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.
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?