at, say, 30%. Hurrah! Both approaches involve percentages and measurements, yet the second is not an attempt at fulfilling a "quota" (even if there's a target % to reach) and should be more palatable to everyone while still ensuring efforts are made to increase diversity.

vijayr 14y ago
This "forced quota" thing rarely works well - on large or small scale. Back in my college days, IBM came to campus - they announced their intention to hire more women than men, to have diversity in their workforce. While it was good for the girls who got hired (edging out guys who were more qualified), it annoyed a lot of guys who had better grades. May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.
- wuest 14y ago
  >May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay. I agree wholeheartedly! I think that this is the sort of attitude which would be conducive to moving the state of affairs along. In these fights it's often lost that the problem at hand is that treating people in a way that makes them feel like they're not welcome and not respected is at the root of the issue.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  By the way, are "grades" still considered as a worthy predictor of one's performance in the workplace? Because it's kind of strange when I think of it. I've interviewed a lot of people in my life already and I can't remember a single time grades were brought forward or mattered. Is it an US thing?

Smudge 14y ago

The author's assertion is simply that enforcing quotas does not empower women, and that instead it devalues the work and talent of the women who are ultimately represented at the conference. And I agree with her. Women shouldn't need quotas in order to be offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Of course, percentages matter, and the fact that far fewer women are represented in a conference may be a symptom of something else, as opposed to a direct bias by the conference organizers. What we need is more of the underlying data. To start, I'd like to know how many women submitted technical talks to begin with.

jtbigwoo 14y ago

I don't pretend to know if the conferences mentioned in the story are exclusionary or just choosing the best speakers. The only thing I'll say is that speaking or joining a panel at a small conference often leads to speaking at bigger conferences and keynote appearances. If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot. I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.

Evbn 14y ago
In this day and age, why not watch a YouTube video or read slideshare, instead of snowballing the judgement of people you have never met?
jlees 14y ago
One of the problems in the hierarchy underlying this is simply that women (empirically) don't take that first step of reaching out to a small conference to speak. It's similar to data about self-nomination rates for promotion. Simply raising awareness of the promotion case managed to even the rates out, so arguably anything that raises the visibility of the lack of conference submissions by women could have a similar knock-on effect.

stefantalpalaru 14y ago

There's too much common sense in this article.

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rcirka 14y ago

This is the concept of affirmative action at it's core. Do we base admission partly on demographics instead of merit? On one hand it may help promote the minority, though there are downsides as well.

eplanit 14y ago
Sadly, in modern times Dr. King's dream of basing ones judgement of others solely on character (including merit) rather than on skin color is considered by many to be passé. I must quickly add that I am not of that modern group -- I still cling to the notion of a color-blind society as being the 'right' approach. Clearly we need "gender blindness", too. However, counting colors and genitalia and striving for parity across all colors and parts has proved, over and over, to cause as many errors as it solves. I'd pose the same question to professional women as has been posed to black males for decades now: "Are you wanting to define yourself as a great lawyer/doctor/engineer, or a great _black_ (or in this case _woman_) lawyer/doctor/engineer?" Personally, I have far, far greater respect when the gender and race is not part of the definition. Otherwise it seems there is a message of "I get extra points due to the mistake of my birth". Is that not just another form of 'privilege'?
- Crake 14y ago
  I saw Neil Degrasse Tyson speak a few months ago. In his talk, he mentioned how strange it was that he was always referred to as "a black physicist," since he had always thought of himself as just "a physicist." I feel much the same way.
dasil003 14y ago
Yes I'm surprised there's not more mention of affirmative action since that debate raged heavily in much wider circles decades ago, and many of the talking points are the same. Personally I think affirmative action is more justifiable in something like college admissions where it's a critical gateway that a majority of people are expected to pass through on the way to success, versus conference speakers who are ostensibly there to talk about something they've already done rather than some future potential. In other words, if you let more minorities into college, I think it's a credible argument that many will fulfill their potential and that will help correct structural problems over time, whereas I don't see how getting more women speakers at tech conferences does anything to solve the larger gender imbalance other than paper over the problem at the edges.

