241–250 of 283 posts
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If you searched for this, you would find multiple programs trying to do just that. The difference is that it doesn't make the news because there isn't a reactionary movement which sees that as an existential threat.
There isn't a reactionary movement that sees "women in tech" as an existential threat. The "reactionaries" you're alluding to are properly known as "liberals" or "egalitarians".
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What's outlined in the article doesn't meet the burden of proof. There was a conflict and OP solipsistically experienced it as a big deal. Meanwhile, there's plenty of oppression and destitution in the world, but let's all focus on some low-level drama because it's more entertaining.
>doesn't meet the burden of proof. What burden of proof?
>Nevertheless, we didn’t expect a threatening reaction followed by several emails, Twitter DMs, persistent phone calls and Whatsapp messages. She even texted my girlfriend, one of the organizers of the conference, whose telephone number is not public and wasn’t given to her at any moment. At the same time, she started contacting other speakers of the conference. At that point you know you made the right choice... the…
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What is your response to the author's point that "ability and topics" are abstract concepts that don't take into account how people engage with a conference?
I think the author makes sense with that. People should be comfortable and feel safe, but then the author goes on to explicitly talk about gender and what I assume are racial minorities. I don't think that race and gender are the only disadvantaged groups in the world. Things like disability, mental illness, and country of origin can have a much bigger impact on whether somebody could become a speaker. Depending on h…
I do understand their lived experience often differs from that of most of us and thus they can provide value sharing it, but that is not really the kind of normalization we should aim to achieve. In a similar vein, I'm disappointed whenever women speakers are still predominantly presenting gender issues. This might be necessary for now to break all those self reinforcing feedback loops that lead us to the current status quo, but just shows how long the road ahead of us still is.
> but that doesn't mean we should try to make the conference have an equal amount of disabled people as speakers
Pretending like anyone would generally want 50:50 representation of disabled is a bit of a straw man, isn't it? Its just that half of all humans tend to be female, thus this particular split when talking about sexes.
> It makes more sense to pick topics and technical ability in the vast majority of cases, because that's what people are there for.
I'd expect them to have done pretty much that, considering only 2 of 9 speakers are female.
Insanity. If only her name could be published. People like that deserve to face consequences for their actions.
The name can be found by searching for 5 min on twitter, starting with the name of the conference and going down until you reach posts that are not announcements.
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No, I believe the whole compensation argument misses the point. There are males who want to be educators and are actively discouraged from doing the job. Compensation is not a factor in their decision or the employer decision. Its a prejudice against males in early childhood education. If imbalance in IT is bad then it should also be addressed in education. Compensation isn't the problem.
Discouraged by whom, and how?
I've been a co-convener for two Python conferences in Vancouver. The conferences were small ( For me, the key sources of stress were: 1. hoping that tickets and sponsorship would cover our costs (at some point you have to pay for your venue, flights for your keynotes, etc. and this happens before ticket sales open). I think that we lost a few hundred dollars on the first conference and donated a few hundred dollars t…
Experience tells me author is probably in the wrong here based on this sentence alone. This screams of those extreme lefties that want to police everybody else with their safe spaces and trigger warnings, then deplatform and unperson anyone who doesn’t agree with their agenda or worldview. Author should have disinvited those people instead.
”It was a difficult decision in which we prioritized the participation of the public that had reached out to us while also knowing that many people, especially women, wouldn’t come to the conference if we did nothing about this situation.”
This reeks of BS to me. We are supposed to believe that the presence of this particular woman at a conference will discourage women from attending? What the hell?
The reason for the extreme reaction was likely because it pissed them off that these extremists got their way, and successfully censored and unpersoned another victim. Admit it, you’d be pissed too.
If you don’t like one of the speakers, and you’re an adult, you skip that talk. Stop creating drama and find a real purpose in life other than being a professional victim.
Sorry to hear about the harassment, thats never fun to deal with. On the plus side, sounds like OP made the right call to disinvite the person from the conference. You can tell an awful lot about a person by how they handle rejection.
As long as that speaker was one of many, I wouldnt have uninvited them. If the audience has an issue with one speaker out of 10, they can take a lunch break then. If it's one out of 2, I can see why they might not want to attend. Using inclusion or exclusion to punish someone for past actions I would try to avoid at all costs. If someone has broken the law, the legal system is there to do punishment. It isn't your ro…