One way to look at percentages is as a quota. "20% of our speakers this year shall be women!" Right or wrong, a lot of people don't like this.
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.
Making sure a certain % of speakers are women is ridiculous. I'm a woman and a programmer and I'd be offended they just threw a few women on to even it out vs. to make sure the best of the best speakers are there. If some happen to be women - great! If not, who cares. Women are not being excluded, so what's the problem? Why include women who may be mediocre just for the score? Too much sensitivity these days...
Agreed. This women 2.0 thing has been super annoying. Meanwhile every women I know who kicks ass at their craft doesn't have any problems with "marginalization". People who are competitive and competent tend to just fine in competitive careers. I never knew anyone who deserved to be at the top who got their by asking someone to make some rules so they could get there instead of you know... just being awesome.
This is the same quota issue we deal with in all sorts of fields for all sorts of minorities. In my opinion the only effective course of action is to continually improve equality of opportunity, not by promoting some people at the expense of others because of minority status, but by concentrating and encouraging/requiring others to concentrate on qualifications to the exclusion of ethnic, sexual, etc. factors.
Yes, definitely, too much (over)sensitivity. There will always be people who discriminate, and there will always be someone out there -- no matter who you are -- that will actively discriminate against you given the opportunity. Those people will never change. For the rest of us, what the world needs is to lighten up and give things some time: In the grander scheme of things, all this equality talk started up relatively recently. People don't change overnight, and the institutions we build change far more slowly.
Patience, people. Patience, tempered expectations, and realism. Not all of this will ever be "fixed," and that which is will pretty much asymptotically approach our best case expectations, so learning to be happy with what we get and work to improve things without pissing everyone off all the time seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
That's correct, as is the author. People are advocating for affirmative action for women instead of advocating for the best speaker pitches and letting the chips fall where they may. Don't make women tokens, expect the same excellence you do from men and they will rise to the occasion. I have no doubt that the visibility of women will rise at conferences while they are competing successfully in tech jobs and representing a greater share of programmers and engineers.
It's pretty annoying to read articles like this about any topic - someone who doesn't appear to have thought through much of anything, let alone done a little research, bringing up 'thought provoking' ideas like 'did they consider that most of the submissions may have been from men?'. Well gee golly, if only anyone ever had looked at submission patterns across gender and ways to change them. Or there's the 'you think they dismissed awesome presentations from people who happen to wear a bra?' question, which is saying 'you must be accusing everyone involved of outright misgyny!'. Gee whillikers, if only anyone ever had studied the unconscious changes in reaction to a proposal submitted under a male name or a female name! etc etc. Do everyone a favour and do a little research before diving in to a controversial topic that already suffers so much from 'I'm a man/woman, I must know about this!' layman syndrome.
The author's assertion is simply that enforcing quotas does not empower women, and that instead it devalues the work and talent of the women who are ultimately represented at the conference. And I agree with her. Women shouldn't need quotas in order to be offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
Of course, percentages matter, and the fact that far fewer women are represented in a conference may be a symptom of something else, as opposed to a direct bias by the conference organizers. What we need is more of the underlying data. To start, I'd like to know how many women submitted technical talks to begin with.
I am from a country(India) where reservations and quotas are as rampant as breathing. Quotas and reservations are disastrous to any community over the longer run.
The only place where reservations make any impact is areas where there are too many good candidates and somebody from the lesser privileged sections of the society who is equally good can't make it due to the limited availability of opportunities. In such cases it makes some sense to offer the minorities a degree of reservation as the culture is unwelcoming to a meritorious minority person.
Any thing apart from this and what you will see is, the social problems remain totally unchanged. Reservations and quotas means some one from privileged class who is deserving of a position will be denied the opportunity, and some one oppressed class who is not deserving will get the opportunity instead. The net result is the whole system will be poisoned. Work never gets done, more and more hard working people are denied opportunities. At the same undeserving people get the same opportunities and make a big waste out of them.
If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't.
