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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

#71

Post by sagichmal »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #46
xrd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

But that is exactly what the second speaker did. The organizers refused.

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

#72

Post by shkkmo »

Yver wrote: post #42

There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the organizers to find more women for them. "Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.

There is something heart warming about people making personal sacrifices to promote divirsity.

"Here, take back some of the money you were using to pay for our travel and use it to bring in some female speakers" said the male speakers.

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

#73

Post by jbob2000 »

Yver wrote: post #42

There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the organizers to find more women for them. "Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.

It’s very patriarchal, the men still control the event. They used their power to end the event when there are probably many people, women included, who would have liked it to continue so they could attend. But no, daddy event organizer knows best, make sure to follow him and listen to what he says!

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

#74

Post by larkeith »

numakerg wrote: post #40
larkeith wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the second and third links (both blog posts rather than Twitter), only 1 out of 250+ submissions was from a woman, so the latter. Presumably a similar situation occurred in 2018, as there was a single female speaker out of the 39-person lineup.

>only 1 out of 250+ submissions was from a woman Mark didn't cite a source for this, which is what I was looking for in the Twitter thread.

Oh, that's a good point. It might be sourced from crell's post: "According to them, they had only a single woman submit a session proposal this year...", which was from conversations with the organizers, so potentially nonverifiable.

You could probably check Mark's other claim more easily: "...the line-up last year was almost all male as well, just one woman out of 39 speakers."

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

#75

Post by jasonlotito »

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?

> As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers.

Good thing that's not why they are withdrawing from the conference. Specifically, they are pulling out because the conference wasn't even wiling to work with them to find a more diverse speaker lineup. If nothing came out of that, then they would have gone. But the conference didn't even do that.

> Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?

Then PHPCE wouldn't have been for you, along with all the other tech conferences I've attended, as they generally had talks that weren't strictly PHP.

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

#76

Post by shkkmo »

sz4kerto wrote: post #66
pluma wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All marginalised groups? What are those? Are people living in poorer countries marginalised? Older developers? Obese people? People with childhood traumas who suffer from anxiety disorders? Should we have quotas for all these? 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…

> Should we have quotas for all these?

Nobody proposed a quota. The idea is to improve outreach so that you get a wider range of high quality submissions to pick from.

> the solution you're proposing is not workable as there are infinite amount of marginalised groups, unfortunately.

Clearly, there are not a infinite number of marginalize groups.

> :( picking one (eg. women) won't result in a fairer society.

It would. The society would not be perfectly fair but it would be fairer.

That doesn't even have to be about fairness. There is knowledge and experience that is going underutilized because it is held by groups of developers that are underrepresented in these conferences.

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

#77

Post by jasonlotito »

Yver wrote: post #42

There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the organizers to find more women for them. "Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.

> There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there

That's not why they aren't attending. They aren't attending because the conference wasn't willing to put in any effort to try.

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

#78

Post by jasonlotito »

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…

Except they were willing to help with that. They were willing to help and contribute financially.

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

#79

Post by bonoboTP »

mises wrote: post #62
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?

I wish more people realized that if you want to increase representation of a population, you're looking at the wrong part of the pipeline by trying to get more of that group at the conference (beyond a reasonable effort). If some one is passionate about increasing that group, it makes much more sense to try to address this at the educational stage. You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening c…

The idea is that to increase the number of girls in the beginning of the pipeline, they need to see a path ahead, see role models and not feel weird about their career choice. This needs to be done in many parts of the pipeline at once.

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

#80

Post by shkkmo »

adonnjohn wrote: post #55

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:…

> Optimizing for non-sex factors, you would expect the selected lineup to more or less match the proportions of notable men and women in the space. If that holds true, then the issue is much further up the line in this case

Except that is not the case. There are disproportionately more male speakers than there are male PHP developers.

> Do we cancel future events solely on this premise? Seems like a terrible idea to me.

The events were not directly canceled due to a lack of diversity, but due to a complete lack of effort to solicit a diverse range of submissions.

The organizers have committed to making an effort in future years.

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