Before the schedule was announced.. did the organizers get the speakers they wanted or did some decline?
Before that.. when CfP responses were rated, did the submitters provide relevant supporting material like a resume of previous speaking appearances (to demonstrate speaking skill) and blog posts, articles, etc (to demonstrate expertise in the topic).
Before that.. did the submitters have writing and speaking skills that made them comfortable to submit?
Before that.. was the CfP well-publicized to relevant groups, companies, etc?
Before that.. was the CfP entirely open? Was it invite only? Was it a blend of the two with only some of the slots open to the CfP?
Before that.. did the person believe they had the skills and expertise to submit?
Before that.. did the person actually have the skills and expertise to submit?
Before that.. did the person have a job or interests to give them the opportunity to learn those skills?
Before that.. did they get encouragement and support along the way?
Before that.. did they receive the education to get the job or choose those interests?
Before that.. did they believe they could learn and work in the industry?
Before that.. did the person have the aptitude for those skills?
If the number at the beginning of this process is small and every one of those steps chips away at the entire group - let alone those with particular genders, ethnicities, etc - of course the output is going to be low.
For example, my undergradate engineering school adopted a bunch of Girl Scout troops to encourage and grow interest in STEM. It has taken years but female enrolment has increased by 50%.. and they're not just shuffling from other schools. They're growing the pool of qualified candidates.
So I disagree with you. The blame does lie with "the people at the end".
> did they get encouragement and support along the way?
> did the person have a job or interests to give them the opportunity to learn those skills?
> did the person believe they had the skills and expertise to submit?
These reasons are exactly why quota systems are used.
If there isn't anyone from your particular group at a highly demanding conference panel, or visible in your industry, you're much less likely to become a part of it... even though you're more than capable of performing at that level if you put the time in.
Technical conferences don't exist to engender your preferred social change, they exist to impart knowledge to attendees, all of whom paid considerable sums to be there.
Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge', so they are a fundamentally social event. The 'hallway track' as it is known. If it weren't for the networking, conferences would be pointless as you could just do a local course or read up on the niche publications.
Open-source is not simply egalitarian. PostgreSQL (for example) doesn't try to apply egalitarian ideals to patch acceptance. Bad code is bad code, no matter who wrote it.
In the ideal, open-source is meritocratic, which also happens to be the ideal criteria applied to selecting conference papers.
> Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge' ...
Why do you think these are different things? Some of the best collaborations I've had have resulted from meeting the smart people presenting at conferences, and sharing knowledge.
If conferences break the signal-to-noise ratio by attempting to fill quotas rather than selecting noteworthy papers, then the smart people will stop attending; the social value AND the associated knowledge sharing will be diminished.
I'm pretty sure that pifflesnort got it correct. Egalitarian means that people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. But open source communities do not treat people equally. If you've never learned to write a good bug report, you're marginalized. If you've learned to program and have time to contribute, you're likely to be able to have a significant impact on the project that you're interested in.
It is true that the economic barriers to entry are fairly low. I've personally known multiple homeless people who found open source to be their gateway to learning a useful skill and getting a good job. (Most who know the ones that I am thinking of do not know this detail of their lives...) But there are other types of barriers to entry. Language skills, intelligence, interest, etc.
It is easy to ignore those requirements. But stop and think about the fact that significantly less than half of adults in the USA can read, write, and do math at a grade 8 level. A lot of the reasons why have to do with unequal opportunities (bad schools, families that discount learning, etc). The fact that open source communities ignore those people rather than actively seeking to give them access is a demonstration that open source is a meritocracy, not an egalitarian society.
Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal. A dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian in need of advice on wood will still seek a carpenter over a weaver.
What is a 'starting point'? Open source certainly doesn't provide equal starting points, because each individual is evaluated on merit, the acquisition of which is often tied to social and economic background.
Conferences don't provide equal starting points, for the same reason.
> Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal.
They are orthogonal. An egalitarian meritocratic society would give each member equal opportunity to achieve, but would judge the achievements of each member according to their merit.
Open source only concerns itself (like any sane organization whose mission is not social advancement) with merit, not with egalitarian questions of how merit was acquired.
That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.