Our job is to create a level playing field. So that anybody who want's to, can deliver.
There is a provable, significant difference is earning/wealth between different castes in India[1]. If you believe that there is no difference between people depending on their caste, this is situation you want to remedy.
If there has been systematic discrimination against a class of people, spanning centuries, they can not compete without providing affirmative action. Quota's are a way to level the playing field.
"If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't."
Not if the means of productions, wealth and power is hoarded by a few.
You are speaking with a sense of entitlement which is vain. Backward castes and Dalits constitute 75% of the population of India. So if the electorate decided they need affirmative action as even after 60 years of independence, their representation remains below 20% in white collar jobs, then it is their prerogative. Since when do the minority dictate terms to a majority in a democratic polity. Grow up dude, and be thankful that you still have 50% seats in general category and that is given to you by the will of the majority.
Interesting. So you're saying have an extra seat reserved for minorities only, and the minority on the seat must have the appropriate qualifications. That way no one is disadvantaged by the new system.
That's actually a great way of doing things and i'm surprised it's not used more.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because quotas are a wrong solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process".
One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.
What's interesting is when people do the opposite. When they A/B test the name. Same content. Half the people have male names, half female. Now, if gender doesn't matter, and people are judged purely on their achievements, and we are in a real meritocracy, then there should be no difference, right? If there a statistically significant difference in how people treat the male vs. female applicant, then there's some bias going on.
Do you think a name blinded review process would yield a different result? I've never run a tech conference but it would not surprise me if ~95% of submitted technical talks were from men.
If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women.
The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
Name-blinded reviews doesn't seem like a good solution for a conference, where a significant part of the appeal of a potential speaker can be their existing fame. They are a business, and name-blinded reviews could cost ticket sales.
As someone who has organized several conferences, and countless events in the tech space, let me just say that it is REALLY hard to find and get top-tier/well-known women to speak at your event. I reached out to over a dozen women execs from 10+ startups that were well known and all of them turned us down for this last conference I helped organized in Miami in February.
Part of the issue is that you need well known speakers to sell more tickets, that coupled with the fact that the % of women working in tech is a minority, you're left with a shallow pool of possible speakers. Furthermore, if you're looking for certain skill-sets in tech to be speakers, you're further diminishing your pool of available candidates.
Affirmative action are troublesome, and its good that someone are directly speaking against it. There are all from social to statistical problems, and those problem need to not be ignored.
Take Sweden education system. In the 1990s, they thought it would be a good idea to encourage minority groups by giving them an bonus when applying to a area of study where the applying individual would be a minority. It was a very simple rule, and it backfired, got scraped by the early 2000, and declared illegal. What the Swedish Education board found out was, that in 90% of the time where a applying individual would become a minority in a class, it was a white male trying to enter a female dominated area of study. The concept was scraped short after, with statements that the initial goals was not achieved, and that affirmative action was found as counterproductive to the concept of education. The second part was also reaffirmed in the courts and is now made illegal.
There are also much better alternatives to affirmative action which has been proven to be effective. Outreach programs works. Just a few months ago, there were a article describing how they reached around 50% or above female speaker participation through just doing outreach. They even made it a large point that they did no distinction what so ever when picking speakers, and the only work towards equality was outreach.
There are also social studies. We need more of those. As a scientific society, we should even demand it before listening to anyone arguing about problems within this society, and more importantly, when the discussion turns to causes or suggested solutions. If we do not demand it, those studies won't happen, as there will be no pressure to do so or money invested into it.
A few years ago I heard someone push the premise that women were simply too smart to acquire or keep a career in the tech industry. While sweeping generalizations like that usually set off my spidey-senses, this hypothesis might actually have merit.
The short version is that women won't put up with the (lack of) work-life balance, long hours and constant on-call status. The successful women I've worked with all stayed because they simply love it (like I do) but it's entirely possible that this is something that even young girls notice when they avoid IT related curricula.
