KatieConf - Hackdot

Re:KatieConf by incongruity on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @11:50AM (#11954827)

While I think your point is superficially valid, I'd ask you this – what if you had the power to change something that you admit is less than ideal (i.e.: the lack of a wide variety of speakers, or even the exclusion of a group) – if you had that power and didn't use it, wouldn't you be part of the problem?

All of this is a vicious circle – women don't apply to be speakers at many tech conferences in equal numbers as men, possibly in large part because they don't attend in equal numbers as men and that happens in large part because it's clear they're not amongst peers – i.e.: there aren't women who are speaking in equal numbers as men and they're not seeing women in attendance in equal numbers as men, so they're less inclined to feel like it's a place for them.

Where does that system of subtle/unintentional exclusion end? Why shouldn't it be the role of the conference to encourage a breaking of that cycle?

PyCon US is a good example of a conference that did just that...

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Re:KatieConf by stevetrewick on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @02:03PM (#11955764)

Aren't amongst peers? I mean I get the concern about gender imbalance, really I do, but to feel that someone is a 'peer' in a professional context really shouldn't require identical genital configurations, surely?

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Re:KatieConf by incongruity on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @02:55PM (#11956135)

First off – gender isn't always equal to genitals – I gather you're trying to be light hearted in that but it's an example that highlights the fact it can be hard to understand situations outside of the mainstream.

If you reject my explanation for why there are so few women in tech and in tech conferences, I'd request you offer another one that doesn't depend on things like "they don't like math or technology", etc. The data shows that women leave tech/IT/engineering fields – why is that?

Explanations like the one I offered are simple and make sense, (of course, IMHO) and it's not really as much conjecture as you might think. A very close analogy can be seen in Schelling's Model of Segregation: http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg... – essentially, it's an agent based model that shows how segregation can evolve from even a minor preference for being those similar to one's self.

It's not an indictment of men or women in tech, but it shows how even small preferences can end up having big impact.

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