There's not much controversy there, and like it or not, most people feel the same way.
You are not a technical conference. You are a person.
At a technical conference, focused on technical content: if you sacrifice the quality of that technical content for quotas, then you've produced objectively worse conference.
> That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.
What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?
Well spotted. The point is that the status quo is a choice, just as being more inclusive is a choice. Which is the better choice?
And your post has a couple of assumptions that I feel compelled to point out:
1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.
2. That conferences include talks based on some absolute value of merit.
3. That conferences are so amazing that everyone wants to go to them.
> What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?
Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."
Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.
> 1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.
No, judging content on the basis of anything other than direct merit will lead to inferior papers and talks.
> Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."
What do you want them to do exactly? They put out a call for papers, they get the papers they get. Of the roughly 200 accepted speakers (authors of papers) presented at Usenix, about 5% were female.
Usenix is well known. It's not new. The call for papers goes out every year. Research arms of corporations and universities send their employees.
So what, in your book, does Usenix do so wrong?
https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/tech-schedule/usenix...
Say that you put out a call for conference papers, but due to a bug in your mailing list software, only every other email is sent - 50% of potential participants are excluded. What do you think will happen to the quality of your conference?
Now let's say you find the bug after you've decided on your talk schedule. Should you should fix the bug and include the 50% of papers that you've missed? Isn't that unfair to the people who've already been selected?
So where is the problem, exactly?
That's only partly true, and even that part depends on what you mean by "better technical content"
It also depends on whose perspective you're measuring from.
If a conference is run purely as a business, then the "better choice" for the organiser is the one that has the highest return on investment (presumably "highest net profit"). And there are lots of things, over and above the merits of the content itself, that contribute to that. If your target audience is 30% women, but your speaker line-up is only 5% women, that might be a problem for you. It might cause some percentage of those women to decide not to attend. The alternative - creating an artificial quota of having women make up 30% of speakers, regardless of quality - might cause an even larger drop in attendance. There's a balance that's needed, and it takes work.
But even if we don't worry about that, "technical content" isn't a simple measure. If your conference has even a moderately broad scope, then you need to worry about the breadth of talks. Clearly a Ruby conference where all the talks are on Rails, is not an ideal lineup even if the best submissions (on individual merit) were all for taks on Rails. In terms of content, if nothing else, you need to worry about diversity.
So, if you're planning a Ruby conference, and you know that only 50% of your target audience are Rails users, but 90% of the papers submitted are for Rails talks, then it would appear that something has gone wrong in your process. It look like people have pegged you a a Rails conference, even though that's not your intent.
I'd argue that same applies to speaker demographics as well. If you think that 30% of your target audience are women, but only 5% of your submissions are from women, then there's a reasonable chance that something in the process caused the women not to submit papers. If that's the case, then your conference is going to suffer for it.
There a lots of things that conference organisers can do that either increase or decrease the diversity in their submissions/selection process. E.g.
- Placing too high an emphasis on previous speaking engagements in an industry segment where diversity has been lacking in the past.
- Having a selection panel that is overly skewed towards one group of people (selection bias)
- Putting out your call for papers in the wrong places (one that is skewed)
- Having a call for papers that contains biased language
Even if you are firmly decided on selecting speakers based purely on their content (even though, for some conferences, that might not produce the "best" result), there is work that can be done to make sure you're at least considering the widest selection of papers in the most effective way.
Right, and if their CFP is systematically discouraging some people from applying, or their review process is systematically undervaluing proposals from some people, and those people would give great presentations, then the conference is not going to be as good as it otherwise would be. Conferences that fail to take questions of gender representation seriously are depriving their attendees of great presentations from women. If you care about the quality of technical conferences, you should want to attend those which have a policy that tries to ensure good proposals won't be missed simply because of the gender of the presenter.
At 'serious' technical conferences, presentations are based on papers, papers are based on work already done. The conference itself is an end game of months or years of work that already happened.
At less serious conferences, talks, presentations, and panels are selected to maximize interest by choosing people of significant stature and interest in the community. Again, this is the end game of months or years of work that already happened.
