8 ms·

Our approach to gender diversity

27 points by johnwards 13y ago

batemanesque 13y ago
this kind of seems like a way to advertise the conference, but well done anyway
- pstack 13y ago
  Where is their inclusion of transgender, gender dysphoric, gay, and lesbian speakers? Also, where are all the non-white/asian/indian speakers? I think this is going to require a bigger spreadsheet!
  - 013 13y ago
    Simple. 1. Invite straight white male 2. Invite straight white female 3. Invite gay white male 4. Invite gay white female 5. Invite straight black male 6. Invite straight black female 7. Invite gay black male 7. Invite gay black female etc. etc. I think the best way to be diverse with genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, is to ignore genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, not to invite male, female, male, female. Simply invite the best speaker, taking into account their sex isn't diverse, even if you do take turns.
    - batemanesque 13y ago
      problem w/ that is that regardless of how good yr intentions are, you can't prevent unconscious bias from coming into play.
  - sambeau 13y ago
    The Tech industry has many male asian speakers, I suspect there is still a strong white-male majority (I can't find any reliable figures) but asian (men) are the other race who seem to be well established in the world of IT . We do have incredibly talented transgendered speakers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson and at least one very talented asian transgendered speaker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men. I find it interesting that you didn't add black speakers to your list. Our industry has a very notable deficit of anyone from an African, Afro-Carribean & African-American background. Personally I have worked with many more women programmers than I have with black programmers (although I have worked with two very talented black men, both ex-programmers in a senior management role, one military trained). I wonder why? But you are right. Equality is equality. We'll get there in the end!
    - masklinn 13y ago
      > It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men. Might be because trans men in tech are men and thus "the norm"? Further, maybe most of them weren't in tech or high-profile before transition? Both Tang and Wilson were high-profile before transitioning. (no evidence or anything, just providing possible working hypothesis).
      - pstack 13y ago
        I am so confused, now. When we speak of a trans[$], is the noun used supposed to be the source-sex or the target-sex? I know it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender, so does that apply to this terminology, too? That is, a transgender man would not be a man who became a woman, but a woman who is now a man?
        kivikakk 13y ago
        Hint: if you leave off the word transgender, it should still describe who they are; Audrey's a woman. Audrey's transgender. Audrey's a transgender woman.
        jgroszko 13y ago
        You refer to them by their preferred sex. A transgender man is (usually) female-to-male or FTM, and would be referred to with male pronouns. Using the pronouns of their birth gender is considered rude.
        masklinn 13y ago
        Yes: > a transsexual man is a person who was assigned the female sex at birth [but] identifies as a man and is transitioning or has transitioned to a male gender role and has or will have a masculine body. They're separate components of the person's identity: a transgender man is a man and transgender. From [it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender] it follows that a transgender man is transitioning, has transitioned or will transition to masculinity.
        13y ago
- booop 13y ago
  Indeed. I can't find anything really interesting about this conference other than a ton of self published links to social media sites (an obvious SEO/media campaign?).
bloodorange 13y ago
Do you allow exporting of raw data?
rayiner 13y ago
I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.
- spindritf 13y ago
  Nobody may be thinking twice about the head of internal medicine being a woman. But they do about just regular physicians. > We find that the median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. This result is partially due to a gender-wage gap in medicine. However, it is mostly driven by the fact that the median female physician simply doesn’t work enough hours to amortize her upfront investment in medical school.[1] Anyway, I think ibanking is in line before tech. [1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/GenderNPV_WorkingPaper.pdf http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Gende...
  - masklinn 13y ago
    That's a very different meaning of "thinking twice" than the one rayiner used.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Banking is more overtly sexist but banks have policies to hire women so you have more women in "front-line" roles. 14% of partners at Goldman Sachs are women. In which tech company are 14% of executives in technical roles (not HR or marketing) women?
elnate 13y ago
> Ours is a male-dominated industry – and weaker for it Has this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any evidence either way. (the latter part)
- Zigurd 13y ago
  The evidence from other industries and organizations is pretty compelling. Including women gets you better decision-making overall: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326101616.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326101616.ht... Given the record of industries that have reformed to include more women, I would not bet on there being very many "naturally male" businesses. Especially not ones that have a lot of sitting and typing involved.
  - gametheoretic 13y ago
    If your use of the word 'compelling' is in reference to the contents of that link, well, I just could not disagree more. a) Surveys are shit - they're as far removed from double-blind as you can get, and b) the framing of cause and effect is highly opinionated, e.g.: "Having just one female director on the board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20%" -- superior feminine corporate guidance or well-documented feminine avoidance of risk(y companies, e.g. startups, for whom bankruptcy, statistically, is the expectation)?
    - Zigurd 13y ago
      Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives? Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
      - gametheoretic 13y ago
        > Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives? I made no positive claims, only negative ones. >Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet." Doing my best to refrain from username-dropping here. If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player. >Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. I will assume you're referring to Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen here. ;) But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work around their blind spots and keep moving forward. When/if we're lucky enough to be cognizant of our own ignorance, we can either notify the others in the room or we can not - both are real options; neither strategy is universally dominant. Obviously, I'm being nice; it is called 'bullshitting'. But if you have a nose for it, then who's to blame for letting it affect you?
jlebrech 13y ago
that makes absolutely no sense at all, you should invite the speaker by experience and knowledge and not anything else, the criteria should be technical and not political. If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over men more aggressively. I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have the skills for public speaking. This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level. But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up.
leoedin 13y ago
I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much. I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field. This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men. My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome. Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems.
dep_b 13y ago
I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant. Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry.
- dgempesaw 13y ago
  Many "women choose not to do it," because of sexist environments composed primarily of men who repeatedly tell them not to be progammers . So, sure, the problem is women choosing not to be programmers, but that's not the underlying cause. The first-hand experiences of many women in tech, widely available on public blogs, are directly opposed to your second-hand experience of them. Should we take your word for it, or theirs?
  - dep_b 13y ago
    There are probably more blogs about Obama stealing your guns than blogs about women in tech being discriminated, does that mean we are about to enter the Obamacalypse? People blog either about awesome stuff or awful stuff and people behaving normally like expected is nothing to write about. I fail to see why programmers are of a special fascist pig breed of men that are somehow way more discriminating towards woman than for example lawyers are. Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers. Modern life is full of hazards for women. I choose to not be one of them but they're everywhere and I'm not denying in any way the impact they can have on women. Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated. I had a female boss once and a female programmer colleague and I never ever felt a single bit disrespect towards them because of their gender. Should I start a blog about that? "Today I accepted a suggestion about how to refactor my code from my female coworker and it totally felt like the most normal thing in the world".

