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Instead of every of them recommending a woman for one of the time slots at the conference or any non-white-male they just throw a fit like spoiled kids and say they are not going until someone else fixes the issue at hand for them, this kind of behavior is one of the things that deepens the gap between people in favor of diversity everywhere not by increasing diversity but alienating people that think different and c…
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?
Tangentially related, the second post linked in that announcement is from Larry Garfield, who was involved in some PHP/Drupal controversy a few years back — https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2017/10/drupal-gor-ayelet.htm...
The reason given was that only one woman submitted a proposal from over 250 submissions. Lots of discussion on twitter about how talks were chosen. Not many brought up the fact that the submissions process itself was apparently broken.
If you read through the second link he mentions how he tried to work with the organizers to improve their submission process and reach more diverse speakers and they opted not to.
I used to be involved in access work for those from underprivileged backgrounds.
It's very difficult to get poor kids to apply to University even if they have the grades, for reasons I expect are pretty similar (social environment, not 'fitting in', having few role models, etc).
Going back further - tons of them simply don't have the grades or skills, because they weren't interested early on, or weren't supported, or whatever else.
They fall behind at an early age. They're stuck in an environment that doesn't support them.
Changing the statistical makeup of people at that sort of level - at the end of the funnel, after all of the filtering - is really difficult. You need good reason to do so. It's still not clear to me that it actually makes sense - is the world actually better off if half the Ivies are made of poor kids, or have you just shuffled around status (is it zero sum)? Do you get better results - what are the better results you're looking for?
This stuff is difficult.
And also, if women want to participate they can submit a request to have a talk. There's no reason to run around trying to recruit speakers to adhere to the completely irrational narrative of the sjw-extremists. This is becoming utterly silly in the society as a whole. Grow up people. This is a tech conference. If it is 100 percent male, so what? Women are of course welcome, but there's no reason running around, hauling them in. Is there folks running around hauling in men to speak at knitting conferences? Honestly, this is a non-issue. The diversity mania has gone too far. What matters is if presenters are good, not if they are gay, white, black, brown or whatever.
I'm reading through the Twitter thread, but I can't decipher the exact issue(s). Did the organizers select a lower ratio of diverse speakers than applicants? Were there very few diverse applicants and the organizers decided none of them qualified?
From 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…