Where is it the conferences responsibility (and to what advantage) to extend themselves to garnering talks and presenters from a minority industry segment (and which minority segments?). Do you actually have demonstrable evidence that presenters and papers of merit are being excluded from conferences? This would serve as evidence that conferences were failing in the missions to provide top tier content.
It seems that your position is focused more on who is presenting content than what the content actually is.
Did this actually improve the technical content of the conference, or did it simply redefine the objective measure by which PyCon determines "success" to include non-technical metrics? The latter seems to be the case, in which case, it's not a particularly valuable stratagem for a merit-focused technical conference.
Also: Why are women more valuable than stutterers at conferences?
The basic answer to that is that they're not - if you know someone who stutters, I would like to think that you'd encourage them to present at a conference if they had something valuable to present.
However, imagine that that conference is a brofest - they're not going to feel very included, are they? Bros are assholes after all, and they probably won't want to participate if they feel that they're going to be mocked or not listened to.
Being on stage in front of an audience who are tweeting about your physical attributes, not what you are saying; who are snarkily commenting about you being the token blonde; who are assuming you got there because of your birth, not your brains -- that's not a hindrance to speaking?
Even if none of those things are true, they can be running through the speaker's head, just as a stutterer is incredibly self-aware of their impediment. We create our own barriers.
The definition of stuttering involves having problems with physical speech. The definition of woman doesn't involve having problems with physical speech.
Stutterers are underrepresented in most conferences; even if you could get them up on stage, it would be a difficult presentation to listen give eloquently (and probably hard to listen to). Women are underrepresented at conferences, but it's not because they would have a problem presenting. Some people might have a problem listening to it, but that'd be largely because of their own issues.
Comparing stutterering - a physical (or perhaps mental) impediment - to females is insulting.
I've seen few female presenters bomb, and the ones that did - there were much easier explanations - no or little experience public speaker, didn't understand the topic, etc. The ones I've seen who know the topic and the audience and have spoken before in public are fine - no better than men. I do have occasion to listen to male speakers who stutter, and while I know they're smart people - they know their subject well - they can not present.
May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.
I agree wholeheartedly! I think that this is the sort of attitude which would be conducive to moving the state of affairs along. In these fights it's often lost that the problem at hand is that treating people in a way that makes them feel like they're not welcome and not respected is at the root of the issue.
So what? It's not like those men are going to find all employment doors shut to them. They weren't guaranteed jobs at IBM, and the assumption that they should have a say in the firm's hiring criteria and strategic goals demonstrates an almost laughable sense of entitlement.
Because it's kind of strange when I think of it. I've interviewed a lot of people in my life already and I can't remember a single time grades were brought forward or mattered. Is it an US thing?
On top of that, even if the company didn't consider them, their classmates probably knew where everyone fell in relation to each other. They would know if they got passed over for someone who had better grades than themselves.
I'm not saying that's definitely the case here, just that grades alone don't tell the whole story.
I don't care if you were pampered and that's why you got A's. If you have the necessary knowledge and are a hard worker, you have my vote.
What I said was nothing but perception.
If you work hard to get good grades, you are likely to work hard at your work place too.
Though its true not every hard working student gets good grades.
Just make sure you don't do it to anyone, like straight, white males who have the political strength to resist it or you'll never hear the end of it.
genuine/serious questions:
would you be okay with quotas in sports? music? movies? something like "30% of olympic 100m finalists should be allocated to minorities" etc?
I've seen students with laughable grades (no, I am not making this up) get into medical schools, because they are from underprivileged group. Would you be okay with them performing surgery on you?
</questions>
Quota system is a very dangerous game to play - it usually goes downhill quickly, even if the intentions are good and even if people who run it are super competent. There are numerous other ways to help the under privileged.
They'll not even notice after decades of this.
History has lots of people from the privileged class who ended up working to improve society as a whole. Bill Gates is great living example.
You present it as different things but it's exactly the same flawed idea.
"An estimation of your outreach" would only be different from quota if the number of good conference pitches sent in by men was equal or near equal to the number of pitches sent in by women.
Since the number of women in programming are far less than the men, that is obviously not the case (their respective total number of pitches would be unequal and hence their respective total of good pitches would be unequal).
