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A comment on Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out.

Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by MrScruff on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @05:51AM (#5399848)
As a non-American who occasionally attends conferences in the States, this entire incident is rather frightening. I really could not imagine a similar reaction in Europe. It reminds me of the situation last year where a British ruby conference had to be abandoned after negative publicity resulting from tweets, made by non-attending Americans about the entirely white male lineup of speakers.

I don't think this cultural difference is because women and minorities are more oppressed here. I think it's more a result of the simplistic view some Americans take on issues of discrimination.

Or maybe I'm wrong, maybe people do feel oppressed here and there's just less of a culture of complaining. I'm not convinced though.

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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by Argorak on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @06:14AM (#5399929)
Actually, brit ruby was initially called out for calling themselves a "diverse conference", which was a very valid point: they had nothing to back that up. The resulting shitstorm was inappropriate, though, and I am very sad that it got cancelled.
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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by gngeal on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @04:44PM (#5403507)
"they had nothing to back that up."

You mean that they received an insufficiently broad (or overlapping) range of presentation submissions?

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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by Argorak on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @05:18AM (#5406245)
They didn't have a CFP when that happened. All invited speakers.
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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by MrScruff on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @06:17AM (#5399935)
Ok, that's possibly unfortunate wording but it could have referred to the attendees rather than the presenters.

At the time the complaint was that they hadn't applied quotas to the presenters which is not the same thing as discrimination.

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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by Argorak on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @06:27AM (#5399978)
Not wanting to discuss that in detail (again), but the initial complaint about brit ruby was okay and also accepted by the conference. The whole thing afterward was sadly very messy. This blog post sums it up quite good:

http://testobsessed.com/2012/11/diverse-discussions/

In my opinion, its not a good example, as it is a relatively civil discussion about an important topic gone horribly wrong.

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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by norabean on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @08:23AM (#5400418)
You're not too far from right, but you're not fully right either. America is very much a spot where anyone can sue or whine and get people fired.
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Re:Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out by stefantalpalaru on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @06:17PM (#5410814)
>I really could not imagine a similar reaction in Europe

As far as I know, nobody was fired, but at last year's EuroPython a male participant was publicly shamed for twitting an "inappropriate" joke while eating at a restaurant[1].

[1] http://www.roguelynn.com/words/really/

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