27 points by johnwards 13y ago

batemanesque 13y ago

this kind of seems like a way to advertise the conference, but well done anyway

pstack 13y ago
Where is their inclusion of transgender, gender dysphoric, gay, and lesbian speakers? Also, where are all the non-white/asian/indian speakers? I think this is going to require a bigger spreadsheet!
- 013 13y ago
  Simple. 1. Invite straight white male 2. Invite straight white female 3. Invite gay white male 4. Invite gay white female 5. Invite straight black male 6. Invite straight black female 7. Invite gay black male 7. Invite gay black female etc. etc. I think the best way to be diverse with genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, is to ignore genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, not to invite male, female, male, female. Simply invite the best speaker, taking into account their sex isn't diverse, even if you do take turns.
  - batemanesque 13y ago
    problem w/ that is that regardless of how good yr intentions are, you can't prevent unconscious bias from coming into play.
- sambeau 13y ago
  The Tech industry has many male asian speakers, I suspect there is still a strong white-male majority (I can't find any reliable figures) but asian (men) are the other race who seem to be well established in the world of IT . We do have incredibly talented transgendered speakers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson and at least one very talented asian transgendered speaker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men. I find it interesting that you didn't add black speakers to your list. Our industry has a very notable deficit of anyone from an African, Afro-Carribean & African-American background. Personally I have worked with many more women programmers than I have with black programmers (although I have worked with two very talented black men, both ex-programmers in a senior management role, one military trained). I wonder why? But you are right. Equality is equality. We'll get there in the end!
  - masklinn 13y ago
    > It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men. Might be because trans men in tech are men and thus "the norm"? Further, maybe most of them weren't in tech or high-profile before transition? Both Tang and Wilson were high-profile before transitioning. (no evidence or anything, just providing possible working hypothesis).
    - pstack 13y ago
      I am so confused, now. When we speak of a trans[$], is the noun used supposed to be the source-sex or the target-sex? I know it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender, so does that apply to this terminology, too? That is, a transgender man would not be a man who became a woman, but a woman who is now a man?
      - kivikakk 13y ago
        Hint: if you leave off the word transgender, it should still describe who they are; Audrey's a woman. Audrey's transgender. Audrey's a transgender woman.
      - jgroszko 13y ago
        You refer to them by their preferred sex. A transgender man is (usually) female-to-male or FTM, and would be referred to with male pronouns. Using the pronouns of their birth gender is considered rude.
      - masklinn 13y ago
        Yes: > a transsexual man is a person who was assigned the female sex at birth [but] identifies as a man and is transitioning or has transitioned to a male gender role and has or will have a masculine body. They're separate components of the person's identity: a transgender man is a man and transgender. From [it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender] it follows that a transgender man is transitioning, has transitioned or will transition to masculinity.
      - 13y ago
booop 13y ago
Indeed. I can't find anything really interesting about this conference other than a ton of self published links to social media sites (an obvious SEO/media campaign?).

