61–70 of 171 posts
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:…
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?
You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening conference spots. Conference spots are open to at least somewhat-experienced people who already are committed to the industry, and no one joins to speak at a 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…
That said, what is the focus on individual diversity good for? It's the system that holds people back, and as the parent poster says, no amount of individual effort at the end of the funnel is going to make any difference.
It's become increasingly clear that no, tech is not just about tech. Tech has a huge impact on society and if your tech conference only has male speakers you aren't trying hard enough to make your conference reflect this.
Further, if your tech group isn't actively working to bring people from other backgrounds into it then it becomes an echo chamber.
Echo chambers are the worst, because people don't realise that's what they are in.
This isn't some random political position, it's something based on real, measurable results where echo chambers make horrible technical decisions because of real-world blindness.
I do machine learning for a living, and there are some particularly notorious examples of this happening in my field. The most obvious one is "Gender from Iris Images" where an entire series of papers by male-only teams ended up being discredited by a single devastating paper by (apparently) the first female to look at the problem. The paper title gives away the whole story: Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?[1]
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:…
There are things in life more important than tech conferences. Quality in tech should not override human rights, civil rights, people's health and relationships, etc. This could be a long list, tech isn't even close to the top.
The only number I've seen for this conference is one woman submitter out of 250, which isn't even close to matching the proportions of the community.
Earlier 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…
I see where are you coming from, but the solution you're proposing is not workable as there are infinite amount of marginalised groups, unfortunately. :( picking one (eg. women) won't result in a fairer society.
Do metal working conferences cancel due to a lack of female participation? Getting women into the mix is nice, but... it’s computer science?
> 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…
> If they had tried and were unsuccessful I'd be more forgiving, but you need to at least try. And when multiple speakers offer to work with you to reduce costs so that you can at least try, that should be taken seriously.
It sounds like he took issue with what he took as a complete lack of effort in trying to solicit submissions from women.
I think that is quite reasonable, especially since he went out of his way to frame this as a "way to improve" rather than a "reason to hate"
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…
> 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…