Unless men and women Python programmers are something like 50-50, you cannot have something like 50-50 men and women Python conference speakers. At best, a fair outreach should be M-F, where M/F the respective male and female Python programmers ratio.
And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it.
Which might not be the case at all (it doesn't even have to be because women are, say, less nerdy and obsessive with coding: just assume, which is very plausible, that male bosses in the workplace don't assign them interesting enough problems in their Python work, and prefer males to be project leaders etc. Then, following that, fewer women will have interesting conference pitches to make). And there are 1000s of other factors like that.
Finally, not every field needs to have 50-50 representation anyway. We don't lament that there are far fewer women boxers or rugby players than men. Or that there are far fewer women coal miners or truck drivers than men. Or that there are far more women in fashion that men. Or than there are far more women in biology than men, etc etc.
We don't lament that there are far fewer women $foo than men
We don't, because we're in technology.
Some of my other hobbies are also male dominated and unrelated to technology, there's definitely an awareness of the situation and active efforts to recruit more women. On the flipside, I've seen some arguments about the biology situation, theorising that the reason there are more women in biology is cultural conditioning for girls interested in science (it certainly happened to me, but that's hardly solid data).
No, I'm not taking this for granted.
I even stated: "And that's assuming (and it's not guaranteed by any law of physics) that men and women Python programmers, in aggregate, are equally good and passionate with Python and doing conference worthy stuff with it."
>(Or, the inflammatory counter, what if women just aren't good at math and should be shopping instead - shifting it the other way?)
Could be entirely plausible too. Don't have any numbers though (could also be the inverse, women better at math).
But more plausible to me is an alternative explanation. What if not enough women (due to either nature or nurture) don't have the obsessive nature that being a coder and doing conference worthy stuff requires? I know men working meticulously on some stuff (from hacking to wood-working) for ages. Far less women doing so. I'm not judging, if anything it could be far smarter, personal-development-wise, than programming 10 hours straight at work and then again at home, in your "cave", as a hobby. So, perhaps women favor work-life balance more. Or men coders compensate with coding for other stuff (for example a lot that I know have subpar sex lives and are not exactly "party animals").
Women do plenty of obsessive hobbies. I know women who can spend an entire day (12+ hours) baking, for example. Sure, our brains are wired differently, but I think the idea that you have to be obsessive to present at a conference (and that females might not be as obsessive for whatever reason) doesn't quite hold up. There are plenty of conference-worthy subjects which might not be deeply meticulous coding topics, for example.
This has an obvious correction: put a counterweight on it in the form of a quota. Does this fix the illness? No. It is a pill, medicine to manage the symptoms of the illness while the illness is fought. The malady is diffused, the remedy is not, so it is easy to pick on the remedy - but it's better than doing nothing.
We have some guesses about what the "right" number would be, and a quota of 20% or 25% is hardly getting us there - it is ensuring a lower bound. How much injustice is really resulting from having a lower bound?
What numbers do you have to demonstrate that the function is broken? What percentage of our industry is made up of women, and what percentage of them are interested in presenting at a conference?
> This has an obvious correction: put a counterweight on it in the form of a quota. Does this fix the illness? No. It is a pill, medicine to manage the symptoms of the illness while the illness is fought. The malady is diffused, the remedy is not, so it is easy to pick on the remedy - but it's better than doing nothing.
Why do you believe that enforcing the selection of speakers on a basis other than their qualifications is better than doing nothing?
Are the speaker selectors favoring men? That should be possible to test for. If so, it needs to get clamped down on hard.
Are women less inclined to try to speak at these conferences? If so, why? It's likely that making presenting more female-friendly would be worth it.
Is this subfield just that male? If so, it's not the conference-organizers' place to deal with it, but someone should sniff around for active biases.
In short, this is suspicious enough to justify a real investigation, and I'd be very interested to read the results of one.
That doesn't sound like something to reject the null hypothesis over.
Furthermore, (% of industry that is women) x (% of women interested in presenting at a conference) is exactly what I was referring to when I talked about "outsourcing" the discrimination - the filter was set upstream.
Why is this a prima facie case proof of sexist qualification requirements? What evidence do you actually have?
At the 2012 American Academy of Nursing Conference, the expert panels were roughly 100% female. Is this prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications was being a woman?