bloodorange 13y ago

Do you allow exporting of raw data?

rayiner 13y ago

I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.

spindritf 13y ago
Nobody may be thinking twice about the head of internal medicine being a woman. But they do about just regular physicians. > We find that the median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. This result is partially due to a gender-wage gap in medicine. However, it is mostly driven by the fact that the median female physician simply doesn’t work enough hours to amortize her upfront investment in medical school.[1] Anyway, I think ibanking is in line before tech. [1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/GenderNPV_WorkingPaper.pdf http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Gende...
- masklinn 13y ago
  That's a very different meaning of "thinking twice" than the one rayiner used.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 13y ago
  Banking is more overtly sexist but banks have policies to hire women so you have more women in "front-line" roles. 14% of partners at Goldman Sachs are women. In which tech company are 14% of executives in technical roles (not HR or marketing) women?

elnate 13y ago

> Ours is a male-dominated industry – and weaker for it Has this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any evidence either way. (the latter part)

Zigurd 13y ago
The evidence from other industries and organizations is pretty compelling. Including women gets you better decision-making overall: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326101616.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326101616.ht... Given the record of industries that have reformed to include more women, I would not bet on there being very many "naturally male" businesses. Especially not ones that have a lot of sitting and typing involved.
- gametheoretic 13y ago
  If your use of the word 'compelling' is in reference to the contents of that link, well, I just could not disagree more. a) Surveys are shit - they're as far removed from double-blind as you can get, and b) the framing of cause and effect is highly opinionated, e.g.: "Having just one female director on the board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20%" -- superior feminine corporate guidance or well-documented feminine avoidance of risk(y companies, e.g. startups, for whom bankruptcy, statistically, is the expectation)?
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives? Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
    - gametheoretic 13y ago
      > Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives? I made no positive claims, only negative ones. >Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet." Doing my best to refrain from username-dropping here. If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player. >Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. I will assume you're referring to Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen here. ;) But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work around their blind spots and keep moving forward. When/if we're lucky enough to be cognizant of our own ignorance, we can either notify the others in the room or we can not - both are real options; neither strategy is universally dominant. Obviously, I'm being nice; it is called 'bullshitting'. But if you have a nose for it, then who's to blame for letting it affect you?

jlebrech 13y ago

that makes absolutely no sense at all, you should invite the speaker by experience and knowledge and not anything else, the criteria should be technical and not political. If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over men more aggressively. I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have the skills for public speaking. This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level. But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up.

leoedin 13y ago

I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much. I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field. This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men. My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome. Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems.

dep_b 13y ago

I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant. Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry.

dgempesaw 13y ago
Many "women choose not to do it," because of sexist environments composed primarily of men who repeatedly tell them not to be progammers . So, sure, the problem is women choosing not to be programmers, but that's not the underlying cause. The first-hand experiences of many women in tech, widely available on public blogs, are directly opposed to your second-hand experience of them. Should we take your word for it, or theirs?
- dep_b 13y ago
  There are probably more blogs about Obama stealing your guns than blogs about women in tech being discriminated, does that mean we are about to enter the Obamacalypse? People blog either about awesome stuff or awful stuff and people behaving normally like expected is nothing to write about. I fail to see why programmers are of a special fascist pig breed of men that are somehow way more discriminating towards woman than for example lawyers are. Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers. Modern life is full of hazards for women. I choose to not be one of them but they're everywhere and I'm not denying in any way the impact they can have on women. Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated. I had a female boss once and a female programmer colleague and I never ever felt a single bit disrespect towards them because of their gender. Should I start a blog about that? "Today I accepted a suggestion about how to refactor my code from my female coworker and it totally felt like the most normal thing in the world".