To get back to the topic at hand, I think the best way to get women involved in more conferences is to have more "tenured" women in the industry. And the best way to do that is to that is to recruit more into the industry and to make the industry more aligned with their desires.
I'm actually not opposed to quotas for female participation at conferences ... I simply want to learn something from anyone that's put in front of me.
-The author claims that criticism is misguided, because we don't know the ratio of men to women who pitched or work in the industry.
-The author doesn't seem to know either.
-Insofar as criticism of conference excluding women is uninformed, the defense that the author provides is equally uninformed.
If there are fewer women speaking, applying to speak, or in the industry as a whole, there's a reason why. It seems to me we should spend less time going back and forth with vague abstractions, and more time looking for the underlying cause. Anything else is just cheap uninformed opinion. In this case, it's probably just linkbait.
In my mind, the author is the one pointing out the lack of industry data. Just because she doesn't provide it does not mean her core argument -- that quotas undermine the empowerment of women by devaluing their hard work and talent -- is invalid. It just means that, ultimately, we still need more data.
I vote for link bait though I believe the author is authentic in her frustration. I like the suggestions at the end of her article.
To share a personal reflection, I just applied to speak at a conference in June. I submitted two ideas and I have many more I could share. I would love if the conference organizers were interested in diversity of viewpoints and gave me feedback that would allow my topic to be accepted. I think there is a nuance here between a handout and a handup.
It's the same experience I have applying to accelerators. I want to make it into the next YC class but I may not, not because of my race and gender but that I don't know the technique. Teach me to fish. I will be the captain of fishing.
Out of curiosity, what's the acceptance rate for these tech conferences? Are these like academic conferences where < 20% of the talks are accepted after months and months of work, or do mere mortals have a reasonable chance of acceptance?
I think it depends on the conference, but my general impression is that mere mortals cannot expect to get speaker spots. In most cases, the organizers or at least the community in general want well-known speakers. There is no way random people are allowed to just walk up there and present. That's probably for the best, since as an organizer you want to have some kind of quality control. I do suspect that's part of the gender ratio problem though.
When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).
PyCon has been around 25% the last couple of years. For 2013 we accepted 114 out of 458 proposals, and in 2012 we accepted 95 out of 378 proposals.
For 2014 we're more than likely going back to 95 slots, and I'd expect the number of proposals submitted to be roughly the same or higher. That'll put us closer to 20%.
Plenty of mere mortals get on stage at PyCon. Speaking experience does hold some weight with reviewers, but a well organized and interesting topic will take you pretty far.
YAPC::NA generally accepts one talk per applying speaker if we have the slots; some years this has meant we've added an extra track or too to do it, some years this has meant leaving 20-30% of the potential speakers out.
We always schedule at least some first time speakers, because, well, that's how you get your next batch of experienced speakers.
On top of this, anybody whose talk isn't scheduled tends to be encouraged to give a lightning talk (5 minutes), and anybody who gave a particularly memorable lightning talk one year is almost certainly going to be accepted the following year.
I would expect that a lot of non-profit community conferences end up along these lines; the expensive commercial ones much less so.
It's a tricky question to address. It doesn't help that the people addressing it are obviously not entirely clear on the concept of an unbiased sample. To quote the fine article:
But let’s say a larger percentage of the pitches came from women. Then people are also assuming that of the pitches that came from women, 100% of them were awesome pitches that organizers passed up solely because the presenter would be wearing a bra.
No, people are assuming that pitches from women and men are on average of equal quality. It's an assumption borne out by experience. So we do need to ask the question why there are less women. If indeed 95% of the proposals were from male speakers, it's not a problem with the conference. If there were more than 5% of the proposals coming from women, but the final selection looked like it did, the organizers should take a look at their process - something is likely to be off if that's the case.
I don't pretend to know if the conferences mentioned in the story are exclusionary or just choosing the best speakers. The only thing I'll say is that speaking or joining a panel at a small conference often leads to speaking at bigger conferences and keynote appearances.
If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot.
I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.
