As a European, I keep getting baffled about how out of hand these things seem to be in the USA.
I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception).
All this without safe spaces, forced quotas at conferences, codes of conduct and people that police every word you say. There are laws against harassment of course, and that's enough.
Of course, it's not perfect, but there are rarely if ever any big incidents due to discrimination (to my knowledge).
Looking at the USA instead I see people getting offended pretty much for anything. As a consequence discussion gets neutered to the point where everybody is afraid to express even small controversial ideas or make the next "dongle" joke for the fear of repercussions.
I have also seen a lot of videos of people getting beaten in the streets for holding up signs with which "offended" people did not agree. Is that freedom of speech? We had such things in our history in the "old continent" and they were definitely not called this way.
This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. Here in Europe to me it feels much safer and open minded, with all the flaws and imperfections that there might be.
I definitely agree with this view, and it's perhaps also why I really can't understand choices like these, to cancel an event, because of the genders of the people speaking? Why does that even matter?
If what another commenter mentioned[0][1], that they did blind-reviews of the papers, then this is actually quite appalling to me and sends the reverse signal that we don't really care about your paper, as long as you fill up our quota.
I also deeply believe that this is inherently the wrong way to fix this kind of problem. It's like treating symptoms instead of actually treating the underlying disease. If the papers accepted were all male, then why not ask "why was it only papers from men that were qualified enough?" or "why did only men submit papers for our event?". If the former is true than we need effort into investigating why more women aren't writing these papers (be it quality or just plain quantity), and if the latter then look into the marketing/awareness on the paper submitting process.
EDIT: Included links to the comments that mentioned the blind-reviews.
--
Semi-related: While I haven't seen it, I saw an interview with Jordan Peele about the movie "Get Out". He mentions that he wanted to tackle the fact that while Obama definitely helped the US move to less racist tones, it was never really solved, it is just there hiding under the skin with super-awareness to not be racist, which arguably is not the desired effect - there shouldn't be awareness at all about race period. I feel like this effect is somewhat similar to what is happening here, and the fact that the US is not able to hold any reasonable discussion at all on these topics doesn't make me optimistic on their capability to handle these issues. I feel like PC culture is causing way more harm than good.
The US is currently deep in a dark age. With a country this big, it may not be obvious as everything is mostly operating as it was in the past, only slowly failing over time. If you look closely, however, you can see that we have pretty much given up on education, science, and the pursuit of truth. Actually, you don't have to look very close anymore at all; it's beyond obvious. We make a big deal out of people graduating high school, a feat that I have no doubt certain non-human primates are qualified for at this point given how much we've dumbed down our education. We have no problem churning out uneducated fools, so why would we expect these fools to be knowledgable when softer topics like "diversity" are so much easier to tweet about? I'm not saying diversity is not a worthy pursuit, far from it, but the way these people are pursing it is indeed foolish and dumb. It's a step above anti-vaxers and climate change deniers, but now we're just splitting hairs on what constitutes stupid.
Come now. What would you say to an academic who didn't want to go to the whole of Europe, just because he saw some scary news about something that happened in Prague once?
The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the amount of airtime their doings get would have you believe.
tl;dr- Come on over, the water's fine. You'll probably make some friends. Everybody wins.
I agree 100%. If I'm paying for a conference I want the best speakers and content - if you can deliver that with diversity I'm all for it. If you're number one priority is diversity and it means your content and speakers are sub-par, I'm going to stop coming.
I think the more important issue is to make sure you selection committee is not biased. While it might be nice to have a selection committee made up with the front-page names in the start-up industry, you'd probably be better off skipping those that act more like fraternities.
The U.S. faces challenges the Netherlands does not. Take race for example. One out of every eight Americans are here because their ancestors were slaves. That's not the distant past. Heck, many people today are fighting for the right to commemorate the pro-slavery side of that story. More recently, if Bill Gates had been born in the south, he likely would have gone to a racially-segregated school. And the effects of that are felt today. Black households, for example, have a median income of just 60% as much as white households.
How does this affect a coding conference you ask? Because it affects everything. You don't do something like that as a society and expect that the consequences will disappear just a few generations after you stopped doing it.[1]
So yes, everyone in the U.S. is really sensitive, with good reason. Frankly it's a miracle that safe spaces and sensitivity training are the worst atonement we have to deal with. People in many regions of the world are fighting decades' long bloody wars over less egregious circumstances.