jacalata 14y ago

It's pretty annoying to read articles like this about any topic - someone who doesn't appear to have thought through much of anything, let alone done a little research, bringing up 'thought provoking' ideas like 'did they consider that most of the submissions may have been from men?'. Well gee golly, if only anyone ever had looked at submission patterns across gender and ways to change them. Or there's the 'you think they dismissed awesome presentations from people who happen to wear a bra?' question, which is saying 'you must be accusing everyone involved of outright misgyny!'. Gee whillikers, if only anyone ever had studied the unconscious changes in reaction to a proposal submitted under a male name or a female name! etc etc. Do everyone a favour and do a little research before diving in to a controversial topic that already suffers so much from 'I'm a man/woman, I must know about this!' layman syndrome.

dreamfactory 14y ago
> Gee whillikers, if only anyone ever had studied the unconscious changes in reaction to a proposal submitted under a male name or a female name! According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5554390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5554390, women actually come off worse in this case.
jorgenev 14y ago
> Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. http://ateson.com/ws/r/www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full http://ateson.com/ws/r/www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full
- jacalata 14y ago
  That is interesting, and I hadn't read that - I was thinking of the hiring study that dreamfactory linked. I'd be interested in seeing some analysis showing whether the new study is considered flawed, or how else to understand the two together (on a superficial level, they seem totally contradictory results).

jongold 14y ago

For a vastly different take on the same subject… (no comment) https://medium.com/about-work/405b2d12d213 https://medium.com/about-work/405b2d12d213

joyeuse6701 14y ago
Rant/Manifesto, but more rant.
jerrya 14y ago
Wow. Very misguided take at that. Interesting how she characterizes it throughout her piece as a very violent gender war, but at the end claims it to be a class war at then end. I think that's the crux of many of the problematic perspectives of contemporary feminism, that what are class differences are jammed into the square box of gender war.
- Crake 14y ago
  Well, according to Feminism 101, everything in society that is bad is because of the Patriarchy. So even if it is a class war, men are still to blame for it. I...don't agree with this, but they make the same jump in "logic" over and over again, so it's fairly predictable. It's frankly a little alarming. College should be about learning diverse methods of evaluating a position, and critical thinking, not blaming everything on X root cause. (Any given problem is quite likely to have several variables affecting it.)
  - casiotone 14y ago
    Yeah, they should do more of that "critical thinking" where you deliberately mischaracterise an entire ideology and dismiss concepts out of hand. You realise that the theory of patriarchy has been extensively discussed and refined throughout the years. More 'critical thinking' has gone into it than you could even dream of. I am willing to wager that you've never even picked up a book about it, let alone read one. So, explain to us your theories of 'critical thinking'...
    - 14y ago

altero 14y ago

There was tech conference in eastern europe where was 15% quota for womans. Organizers solved it by organizing afterparty and hiring stripers.

ditojim 14y ago

who is john galt?

psychometry 14y ago
An unrealistic, one-dimensional character in a second-rate novel by a second-rate philosopher. Next question?
- MartinCron 14y ago
  You know, if you had called her a third-rate philosopher the sentence would have a beautiful linear 1-2-3 progression to it. Consider that for next time.
  - SPSteinbeck 14y ago
    Haha, yeah I'm gonna use that line sometime with your modification :)
- yarrel 14y ago
  Ideologue, not philosopher.

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brianbreslin 14y ago

As someone who has organized several conferences, and countless events in the tech space, let me just say that it is REALLY hard to find and get top-tier/well-known women to speak at your event. I reached out to over a dozen women execs from 10+ startups that were well known and all of them turned us down for this last conference I helped organized in Miami in February. Part of the issue is that you need well known speakers to sell more tickets, that coupled with the fact that the % of women working in tech is a minority, you're left with a shallow pool of possible speakers. Furthermore, if you're looking for certain skill-sets in tech to be speakers, you're further diminishing your pool of available candidates.

