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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

#41

Post by sp332 »

mpweiher wrote: post #15
sp332 wrote: post #4

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.

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 only one woman would be... not sure if I did this exactly right but something like (0.1 * (0.9 ^ 249) ) * 250 = 10 ^ -10. Kinda looks like the submission process was biased.

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

#43

Post by duaoebg »

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?

It's a virtue signal in an industry that demands it.

A weird but predictable side effect of using affirmative action to promote women is that statistically attendees will see female presenters as worse. (Availably heuristic / selection criteria bias).

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

#44

Post by Yver »

larkeith wrote: post #7

That's a shame, but I can't say I disagree with the two blog posts linked in the page. Such speaker lineups only exacerbate the lack of diversity in tech, and, given the prior year's lineup, the organizers had the opportunity to work on outreach this year. Hopefully a new conference will supersede this one (if there's not already alternatives, I'm unfamiliar with the PHP community). Props to the speakers who stood up…

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.

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

#45

Post by LudwigNagasena »

throwanon77 wrote: post #27

This is really a non issue. Conference cancelled, who cares? 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…

First guess is that people who wanted to visit it care.

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

#46

Post by EdwardDiego »

xrd wrote: post #18
mattigames wrote: post #6

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…

You sound really frustrated with this outcome. What would you propose those speakers do differently? A follow up question: why do you say that would be more effective than what they did? (And, I would ask you, is that something that still maintains their commitment to diversity, since they all mentioned that was more important than speaking opportunities?)

> 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!"

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

#47

Post by mopsi »

sp332 wrote: post #4

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.

All his life, Shloime hoped to win the lottery. Each week, he’d pray to God intently, pleading that this be the week he’d finally win. For years he prayed for the lottery – but he never won. Finally one day, in the middle of Shloime’s fervent prayers, a heavenly voice was heard in the synagogue: "Shloime, buy a ticket already!"

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

#48

Post by lallysingh »

ngngngng wrote: post #20

> we always struggled to get women from outside of Drupal to submit to that track, despite Drupal itself having a relatively large female population. We actively reached out to women both in the PHP community and local to the event and still sometimes had no submissions from women ^^ From the second link, blog post about a guy dropping out. I'm so lost. So this guy drops out because the organizers won't go to great l…

Great lengths? What "great lengths" were they asked to do here?

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

#49

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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…

Women are less assertive and more risk averse. This conference is not any different from any other conference, the field in the whole or society at large. This particular phenomenon was even highlighted in nature multiple times:

https://www.nature.com/news/why-women-talk-less-at-conferenc...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07049-x

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

#50

Post by javagram »

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…

That assumes that women submit talks to conferences at the same rate as men.

I doubt that’s actually the case. But 1/250 does seem very low.

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