[1] In college I used to be anti-PC. Then when I was living in Atlanta, I walked across one of the streets that historically served as a dividing line for segregation: http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-.... I went from my trendy white midtown neighborhood to a predominantly black very low income neighborhood. For me, it was a major "holy fuck everything is fucked up" moment.
So I'm a Dutch-American dual citizen that has lived in both countries. I guess I was born to answer this question :)
A big hint to the difference is that my Black American friends spell it capital-B Black. Almost all of them live in, or are from, majority black neighborhoods. The majority listen to different music, and even have different diets compared to my white friends. They speak differently and have different names and are a distinct group of people. This isn't me making this up either; this is paraphrased from a Facebook post by an American Black friend of mine. There are large parts of the country where they can't rely on help from the police, and a significant portion of the country will actively hate them if they marry a non-Black person. I do have some black American friends that aren't like this. They spell it lowercase-b black, they live in mostly white neighborhoods, and aside from the color of their skin they are indistinguishable from another white person in that neighborhood. But those are a minority. The majority of Black Americans are capital-B Black, and they have much different lives because of it.
In the Netherlands however, there are no large Black neighborhoods. (There are "black neighborhoods" to some degree, but orders of magnitude smaller.) None of my black Dutch friends would "capitalize the B" so to speak. The average black Dutch person has a pretty similar life to the average white Dutch person: there wouldn't be much of a difference in where they live, their diets, or their schools. A black Dutch person won't have to worry that the police won't help them.
That can help you understand the race tensions in the US. To a somewhat lesser degree it can help you understand our LGBTQ+ and gender tensions. Sure, there aren't "female neighborhoods", but there are LBGTQ+ neighborhoods, and both women and non-straight people face discrimination. The Dutch women I'm friends with have pretty gender-mixed friends, while I'm usually the only male friend of the American women I've been friends with. The same for LGBTQ+ people - they tend to mostly make friends among themselves in the US, while my queer Dutch friends are mostly friends with straight people.
Basically, in the Netherlands everyone is the same, but in the US people form groups. A big reason for that is that the American groups formed out of necessity. If you were going to be killed for being gay, well it makes sense to have mostly gay friends. If you're going to be lynched because you're Black, well it makes sense to make friends with other Black people. The Netherlands experienced racial tensions to a much lesser degree, so these groups never formed.
As an American, I keep getting baffeled how opinions like GH's in this are so prevalent on the internet but rarely seem to occur in the real world. Please don't judge us on the acts of a few.
Gender equality in IT is a realistic important issue, but this is just taking it to a crazy level.
The issue is that here in the US we have an entitlement problem. Everyone feels entitled to everything. Even poor people feel like temporarily inconvenienced rich people, as the famous saying sort-of goes. We are also still obsessed with might making right, even at an individual level. America means guns and freedom and kicking everyone else's ass. It doesn't help that recentlyish our politicians feed this narrative by creating the worst us-vs-them chasm our nation has ever seen.
I think this is problematic, but I also think it's inherent in a society that truly wants to allow freedom of expression. Why do we still have the KKK in America? Why do we let things like Breitbart exist? In Germany they have restrictions on Nazi-related things and discussions, and they seem to have turned out pretty well. We need to hold the right people accountable when bad things happen, and pretty much up and down the whole chain, that doesn't happen, because freedom. Hell, we even have judges who have allowed "affluenza" to be used as a legal defense for things as heinous as rape.
Yeah it is out of control in America. Perhaps it's partly that young middle-class people are less wordly (less experience of other cultures) and thus more inclined to juvenile, over-the-top views. Perhaps it's a pendulum swinging a bit too far currently; it's a pretty huge change to have the degree of support for a socialist presidential candidate
that we saw with Bernie Saunders.
> This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences.
That's just silly. The first bit of your post was good, but now you sound like someone who really needs to take themselves less seriously. You don't have to avoid going to a continent because you don't like the tone of their culture wars currently. There are plenty of people who think all sorts of shit there, and if you really can't find any people who live up to your European standards then how about going for the natural world etc? (European speaking here)
>>>I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception).
I can't comment on the present social climate or attitudes in NL generally, but the history seems pretty similar. Sufferage at about the same time, anyway.
Anyway, think about who is offending and being offended. No is being beaten in the streets for saying, "Actually, I think Bill Maher is the height of comedy."
Also, holding a sign that, explicitly or implicitly says, "I am inherently superior to you, and I fervently hope you will all die and come to ruin, what are you going to do about that, huh, <expletive>?" seems unlikely to be well received anywhere in the world.
