There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the organizers to find more women for them. "Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.
There is something heart warming about people making personal sacrifices to promote divirsity. "Here, take back some of the money you were using to pay for our travel and use it to bring in some female speakers" said the male speakers.
The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
151–160 of 171 posts
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#152From the Twitter thread: > “Everyone has the same chances” is the exact problem. What are you doing to elevate women and POC? How are you showing your support as an ally and actively encouraging access to these “equal chances”?! These people have gone off the deep end. If you aren't actively following their political playbook you're to be shouted down. You can't even just opt out of participation in their crusade, if…
Spare yourself the headache of reading politically charged debates on Twitter. It’s been a megaphone war platform since day one. Shout the loudest to win. I think it’s a real shame to cancel what seems like a useful conference for an undesirable truth about their demography.
As long as there are no good alternatives that fit their perfectionist ideological worldview then no one can have fun or live their life without constant disruption.
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#154Earlier 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?
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#155What group will be offended next year..
What I find hilarious os that all this storm is coming from a group if men, as well as the vast majority of comments here in HN. Men trying to rationalise something related to women. Would be good to hear female voices in here... why was there only 1 application? Having studied in an all boys school, this looks to me as the times when me and my friends would get together to discuss how to approach a girl, or what wou…
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This stuff is difficult. i don’t think it’s that difficult. the government finds a way to spends billions and trillions of dollars on tons of stuff that has no meaningful impact. if the government cared, they would increase the budgets of schools to fund good teachers’ salaries. if i could pull a six figure salary teaching, i would do it in a heartbeat. but there’s no way i would teach in this current educational e…
These are very complex systems with lots of variables and interdependencies/connections between the variables. Suggesting that simple, direct, change of the variable that has direct linkage to pretty much all other parts of the system, will achieve some specific result, is almost certainly wrong. In fact, pretty much every mechanism taught of how to effect change in large scale systems says not to do that. In this ca…
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it be better to leave outreach programs to outreach groups? This is a conference about programming and "single responsibility principle" is a fairly popular concept there.
From one techie to another: people aren't code. We're not rational actors in a vacuum, treating us like we are is a leaky abstraction that will break in prod. The problem isn't simply "there aren't enough women", the problem is "we only hear from the same group of people with similar lived experiences". The problem is self-reinforcing: because women are underrepresented at those events, they're not attending those ev…
Politics should be discussed on political events, not technical ones.
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone appreciates how goddamned difficult it is to run an organization, especially a volunteer one, well. If you belong to a group, especially one that hosts events at least once a year, and you feel like it's run "adequately well", it's probably run better than 95% of the organizations out there. Head and shoulders above. You should take the time to thank the organizers for doing as well as they do. I…
At least 2 of the presenters have direct experience doing exactly this, they appreciate how hard it is and they also offered to help.
What I have is sympathy for people who discover at the "last minute" that they have fucked up. It's never a situation I like being in, and it brings out better things in some people and worse things in others.
Uncle Bob started one of his presentations with a call out to notice the shortage of women in the room and an ask that people try to think about fixing that. I think a more productive approach for these presenters would be to say, "Look, I'm gonna present this year, but I'm gonna mention this in my presentation, and I'd like to help you figure this out for next year or this is the last time I'll be presenting with you." Nobody is on the spot, you have time to reason with people and appeal to their values instead of threatening them and their conference.
Daryl Davis doesn't get people to leave the KKK by issuing ultimatums. If a black blues musician can have a productive conversation with a Klan member we can have an adult conversation about representation in volunteer run tech conferences.
What kind of pisses me off about this SJW thing is that it's a lot of people who have only recently discovered that their world view is wrong and they are in what someone brilliantly called 'the asshole phase' of new understanding. Now they're punishing people for being a couple years behind them on the clue train.
My classmates decades ago were pointing out and volunteering to address these sorts of inequalities. One in the general case, the other in the specific case of CS degrees. None of this is even a little new and I have some pretty bad whiplash from the sudden uptick in activity and anger.
I love safe spaces. Some of the best, most at-ease times of my life have happened in someone else's safe space. I may not know everything about how they get built, but I know this for sure: You can't create them by threatening people.
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#159Earlier 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-...
Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least 2 of the presenters have direct experience doing exactly this, they appreciate how hard it is and they also offered to help.
I think I tried to hard to make it short and sweet but lost a bit in translation. I'm not supporting their reaction but there aren't enough people out there crazy and skilled enough to run an annual event that pulls people in from hundreds of miles away. I belonged to such a group when I was too young to understand how much work it took for them to make it look easy. And I recall someone trying to replace the leader…
The presenters who canceled their presentation didn't go out and say "nobody should go", they didn't accuse anyone of being sexist. They saw an issue and reached out privately first to address it. There organizers were unable to address it this year have said they would open a dialogue to address it.
Their response has been pretty darn level headed and non-acrimonious. What I don't understand is what they deserve the bilious language you are directing at them? It seems to me like you are having the exact type of knee-jerk reaction that you are accusing other people of.