dspeyer 14y ago
Did you have similar problems recruiting make execs? If not, do you have any idea why the difference?
- brianbreslin 14y ago
  Male executives obviously gave us a much higher acceptance rate (lol anything over 0% acceptance would be higher). But we also had a larger pool of guys to invite/recruit (more males and more visibility of these guys).

tomjen3 14y ago

This is bad taste we have people getting blow up in Boston, we don't need another circle jerk right now.

krisroadruck 14y ago
This was submitted before that. I know because I was the guy who submitted it.
peterwwillis 14y ago
We have people getting blown up all over the world. We don't need your pious bullshit right now.
illuminate 14y ago
"we don't need another circle jerk right now" Then don't introduce one more to your liking.
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groby_b 14y ago

It's a tricky question to address. It doesn't help that the people addressing it are obviously not entirely clear on the concept of an unbiased sample. To quote the fine article: But let’s say a larger percentage of the pitches came from women. Then people are also assuming that of the pitches that came from women, 100% of them were awesome pitches that organizers passed up solely because the presenter would be wearing a bra. No, people are assuming that pitches from women and men are on average of equal quality. It's an assumption borne out by experience. So we do need to ask the question why there are less women. If indeed 95% of the proposals were from male speakers, it's not a problem with the conference. If there were more than 5% of the proposals coming from women, but the final selection looked like it did, the organizers should take a look at their process - something is likely to be off if that's the case.

septerr 14y ago

I don't get why this is made to be a big deal. Gender or race shouldn't matter in choice of speakers, it should be their talent, track record, relevance of their work etc. What woman would want to be invited to speak if they knew it was because the organizers want to be representative of both sexes.

laichzeit0 14y ago
There is this perverse notion that there is something like "fair discrimination". As a South African this is something I've been forced to accept. Actually what it does is breed extreme discontent and disillusionment in those on the opposite side of the fence. No amount of rationalization can make this palatable. They even do it in sports. What this does is discredit people because everyone is thinking "Oh look, a quota player" and any actual merit this person might have possessed is discredited because of the bias in the selection process.

kens 14y ago

Out of curiosity, what's the acceptance rate for these tech conferences? Are these like academic conferences where < 20% of the talks are accepted after months and months of work, or do mere mortals have a reasonable chance of acceptance?

Udo 14y ago
I think it depends on the conference, but my general impression is that mere mortals cannot expect to get speaker spots. In most cases, the organizers or at least the community in general want well-known speakers. There is no way random people are allowed to just walk up there and present. That's probably for the best, since as an organizer you want to have some kind of quality control. I do suspect that's part of the gender ratio problem though. When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).
- kunai 14y ago
  Paradox. You need speaking experience to speak, but you can't speak unless you have speaking experience.
  - Udo 14y ago
    Yes. From what I can tell there are several funnels that can get you speaker gigs. The most common is probably when your company arranges it or at least puts some weight behind your application and sends you to do a presentation explicitly as an employee of that company. That's what "worked" for me, and I see it often at tech conferences. The other way would be if you personally know some movers and shakers. I think that's also quite common. From time to time it's so obvious you're going to see speakers talking about projects or subjects that couldn't possibly have gotten up there on their own merits. They're not terrible, but they're sure not doing stuff that's significantly cooler than what most other people in the community do. The third option is that you're so well known in your community that you technically don't need corporate sponsorship or personal connections, but those probably go together anyway more often than not. Everybody else is going to have a bad time. Im uncertain if this is a bad thing per se, but it's also easy to see how that precludes the participation of a lot of people who could make a nice contribution. But if speaking is what you absolutely want to do, you could conceivably work your way up from smaller to ever-bigger conferences.

