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The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

2019.phpce.eu

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Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#111

Post by listenallyall »

sp332 wrote: post #106
listenallyall wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely the worst kind of analysis. Find some results we don't like, then work backwards using bogus inputs (that are easily refuted, as tzs did below, or which themselves may have been biased, faulty, outdated, not directly relevant, etc) and arbitrary math to determine, yep, the process was biased! I just proved it! Let's call out these bad people! There's no possibility that I am wrong, it has to be tho…

Either the ratio is around 250:1, or they got insanely unlucky, or the sample was biased. What's another possible explanation?

No alternative explanation needed. The objective fact is they received 1 proposal from a woman out of 250. If you want to claim that ratio proves the process must be biased, you need to show some evidence, not a bogus math formula which was flawed from the beginning.

As other repliers have already stated: a) you chose a flawed survey to get your "10%" figure, b) the percentage of "women in open source" is far different, for a variety of reasons, than the percentage of women who are likely to submit a proposal to speak at a PHP conference in Germany, c) you dismiss any possibility that unusual ratios could possibly be due to reasons other than bias (is lung cancer biased because it overwhelmingly affects older people?)

You've offered zero fundamental evidence of bias (i.e. they filtered their mailing lists, they adjusted female speaker ratings, etc), other than the math doesn't work out the way you'd like, which isn't surprising given the invalid inputs and assumptions you started with.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#112

Post by toxik »

nl wrote: post #67
toxik wrote: post #3

Do metal working conferences cancel due to a lack of female participation? Getting women into the mix is nice, but... it’s computer science?

I've done some work in (metal) mining, and I can say that absolutely has female speakers at conferences.

I feel like you missed the point of the analogy by taking it too literally.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#113

Post by elp »

sagichmal wrote: post #71
EdwardDiego wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you propose those speakers do differently? I always find in life that you get better traction when you approach people with a solution instead of just a problem. So perhaps they could've said "Hey, I think it'd be good to increase speaker diversity, and I really recommend person X, she's amazing at Y, I could approach her and ask if you'd like?" Instead of just yelling "There's not enough women!"

But that is exactly what the second speaker did. The organizers refused.

The organizers said that call for papers had already closed. I.e this was late in the planning stage. (conf is 4 Oct) The speaker wasn't offering to help for the next conference.

I hope other conference organizers take note and work to improve diversity while also actively avoiding speakers who pull stunts like this.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#114

Post by belorn »

neilv wrote: post #84
ngngngng wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I read, I read in the second link that he wanted to cancel a bunch of the male speakers, and then have everyone work like mad to reach out to women to come speak. That's not a submission process at all. That's outreach.

> That's not a submission process at all. That's outreach. A lot of conferences seem to have a sort of selective outreach component to their call for papers. Conference organizers will go and post the CFP in various forums from which they'd like to get papers -- particular programming language forums, particular theory or practice forums, particular universities, etc. Some of this seems creative, like "we'd like to g…

Would be very insightful to learn where they did seek out and post a CFP.

From the article it implies they did not do that.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#116

Post by belorn »

sp332 wrote: post #41
mpweiher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How “broken”?

After a couple minutes of research, the lowest number I could find for women in CS was from https://web.archive.org/web/20141221112502/http://floss2013.... Without getting into how accurate it is, I'm just taking it as a very conservative estimate that 10% of OSS software programmers are women. So out of 250 submissions, we'd expect about 25 of them to be from women if the sample is unbiased. And the odds of having o…

In a Swedish town where I live there is an monthly sauna event. In the beginning they did not know how to advertise it so the first event they called it Sauna Extreme - an adventure, with baths like hot-and-cold and the grill. The second time they called it Wellness with the exact same baths, but with one extra bath with a hair pack.

It was fully booked for men during the first event, but only one woman joined. The second event, fully booked for women and only two men.

Third event they called it Wellness Evening, with no mentioning of any hair pack or grill, and it ended up fully booked for both men and women. Forth event similar.

The probability of those outcomes happening through naturally probability is extremely unlikely. It is almost like people will interpret subtle gender identity in events, and then have it impact their decision to join.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#117

Post by nl »

toxik wrote: post #112
nl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some work in (metal) mining, and I can say that absolutely has female speakers at conferences.

I feel like you missed the point of the analogy by taking it too literally.

No I understand the point and gave a good example showing how misguided it is.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#118

Post by toxik »

nl wrote: post #117
toxik wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you missed the point of the analogy by taking it too literally.

No I understand the point and gave a good example showing how misguided it is.

So because some mining conferences you were at had female speakers, every conference must have? I again think you didn’t really understand the point being made as you did not counter argue it very much at all.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#119

Post by pflenker »

jasonlotito wrote: post #75
curiousgal wrote: post #14

As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers. Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?

> As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers. Good thing that's not why they are withdrawing from the conference. Specifically, they are pulling out because the conference wasn't even wiling to work with them to find a more diverse speaker lineup. If nothing came out of that, then they would have gone. But the conference didn't even do tha…

Also, the conference was not cancelled because the speakers withdrew - it was cancelled because ticket sales plummeted after the speakers withdrew. One could argue that people where following the discussions and voted with their feet.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#120

Post by cannonedhamster »

sp332 wrote: post #87
curiousgal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do all men feel accepted, respected, and praised just because they are men? No, the ones that do have earned it. Like so, I personally would like to get invited to give a talk only because I am the best person out there who can do so on the topic at hand, not because some organizers feel like they have some sort of obligation to be politically correct.

Men are encouraged to go into CS just because they are men. https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-...

A group with a self interest to have a certain outcome exist find that outcome to exist. It's a bit hard to say that this is a well made study with that conflict of interest involved. Don't get me wrong there are definitely problems abound and studies to support that position, I just don't think Bustle or Sky are the rigorous organizations to lead that charge. I was never encouraged to go into technology, my family wanted be to go into law. I went into tech well before there was any real indication in schools to do so because it made me feel less lonely. There's also the risk of trying to over correct and pushing people into careers that they aren't suited for, and that affects both genders as well. A more troubling correlation has been that women enter a traditionally make dominated field pay for everyone in that field goes down. Why we would suddenly value a field less because of gender is an interesting problem to understand. Another issue is that traditional gender roles for parenting may contribute to the problem. There's no way currently to address that problem without massive societal changes or law specific to address that. The issue is more complex than just a simple men are told to go one place women the other.
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