It is really worth considering that this conference used a blind review process[1]. Subsequently, there is zero chance that the reviewer's decisions were influenced by racism or sexism.
As a society, we need to consider the implications of what is going on here. In what way could this move possibly be said to be anti-racist/anti-sexist? It just isn't. If anything, abandoning your speakers because they are male/white (presumably), is itself bigoted. Consider how it would feel to be bumped from a speaker line up because of your race/gender.
Pro-diversity, ex-conference (not this one) organizer here.
I can't speak for what GitHub did or didn't do, but a common problem is that there is a huge step before review that you can't skip. You must coach, encourage, and counsel the types of people you want to submit talks! If you don't, don't be surprised if they don't submit because of the treatment or impression they have from other events in the past.
Pro-active outreach to underrepresented groups is the way to get better events and a blind review process is no panacea despite many organizers seeming to think it is.
It's suggested here that they did blind review and then wanted to tweak for diversity. That's just not how it works. You need the diversity up front in the submissions.
However, there's might still be bias in who applies to speak at this kind of conference. They could have done more to reach out and encourage other groups to apply. I'd be interested to see the submission statistics.
Isn't it a slap in the face of speakers that took time to send in their proposals for presentations? "Your talk is great but your ethnicity or gender just isn't quite right"
This may be an unpopular opinion but I still don't understand why diversity even matters here - shouldn't it be the merit of the ideas and the presentation skills of the speakers?
I don't actually know anyone who concerns themselves with identity politics to the extent they would mothball their tech conference. Who are these people who make these kinds of decisions?
The trouble is, this is a very difficult position for the organizers to defend as it is easy to attack them with "So you claim that the other sex is not capable for skilled presentations, how dare you!" -comments. And likely this is something that resonates with enough people to create a storm in social media where you as the organizer end up in the middle.
It is much easier to put up a more equal lineup of speakers and probably picking up few less insightful presentations. While somebody could also attack this approach, it would be much more difficult as you would need to argue that somebody who was left out due to their gender would have given much better presentation than somebody who was included. This would be so complicated that it is not likely to create the angry mob effect.
Didn't expect to find such a gem here - a really good talk! I feel like he hits a lot of points of the current problems and he literally goes into why things such as what the ElectronConf just did is wrong (not specifically ElectronConf of course, but speakers and conferences).
Listen conference organizers, if you actually cared about diversity in our industry and not just optics, you would find the best possible speakers regardless of their "grouping" and then get as many scholarships to people who wouldn't normally come to your conference. In other words, you are doing it backwards.
One of the great problems I, and those I work for, have is getting quality educational resources to the particular minority population I serve. My blood boils when I hear stupid crap like this because you are actively doing it wrong and worse: freezing out the people you want to help by not helping them grow and generating bad will in everyone else. We need the best experts to train and lecture people.
Will we ever accept the fact that women tend to be less inclined to do nerdy stuff (like developing Electron plugins instead of doing your actual coding job)?
That doesn't imply that women are worse or unable, it's simply a matter of proportion.
It's like saying men are underrepresented at yoga classes.
But then some feminists, who probably never took a single science class in their life and majored in "gender studies", will tell you that women not being interested in open source or men in yoga is because our society deliberately conforms people/children into gender based roles.
To counter this of course, parents buy their daughters lego sets with female scientists in lab coats glamorously posing with telescopes. Instead of, say - buying them actual scientific toys like gyroscopes, electronics kits, or lego's own genderless DIY programmable robot.
I'm someone who rants about PC culture so much that I'm sure I'm very boring. However, are you sure that's nature not nurture? And if it's nurture, why should we "accept" it, instead of helping our culture evolve? Certainly, the "nurture" part comes from some pretty fucked up history when it comes to gender roles and treatment of people other than white straight males in western society.
Did they just assume race of the presenters? Sounds like they use race-based discrimination if they just look at the picture and classify people belonging to a race.
I'm disappointed in how many comments here are just kneejerk reactions. Reaching for weird comparisons, getting angry at the idea of diversity and social justice, and many others.
Stop for a moment, think of how you'd organise a conference. Is it different? Will people find it inviting? Will they find it interesting? Go ahead, and organise it! Every community and group of organisers can shape the events they create the way they want to. ElectronConf organisers made such choice.
For the people that worry so much about speakers... I haven't done many talks (2 bigger events), but if I heard my talk was delayed so the conference can be rebalanced / less of a white sausage party, I'd be glad. Others may not share that opinion. But don't assume everybody will.