GhotiFish 14y ago

I wonder how these pitches are reviewed and accepted. It's well possible for an unconscious bias to seep in and taint your perception of someone's work. It brings to mind things like this: http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/1999/JANUARY1999/BehindTheScenes.html http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/1999/JANUARY1999/BehindTheSce... Then again, with the kind of heat conference heads have on them now, I bet they ARE doing something like this, if not actively making quotas.

rachelbythebay 14y ago

Do male speakers tend to get a lot of weird stalkers after they do a conference? Honest question.

rdouble 14y ago
Sort of. I have a friend on the conference / book circuit and he gets a lot of weird email and social media comments and questions.
DanBC 14y ago
Stalking proper happens to both men and women, and is done by both men and women. I suspect you mean something other than stalking. I guess, but I have nothing to support this, that the answer is "Women probably have more men acting weird and creepy after the woman has spoken at a conference".
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  I suspect you're right. I wasn't sure how to word it. I could probably talk about a great many things but have done no conferences. There's something a little too "real world" about it. Does that make any sense?

tunesmith 14y ago

For all the people who rail against quotas, the reason they exist is because of institutional sexism (or racism, in other matters). An overly simplified way to explain it is where there isn't any one instance or person that is sexist, but where the overall result of the system is sexist. A quota is a non-ideal blunt tool but it is one way to try and make up for the institutional sexism - not with the intent of giving improper advantages to a particular person who may be unqualified in a limited view, but by shocking an overall system to reduce the overall levels of sexism.

olivier1664 14y ago
Thanks for your comment, I was afraid to be alone to thinks that quota (while not perfect) can be a good pratical solution: - it allows the expected situation to become unsurprising/usual. - at the team level, it encourages to select the non-white-guy to be the speaker (in order to maximize the chance to pass the selection)
mtext 14y ago
Finally. Exactly. Of course quotas aren't the solution, but no one (except for populist governments) say they are!
Crake 14y ago
This isn't the way to do it. I'd be really offended if someone explicitly added me to the speaking roster just because of my genitals, just as much as I'd be annoyed if they explicitly denied me because of them.
- tunesmith 14y ago
  While I don't know many of the particulars, I believe that one possible good example is Etsy. Etsy started a deliberate effort to employ more female engineers, and they did it by hiring junior female engineers and training them. They don't call it a quota, but it certainly fits the loose definition - they wanted more females, and so they hired junior female engineers when they could have hired more senior male engineers. I'm sure that at some point, a team of theirs was considered at full capacity and some male resume was passed over that might have otherwise been considered. But it's really, really hard to argue that they did something offensive there. They created more engineering talent, got some good press out of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had some sort of small effect in making programming a more viable-seeming career choice for women.

peripetylabs 14y ago

When you submit a paper to an academic journal, the reviewers do not know the name or origin of the authors, and make a decision based on the contents only. Conferences should select talks using a similar process. This would prevent potential bias against women, and also shield the conference from allegations of bias.

briancurtin 14y ago
This has come up a few times for PyCon, but we get a very wide range of proposal qualities from a wide range of people that would make it hard to come up with the best schedule we can, which is the ultimate goal of the Program Committee. Some of the best speakers submit relatively poor proposals if you read them without their name and experience. Those things obviously aren't everything, but they do hold some weight in the review process. Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
vickytnz 14y ago
Conversely, the difference is that women are incentivised just as much as men to apply and be accepted as (in the UK at least) it's tied to research outcomes. At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.
- claudius 14y ago
  Oh yay, let’s fight assumed sexism with more obvious sexism. That will surely work!

Alex3917 14y ago

"Another 10% of people between the age of 18-64 in the United States have a disability." According to the CDC, 27.1% of Americans between the ages of 18-64 have at least one disability. Anyone know why the census numbers are different?

smoyer 14y ago

A few years ago I heard someone push the premise that women were simply too smart to acquire or keep a career in the tech industry. While sweeping generalizations like that usually set off my spidey-senses, this hypothesis might actually have merit. The short version is that women won't put up with the (lack of) work-life balance, long hours and constant on-call status. The successful women I've worked with all stayed because they simply love it (like I do) but it's entirely possible that this is something that even young girls notice when they avoid IT related curricula. To get back to the topic at hand, I think the best way to get women involved in more conferences is to have more "tenured" women in the industry. And the best way to do that is to that is to recruit more into the industry and to make the industry more aligned with their desires. I'm actually not opposed to quotas for female participation at conferences ... I simply want to learn something from anyone that's put in front of me.

