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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. Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?
Tangent that may be relevant here. 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…
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 environment. hyper focus on standardized testing and curriculum, which also needs to be changed, seems suffocating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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?
Well one way to think about it is to view the current structure (one of male dominated events) is already enforcing a system that isn't just about PHP. It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently sit in the back. The attempts by speakers and organisers to level this field is trying to get the events to just be about PHP. However they realize that things are very off balance already…
That's quite a bold claim. Can you delineate this "structure", since you seem confident that the organizers are making use of it to be certain that women won't be able to participate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well one way to think about it is to view the current structure (one of male dominated events) is already enforcing a system that isn't just about PHP. It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently sit in the back. The attempts by speakers and organisers to level this field is trying to get the events to just be about PHP. However they realize that things are very off balance already…
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.
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.
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 events, thus becoming more underrepresented and ultimately marginalised.
Ironically a good solution for that is having more "women's events". Women-only events to strengthen the marginalised group, women-presenting-but-open-to-all-attendees events to settle in and finally quotas in general events to counteract the bias.
Except this is not only true for women but for all marginalised groups.
What a weird and frustrating circumstance to be in. It's definitely disappointing that the organizers could not work through this. I understand that women candidates may be disproportionately hard to line up, but is there any evidence that the promoters put in the extra effort to find them? More importantly, should they be obligated to do so in the first place when the aim of the conference is quality in technology:…