[1] http://www.aannet.org/assets/docs/ConferenceMaterials/2012/c...
> Furthermore, (% of industry that is women) x (% of women interested in presenting at a conference) is exactly what I was referring to when I talked about "outsourcing" the discrimination - the filter was set upstream.
I fail to see the issue here. Conferences have to work with the pool of speakers that they have.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree, because yes, I easily read that as prima facie evidence that one of the most important qualifications is being a woman. I think it's a great example of the filter being set upstream - men face hurdles when trying to become a nurse, and face bizarre challenges when practicing as a nurse (although I believe they are still favored for promotions and prestigious placing).
It's not some kind of man-hating reverse discrimination, it's an attempt to correct very real and very pervasive institutional inequalities.
Your position also assumes that the parties performing evaluations have existing gender biases -- itself a form of stereotyping, discrimination, and bias.
Evaluating papers anonymously solves the problem you claim, while avoiding any issues with quotas or "man-hating reverse discrimination".
The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
What does this have to do with evaluating papers? Why would we divert ourselves from a technical mission to pick up an unrelated social cause?
> The so-called meritocracy you think exists does not. Its just structural discrimination of a different stripe.
The place to worry about correcting structural discrimination isn't at the point where it's already happened. That correction would be artificial and as such, detrimental to furtherance of our art and science.
The time to correct structural discrimination is long before anyone is submitting papers to present research they've already done.
Let's assume for the sake of this line of reasoning that the function for evaluating a speaker's ability is accurate. If you are looking to invite ten speakers to your conference and there is only one woman among the top ten speakers, it would make perfect sense if you only invited one woman. That makes you good at your job, not sexist.
Now how do we go about changing this? Well, one approach is what you're suggesting--affirmative action. There are certainly pros and cons to introducing such a minimum quota, but I find the article's assessment that the cons seem to substantially outweigh the pros to be very persuasive. Inviting inferior speakers in an effort to increase the representation of a specific group at a conference is problematic for two main reasons: (1) it results in a conference that is expected to be worse quality and (2) it deprives women who actually are evaluated to be in the top ten speakers from knowing, and from having other people know, that their value to the conference came from their speaking ability rather than their second X chromosome. Additional ways in which the quota approach is problematic are that (3) it discriminates against the many other groups that are under-represented at tech conferences, as well as the oft-debated argument that (4) inviting a worse female speaker over a better male speaker is unfair for the man.
If we suppose the quota system does more harm than good, what alternatives do we have? That's the million dollar question! The only answer I've got is to focus our efforts on addressing the sources of women's under-representation in computing in general, such as encouraging female students to study computer science, getting schools to examine whether their classroom environment discourages female students from pursuing CS, and help software companies identify whether their workplace atmosphere discourages women and what steps they can take to address that. Forcing conferences to invite more women or businesses to hire more women is a highly problematic and very short-term hack. Identifying and fixing the structural barriers to women in computing is a highly difficult but very long-term solution.
Outreach to encourage more submissions from women, and looking at downstream ("lesser") conferences, to help those also encourage more submissions from women, seem like the right steps to me. It can be self-perpetuating though. You go to a conference and no women are speaking, you subconsciously think you don't belong there.
But hey; if you go to a conference and 20% of the speakers are women, yet 5% of the attendees are, isn't that a different kind of red flag?
Having said that, a human bias in gender does need to be removed if it exists. If this bias is for or against the inclusion of women, it should be removed.
Applying a counterweight to achieve some superficial quota based on a societal demand just degrades the quality of the function and it's integrity.
How ironic it would be to apply such a fix for a 'tech' conference.
Another way is to use percentages as an indicator of how well your outreach is going. If you have, say, 5% women/minority/whatever speaking in the first year of your conference, that metric could act as a swift kick up the butt that you're not doing enough outreach, your CFP is poor, you're not promoting the CFP in a diverse way, etc. You work and improve, and then in year two you might notice you ended up at, say, 30%. Hurrah!
Both approaches involve percentages and measurements, yet the second is not an attempt at fulfilling a "quota" (even if there's a target % to reach) and should be more palatable to everyone while still ensuring efforts are made to increase diversity.