Edit: Yes, there are better and worse ways to go about it. Realising too late and reverting the original list was not the best. Reaching out to / inviting diverse groups rather than fixing balance later would be better. Hope they learned and will do it better next year. Organisers which care about it from the beginning somehow manage to get a decent m/f split - both in the audience and in the speakers. (see linux.conf for a good example)
Edit2: A few people assume that talks will be dropped / replaced as a result. I don't know what the organisers are planning, but there's always an option of adding another room/stream. Until any talks are confirmed as dropped, this is just baseless speculation.
Electron, proton, and neutron enter the bar. I forgot basic physics and chemistry, so I don't know how it goes from that, but at the end, electron says: there's not enough diversity here!
[sarcasm]
Glad to see the legacy of Dr King is alive and well.
[/sarcasm]
If this is the underlying thought guiding GitHub -- yes I've read the other stuff about the company -- it might be time to start setting up my own git server.
"We're not releasing this killer new feature because too many white people worked on it."
This is ridiculous. If I'm attending a conference, it's for the quality of the content and the speaker who will present it. I don't care how they look. I always thought those "women only" coding camps are absurd but this is next level stupidity.
I'm a minority as far as "diversity" goes and this is dumb. If diversity really matters to you (and it fucking shouldn't at something like this), then put the conference on, and use it to get more minorities interested in the con. Teach more people, and eventually you will have more than enough speakers who come from diverse backgrounds.
We published a list of speakers that does not reflect the standards to which we hold ourselves. We will be postponing this event until we can deliver a more diverse slate of speakers.
Oh get over yourselves. Why would future speakers not feel like token representations used to meet an imaginary quota?
[+] [-] DeusExMachina|8 years ago|reply
I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception).
All this without safe spaces, forced quotas at conferences, codes of conduct and people that police every word you say. There are laws against harassment of course, and that's enough.
Of course, it's not perfect, but there are rarely if ever any big incidents due to discrimination (to my knowledge).
Looking at the USA instead I see people getting offended pretty much for anything. As a consequence discussion gets neutered to the point where everybody is afraid to express even small controversial ideas or make the next "dongle" joke for the fear of repercussions.
I have also seen a lot of videos of people getting beaten in the streets for holding up signs with which "offended" people did not agree. Is that freedom of speech? We had such things in our history in the "old continent" and they were definitely not called this way.
This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. Here in Europe to me it feels much safer and open minded, with all the flaws and imperfections that there might be.
[+] [-] Tehnix|8 years ago|reply
If what another commenter mentioned[0][1], that they did blind-reviews of the papers, then this is actually quite appalling to me and sends the reverse signal that we don't really care about your paper, as long as you fill up our quota.
I also deeply believe that this is inherently the wrong way to fix this kind of problem. It's like treating symptoms instead of actually treating the underlying disease. If the papers accepted were all male, then why not ask "why was it only papers from men that were qualified enough?" or "why did only men submit papers for our event?". If the former is true than we need effort into investigating why more women aren't writing these papers (be it quality or just plain quantity), and if the latter then look into the marketing/awareness on the paper submitting process.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098
EDIT: Included links to the comments that mentioned the blind-reviews.
--
Semi-related: While I haven't seen it, I saw an interview with Jordan Peele about the movie "Get Out". He mentions that he wanted to tackle the fact that while Obama definitely helped the US move to less racist tones, it was never really solved, it is just there hiding under the skin with super-awareness to not be racist, which arguably is not the desired effect - there shouldn't be awareness at all about race period. I feel like this effect is somewhat similar to what is happening here, and the fact that the US is not able to hold any reasonable discussion at all on these topics doesn't make me optimistic on their capability to handle these issues. I feel like PC culture is causing way more harm than good.
</rant>
[+] [-] mnm1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Baeocystin|8 years ago|reply
The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the amount of airtime their doings get would have you believe.
tl;dr- Come on over, the water's fine. You'll probably make some friends. Everybody wins.
[+] [-] smoyer|8 years ago|reply
I think the more important issue is to make sure you selection committee is not biased. While it might be nice to have a selection committee made up with the front-page names in the start-up industry, you'd probably be better off skipping those that act more like fraternities.
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
How does this affect a coding conference you ask? Because it affects everything. You don't do something like that as a society and expect that the consequences will disappear just a few generations after you stopped doing it.[1]
So yes, everyone in the U.S. is really sensitive, with good reason. Frankly it's a miracle that safe spaces and sensitivity training are the worst atonement we have to deal with. People in many regions of the world are fighting decades' long bloody wars over less egregious circumstances.
