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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#641

Post by kelnos »

gatvol wrote: post #451
__loam wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What is your evidence for this: "... because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems ..." , "the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out ... "? What alternative reasons have you explored?

I don't think it's our responsibility to educate you about a phenomenon that has been discussed, analyzed, and written about extensively over the past couple decades. If you haven't seen evidence of this, then you've been living under a rock.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#642

Post by kelnos »

bmelton wrote: post #528
rs186 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are always allowed to create a club "boys who code" if that's something you are interested in.

If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who…

If you were to create a "boys who code" organization and get denied for use of a public space that a "girls who code" org has used, then a) you could sue for use of the space, citing the girls groups' use, and win, or b) you could sue saying that the girls group shouldn't be allowed to use it, and win.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#643

Post by roenxi »

th wrote: post #341

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works. A relevant tweet from 2016 ( https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595 ): > Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016 Increased diversity in communities usually comes from ac…

I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.

But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#644

Post by globular-toast »

paloblanco wrote: post #5

1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?

A business will always tend towards taking the maximum and giving the minimum. Believing anything else is wishful thinking at best and naive at worst.

So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#645

Post by lan321 »

Galanwe wrote: post #615

What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed). Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M. I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/par…

It's a general issue with budgeting grants but at the same time companies need to be talked to in numbers. If there's no known money jar, I don't believe anyone will partake and it'll all get more sketchy. 'Why did money appear for them but not for us?' type of thing

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#646

Post by globular-toast »

DEI is actually a bit of red herring here. It's worth reading again the commentary from simonw's blog:

> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!

This is the real problem. It's not about DEI really. It's the same problem as so much else this year: the US government is currently wildly unpredictable and doing business with such an entity is a liability.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#647

Post by amanaplanacanal »

3oil3 wrote: post #627
xdennis wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay. But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they: 1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination 2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of di…

I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing? Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have. Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it. Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/unifo…

We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#648

Post by amanaplanacanal »

rayiner wrote: post #559
KPGv2 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words, it went on for a few centuries like I said.

Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.

How else are they going to balance out all the legacy admissions?

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#649

Post by akimbostrawman »

klipt wrote: post #609
gcanyon wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?

"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"

If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.

It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#650

Post by akimbostrawman »

klipt wrote: post #476
th wrote: post #341

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works. A relevant tweet from 2016 ( https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595 ): > Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016 Increased diversity in communities usually comes from ac…

[flagged]

No because they obviously deserve it for there grand grand grand grand fathers sins and we still live in a patriarchy because 0.01% of men are part of the 1% richest so it's only right to punish the other 99.99%.
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