stephenbez 14y ago
This is probably what you remember reading: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

trg2 14y ago

I've seen Rae speak at multiple conferences and she's freaking awesome. Couldn't agree more with this article - gender quotas for panels are a.) a slippery slope and b.) detract from both the quality of the conference and the accomplishments of the speakers that have made it there without them

charlieflowers 14y ago

Where is the + 10,000 button?

kamaal 14y ago

I am from a country(India) where reservations and quotas are as rampant as breathing. Quotas and reservations are disastrous to any community over the longer run. The only place where reservations make any impact is areas where there are too many good candidates and somebody from the lesser privileged sections of the society who is equally good can't make it due to the limited availability of opportunities. In such cases it makes some sense to offer the minorities a degree of reservation as the culture is unwelcoming to a meritorious minority person. Any thing apart from this and what you will see is, the social problems remain totally unchanged. Reservations and quotas means some one from privileged class who is deserving of a position will be denied the opportunity, and some one oppressed class who is not deserving will get the opportunity instead. The net result is the whole system will be poisoned. Work never gets done, more and more hard working people are denied opportunities. At the same undeserving people get the same opportunities and make a big waste out of them. If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't. Our job is to create a level playing field. So that anybody who want's to, can deliver.

anthonyb 14y ago
Ah, right. No women in tech because they're not very good at it. Gotcha.
- kamaal 14y ago
  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.
  - anthonyb 14y ago

mtext 14y ago

Tech Conferences these days are just terrible. It's always the same people saying the same things, it's just a plain repetition of the same straight white male men saying the same boring things. I always think i'm just loosing my time. If i had dedicated the same amount of time to study seriously, it would be more benefical.

nullc 14y ago

It's unsurprising that the "SEO" industry is taking gender equality seriously: They obviously wouldn't want to besmirch their reputation for ethical conduct.

belorn 14y ago

Affirmative action are troublesome, and its good that someone are directly speaking against it. There are all from social to statistical problems, and those problem need to not be ignored. Take Sweden education system. In the 1990s, they thought it would be a good idea to encourage minority groups by giving them an bonus when applying to a area of study where the applying individual would be a minority. It was a very simple rule, and it backfired, got scraped by the early 2000, and declared illegal. What the Swedish Education board found out was, that in 90% of the time where a applying individual would become a minority in a class, it was a white male trying to enter a female dominated area of study. The concept was scraped short after, with statements that the initial goals was not achieved, and that affirmative action was found as counterproductive to the concept of education. The second part was also reaffirmed in the courts and is now made illegal. There are also much better alternatives to affirmative action which has been proven to be effective. Outreach programs works. Just a few months ago, there were a article describing how they reached around 50% or above female speaker participation through just doing outreach. They even made it a large point that they did no distinction what so ever when picking speakers, and the only work towards equality was outreach. There are also social studies. We need more of those. As a scientific society, we should even demand it before listening to anyone arguing about problems within this society, and more importantly, when the discussion turns to causes or suggested solutions. If we do not demand it, those studies won't happen, as there will be no pressure to do so or money invested into it.

rwmj 14y ago

It becomes absurd if you substitute tall and short people for men and women. Tall people have higher earnings[1] and are better off in many other ways, so should we not be satisfied if a conference panel doesn't include at least one short person? [1] http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2008/05/the-height-prem.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

azurelogic 14y ago

Generally speaking, I agree with the author of this post. While the language is at times intentionally inflammatory, the core point still stands: people who have talents, skills, and ideas should get to float to the top. We work in a hyper-logical field (the only thing more logical is math). Why can't people involved in the field see that the only thing that truly matters is furthering the progress of our craft/art/discipline/whatever-you-call-it. I don't care who wrote my framework/language/IDE/whatever. I just want it to be quality. This is the same problem that plagues things like education. No child seems to be allowed to be special or exceptional anymore. Everyone wants a damn participation ribbon. Screw your participation ribbon.