#FFFFFF Diversity

    That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring
    practises among some companies can be discriminatory.

Totally agree that current hiring practices have implicit biases that can be discriminatory. What I don't get is how people can consider alternative hiring practices that are explicitly discriminatory okay, because they are discriminatory in the opposite direction.

It would be nice if people applied some heuristic like the "5 whys" and tried to actually perform a root cause analysis and try to resolve the base causes instead of plastering over the problem with practices that are at best no worse than current practices.

Explicit reverse discrimination is still discrimination. Quotas result in a situation where brilliant majority developers get passed over because they are in the majority. How about we try and come up with a solution where equally brilliant developers regardless of their minority or majority status don't get overlooked?

    You understand, don't you, that your implicit assumption 
    here is that there just aren't enough competent non-
    straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference 
    list?

I think you're deliberately misrepresenting the OP. The way I read the OP, they are making the assumption that for every single identity group in tech, that the prevalence of great speakers to bad speakers is approximately equal. For shits and giggles, let's say that assumption is 2% of white guys, 2% of white women, 2% of black women, 2% of black men, 2% of asian women, 2% of asian men, 2% of trans people, etc. etc. etc. are no only competent by talented speakers you'd want to see at a conference.

The moment you intentionally ignore base rates of the availability of each group, you're no longer getting the 2% of the engineering population that are the best speakers regardless of their identity. You're instead optimizing for diversity over technical excellence. Nothing wrong with that, just be clear that you can't optimize for both unless the base rates for all groups are approximately equal or unless one identity group actually have a greater percentage of technically excellent speakers than another identity group.

That said, I don't really care about conferences either way, just statistical truths. I rarely go to conferences any more, since I prefer reading code, papers and technical writings that are shared based on the quality of content instead of the identity of the author.

    In my experience, the conferences that work really hard on 
    diversity are better.

I'm really curious to know your definition of "better" because I would venture that both you and the OP are completely correct in your viewpoints and arguments, because you two don't share the same definition of "better". Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.

FWIW, I'm a non-straight "white" dude (half anglo, half latino (by way of iberian and mediterranean descent) (more specifically a anarchoamorous, pansexual, agender male with a cisgender visual appearance because I don't see the value of wearing my identity on my sleeve)

> But how should that affect a hiring manager?

Reverse/positive discrimination is a choice that you can make if you want to. I don't know what evidence there is to support or refute its effectiveness, but there's both appeal and risk there.

Personally I'd make that call based on the circumstances... a senior recruiter (who has built out some of the best teams in the UK) once told me on team diversity; "as soon as it turns into a sausage-fest you're finished". If an environment was 100% white/male then it'd be much less hospitable to other groups, so personally I would use positive discrimination in that case. If an environment was 51/49 male/female then I feel positive discrimination would be inappropriate.

> Doing one's best to look past those labels seems to make sense

As long as you can look past those labels. Which you can't. Check out the research on moral licencing... it shows that the more you believe that you're being meritocratic, the more your subconscious generates excuses for biased behaviour. The only way I know to 'look past' those labels is to (a) use quotas, which often doesn't make sense or (b) use a blinded assessment process & structured interviewing.

Option (b) is an area I'm working on at the moment.

> but the article seems to say we need to consciously label and balance the representation.

Given that tech is already a sausage-fest, and that it's not a natural state of affairs (the gender split having worsened since the 70s), I personally think it's acceptable to try to actively rebalance the way tech is presented both within the industry and to broader society. It needs to be okay to be a woman in tech. There need to be role models. And this seems like a pretty harmless way to build towards that outcome... it's just speakers at a conference. Nobody is being refused a job because of this, and the speakers will be just as good.

    That's not what you're getting now, either.

Completely agree. The point I was making is that a quota system not only isn't better, but is worse if those quotas are not proportional to base rates of the population you are drawing from (software engineers in this case).

The only way to select speakers based on quality of content is to select speakers by content alone and hide all other criteria and characteristics of the speakers when selecting. Pretty much any other system introduces implicit and explicit biases, especially a quota system.

FWIW, yes, I'm claiming that your definition of better is different than that of the OP and that this difference is material. I may be wrong about this but based on your arguments in this thread and their arguments, if feels to me like you're both optimizing for different things. You're optimizing for diversity and the OP is optimizing for quality of content. The only way you get both is if the population from which you're drawing speakers at random has already been optimized for diversity.

There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue, 90 are green. Approximately 10% of fibbwobblers are great conference speakers (evenly distributed among all fibbwobblers regardless of color).

You want to hold a fibbwobbler conference with 10 speakers. To get only good speakers, you'd need to draw the 1 out of 10 blue fibbwobblers that are great speakers and the 9 that are green. If you have no quota system and end up with 10 green fibbwobblers speaking, approximately 1 of them is likely going to be bad speakers. If you decide to have a quota system where fibbwobblers of both colors are equally represented, 50/50, then you'll likely end up with the one great fibbwobbler speaking that is blue, and 4 blue ones that are not great speakers and 5 green ones that are great speakers. Under no quota, you get 1 bad speaker out of 10, under and equal representation quota system you get 4 bad speakers out of 10. Keep in mind that this is all based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that all fibbwobblers are equally capable of being a great speakers, regardless of their blueness or greenness.

Your worst case scenario in terms of quality of speakers gets comparatively worse as the spread between % of population that has identity X and the % of speakers that must be of identity X widens.

This is root of exception the OP was pointing out.