[1] In college I used to be anti-PC. Then when I was living in Atlanta, I walked across one of the streets that historically served as a dividing line for segregation: http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-.... I went from my trendy white midtown neighborhood to a predominantly black very low income neighborhood. For me, it was a major "holy fuck everything is fucked up" moment.
[+] [-] MicroBerto|8 years ago|reply
We are becoming crippled by our own will. It's sad to watch and the pendulum response was the 2016 election.
[+] [-] abtinf|8 years ago|reply
Is that a joke? There are literally laws, with actual prosecutions, in the Netherlands designed to police every word you say.
[+] [-] owenversteeg|8 years ago|reply
A big hint to the difference is that my Black American friends spell it capital-B Black. Almost all of them live in, or are from, majority black neighborhoods. The majority listen to different music, and even have different diets compared to my white friends. They speak differently and have different names and are a distinct group of people. This isn't me making this up either; this is paraphrased from a Facebook post by an American Black friend of mine. There are large parts of the country where they can't rely on help from the police, and a significant portion of the country will actively hate them if they marry a non-Black person. I do have some black American friends that aren't like this. They spell it lowercase-b black, they live in mostly white neighborhoods, and aside from the color of their skin they are indistinguishable from another white person in that neighborhood. But those are a minority. The majority of Black Americans are capital-B Black, and they have much different lives because of it.
In the Netherlands however, there are no large Black neighborhoods. (There are "black neighborhoods" to some degree, but orders of magnitude smaller.) None of my black Dutch friends would "capitalize the B" so to speak. The average black Dutch person has a pretty similar life to the average white Dutch person: there wouldn't be much of a difference in where they live, their diets, or their schools. A black Dutch person won't have to worry that the police won't help them.
That can help you understand the race tensions in the US. To a somewhat lesser degree it can help you understand our LGBTQ+ and gender tensions. Sure, there aren't "female neighborhoods", but there are LBGTQ+ neighborhoods, and both women and non-straight people face discrimination. The Dutch women I'm friends with have pretty gender-mixed friends, while I'm usually the only male friend of the American women I've been friends with. The same for LGBTQ+ people - they tend to mostly make friends among themselves in the US, while my queer Dutch friends are mostly friends with straight people.
Basically, in the Netherlands everyone is the same, but in the US people form groups. A big reason for that is that the American groups formed out of necessity. If you were going to be killed for being gay, well it makes sense to have mostly gay friends. If you're going to be lynched because you're Black, well it makes sense to make friends with other Black people. The Netherlands experienced racial tensions to a much lesser degree, so these groups never formed.
[+] [-] thekevan|8 years ago|reply
Gender equality in IT is a realistic important issue, but this is just taking it to a crazy level.
[+] [-] TylerH|8 years ago|reply
I think this is problematic, but I also think it's inherent in a society that truly wants to allow freedom of expression. Why do we still have the KKK in America? Why do we let things like Breitbart exist? In Germany they have restrictions on Nazi-related things and discussions, and they seem to have turned out pretty well. We need to hold the right people accountable when bad things happen, and pretty much up and down the whole chain, that doesn't happen, because freedom. Hell, we even have judges who have allowed "affluenza" to be used as a legal defense for things as heinous as rape.
[+] [-] Myrmornis|8 years ago|reply
> This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences.
That's just silly. The first bit of your post was good, but now you sound like someone who really needs to take themselves less seriously. You don't have to avoid going to a continent because you don't like the tone of their culture wars currently. There are plenty of people who think all sorts of shit there, and if you really can't find any people who live up to your European standards then how about going for the natural world etc? (European speaking here)
[+] [-] selllikesybok|8 years ago|reply
I can't comment on the present social climate or attitudes in NL generally, but the history seems pretty similar. Sufferage at about the same time, anyway.
Anyway, think about who is offending and being offended. No is being beaten in the streets for saying, "Actually, I think Bill Maher is the height of comedy."
Also, holding a sign that, explicitly or implicitly says, "I am inherently superior to you, and I fervently hope you will all die and come to ruin, what are you going to do about that, huh, <expletive>?" seems unlikely to be well received anywhere in the world.
[+] [-] Manchit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway114|8 years ago|reply
As a society, we need to consider the implications of what is going on here. In what way could this move possibly be said to be anti-racist/anti-sexist? It just isn't. If anything, abandoning your speakers because they are male/white (presumably), is itself bigoted. Consider how it would feel to be bumped from a speaker line up because of your race/gender.
