ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

Null hypothesis. YOU are making an unsubstantiated claim. What is YOUR proof of this structural racism. And feel free to define your terms, because I have no effin clue what 'structural racism' is.

Here's an alternative explanation, people are influenced by the sub-cultures they are in and ideas that go viral in one sub-culture, may not go viral in another. In the early 1900s professional basketball was dominated by Jews. Why basketball? I don't know. It just happened to strike a chord with that specific population, in that specific time.

I'm not saying this is the reason, but what it is, is an example that YOU have to dismiss or account for to prove YOUR claim.

>If the answer is "self selection," explain to me what could possibly cause women and black people to self-select out of high paying interesting jobs?

An average salary for a radiologist is $350,000/year. Why aren't you a radiologist? I'll tell you why I'm not. I would rather shoot myself than spend the amount of time it takes to become a radiologist because I have no interest in it. I have no interest in memorizing massive amount of latin names and reading volumes of biology and anatomy text books. Similarly, if you don't love programming, programming is an insanely boring and tedious profession. You may sit in-front of a computer screen for days trying to find a bug that occurs sporadically under some very specific conditions. I find that fun, others who have no interest in it will want to shoot themselves too.

So to answer your question: "I don't know" but if your criteria is human irrationality, I can go on and on and on and on... Why are middle-class kids borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to private liberal arts colleges with no real hope of landing a job that will provide them an income to pay of those loans? Come to think of it, why do humanities degrees even exist? Why do people buy lottery tickets when investing the equivalent money will net them a significantly higher return rate?

Humans are not rational agents. We're driven by emotion.

Tech isn't new. Why haven't women chosen to enter tech in the same numbers they've chosen other male-dominated fields?

How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia.

What is your point?

There's absolutely a stigma against not confirming to prevailing norms, which is a bit of a different discussion. Also the mess that is putting hundreds or even thousands of adolescents in a confined space with minimal oversight.

>Uh huh. Can you quantify that? Or did you just sit down and think really really really hard about it so it must be true.

Why did you get into it?

>Is that actually a real problem?

Yes. Though, representation generally is probably a better way to have said it. Though availability of role models and mentors with similar life experience is a factor as well.

>Are you saying a white kid will be dissuaded from playing basketball, or even being an NBA fan because the best players are black?

Fandom and participation aren't the same things, and while there's some overlap between former participation and later fandom in sports, it's far from 1 to 1.

I'm not sure if white kids would be discouraged due to lack of representation in the NBA. All other things being equal, yes, that's a likely outcome. But all other things are not equal. Race and sports in the US is an interesting topic in its own right.

>In similar spirit, are you really trying to argue that a young girl will not be able to be inspired by Woz, or Jobs, or Elon Musk because they are men?

Not at all. But a lack of representation has a few different impacts. At the personal level, individuals find it easier to identify with folks who they see as being like them. What exactly like them means varies, but the younger the child, the less abstract they tend to be. Second, parents and teachers are influenced by lack of representation, so it feeds back into a loop of lack of community encouragement, which doesn't help.

>What dystopian, ugly world are you living in?

The same one as you, of course.

The true equality would be when the conference organizers see 12 good presentations, and don't even think to dig into what identity class they represent (unless the conference is specifically organized to represent identity classes). When did you last seen statistics about hair color or eye color of conference presenters? How about blood type? Maybe AB- people are underrepresented? You get the idea.