[1] https://cfp.githubapp.com/events/electronconf-2017
[+] [-] Normal_gaussian|8 years ago|reply
They have an agenda and it hasn't got anything to do with code.
[+] [-] indy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluesign|8 years ago|reply
'Speaker information will be used in any final reviews necessary to break ties and bring a balance to the speaking line-up.'
[+] [-] petercooper|8 years ago|reply
I can't speak for what GitHub did or didn't do, but a common problem is that there is a huge step before review that you can't skip. You must coach, encourage, and counsel the types of people you want to submit talks! If you don't, don't be surprised if they don't submit because of the treatment or impression they have from other events in the past.
Pro-active outreach to underrepresented groups is the way to get better events and a blind review process is no panacea despite many organizers seeming to think it is.
It's suggested here that they did blind review and then wanted to tweak for diversity. That's just not how it works. You need the diversity up front in the submissions.
[+] [-] yorick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
The whole thing is ridiculous. To fight perceived discrimination, those people are doing even more direct and overt discrimination.
[+] [-] tjpnz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmp1991|8 years ago|reply
It is much easier to put up a more equal lineup of speakers and probably picking up few less insightful presentations. While somebody could also attack this approach, it would be much more difficult as you would need to argue that somebody who was left out due to their gender would have given much better presentation than somebody who was included. This would be so complicated that it is not likely to create the angry mob effect.
[+] [-] bassman9000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namaemuta|8 years ago|reply
If you were completely dedicated to Electron you wouldn't postpone it, since what matters is the content, not who tells it.
[+] [-] z5h|8 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8
[+] [-] Tehnix|8 years ago|reply
Thanks! :)
[+] [-] mwcampbell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selllikesybok|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragandj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|8 years ago|reply
One of the great problems I, and those I work for, have is getting quality educational resources to the particular minority population I serve. My blood boils when I hear stupid crap like this because you are actively doing it wrong and worse: freezing out the people you want to help by not helping them grow and generating bad will in everyone else. We need the best experts to train and lecture people.
[+] [-] vemv|8 years ago|reply
That doesn't imply that women are worse or unable, it's simply a matter of proportion.
It's like saying men are underrepresented at yoga classes.
[+] [-] SilverSlash|8 years ago|reply
To counter this of course, parents buy their daughters lego sets with female scientists in lab coats glamorously posing with telescopes. Instead of, say - buying them actual scientific toys like gyroscopes, electronics kits, or lego's own genderless DIY programmable robot.
Go figure.
[+] [-] Myrmornis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaybe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legostormtroopr|8 years ago|reply
"Congratulations @Github for hosting an all male conference!"
[+] [-] FrozenVoid|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps they identify-as other race than they appear-as. After all, race is just a social construct: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
[+] [-] viraptor|8 years ago|reply
This wasn't enforced from outside. It's the organisers who agreed: yup, that's not what we want to do (https://twitter.com/nmsanchez/status/870811022306574336)
Stop for a moment, think of how you'd organise a conference. Is it different? Will people find it inviting? Will they find it interesting? Go ahead, and organise it! Every community and group of organisers can shape the events they create the way they want to. ElectronConf organisers made such choice.
For the people that worry so much about speakers... I haven't done many talks (2 bigger events), but if I heard my talk was delayed so the conference can be rebalanced / less of a white sausage party, I'd be glad. Others may not share that opinion. But don't assume everybody will.
Edit: Yes, there are better and worse ways to go about it. Realising too late and reverting the original list was not the best. Reaching out to / inviting diverse groups rather than fixing balance later would be better. Hope they learned and will do it better next year. Organisers which care about it from the beginning somehow manage to get a decent m/f split - both in the audience and in the speakers. (see linux.conf for a good example)
Edit2: A few people assume that talks will be dropped / replaced as a result. I don't know what the organisers are planning, but there's always an option of adding another room/stream. Until any talks are confirmed as dropped, this is just baseless speculation.
[+] [-] dragandj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2017throw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huffmsa|8 years ago|reply
If this is the underlying thought guiding GitHub -- yes I've read the other stuff about the company -- it might be time to start setting up my own git server.
"We're not releasing this killer new feature because too many white people worked on it."
[+] [-] SilverSlash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caleblloyd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PrimHelios|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuzirashi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|8 years ago|reply
Oh get over yourselves. Why would future speakers not feel like token representations used to meet an imaginary quota?