One of the problems in the hierarchy underlying this is simply that women (empirically) don't take that first step of reaching out to a small conference to speak. It's similar to data about self-nomination rates for promotion. Simply raising awareness of the promotion case managed to even the rates out, so arguably anything that raises the visibility of the lack of conference submissions by women could have a similar knock-on effect.
Interesting how she characterizes it throughout her piece as a very violent gender war, but at the end claims it to be a class war at then end.
I think that's the crux of many of the problematic perspectives of contemporary feminism, that what are class differences are jammed into the square box of gender war.
"Make no fucking mistake that you occupy your cushy tech salary, your mid-level management job, your paltry access to power by permission of the patriarchy."
Oooh, it's one of those tumblr-style feminists. You always know you're in for a psychotic, incoherent rant when they start dropping the f-bomb repeatedly. (not to mention blaming everything from car engine troubles to a stubbed toe on the nebulous yet infamous "Patriarchy"...)
When you submit a paper to an academic journal, the reviewers do not know the name or origin of the authors, and make a decision based on the contents only. Conferences should select talks using a similar process. This would prevent potential bias against women, and also shield the conference from allegations of bias.
This has come up a few times for PyCon, but we get a very wide range of proposal qualities from a wide range of people that would make it hard to come up with the best schedule we can, which is the ultimate goal of the Program Committee. Some of the best speakers submit relatively poor proposals if you read them without their name and experience. Those things obviously aren't everything, but they do hold some weight in the review process.
Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
Conversely, the difference is that women are incentivised just as much as men to apply and be accepted as (in the UK at least) it's tied to research outcomes.
At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.
This is the concept of affirmative action at it's core. Do we base admission partly on demographics instead of merit? On one hand it may help promote the minority, though there are downsides as well.
I don't get why this is made to be a big deal. Gender or race shouldn't matter in choice of speakers, it should be their talent, track record, relevance of their work etc. What woman would want to be invited to speak if they knew it was because the organizers want to be representative of both sexes.
It's unsurprising that the "SEO" industry is taking gender equality seriously: They obviously wouldn't want to besmirch their reputation for ethical conduct.
Generally speaking, I agree with the author of this post. While the language is at times intentionally inflammatory, the core point still stands: people who have talents, skills, and ideas should get to float to the top.
We work in a hyper-logical field (the only thing more logical is math). Why can't people involved in the field see that the only thing that truly matters is furthering the progress of our craft/art/discipline/whatever-you-call-it. I don't care who wrote my framework/language/IDE/whatever. I just want it to be quality.
This is the same problem that plagues things like education. No child seems to be allowed to be special or exceptional anymore. Everyone wants a damn participation ribbon. Screw your participation ribbon.
For all the people who rail against quotas, the reason they exist is because of institutional sexism (or racism, in other matters). An overly simplified way to explain it is where there isn't any one instance or person that is sexist, but where the overall result of the system is sexist. A quota is a non-ideal blunt tool but it is one way to try and make up for the institutional sexism - not with the intent of giving improper advantages to a particular person who may be unqualified in a limited view, but by shocking an overall system to reduce the overall levels of sexism.
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] katherineparker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colmvp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krisroadruck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obviouslygreen|13 years ago|reply
Yes, definitely, too much (over)sensitivity. There will always be people who discriminate, and there will always be someone out there -- no matter who you are -- that will actively discriminate against you given the opportunity. Those people will never change. For the rest of us, what the world needs is to lighten up and give things some time: In the grander scheme of things, all this equality talk started up relatively recently. People don't change overnight, and the institutions we build change far more slowly.
Patience, people. Patience, tempered expectations, and realism. Not all of this will ever be "fixed," and that which is will pretty much asymptotically approach our best case expectations, so learning to be happy with what we get and work to improve things without pissing everyone off all the time seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.
[+] [-] wyclif|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacalata|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smudge|13 years ago|reply
Of course, percentages matter, and the fact that far fewer women are represented in a conference may be a symptom of something else, as opposed to a direct bias by the conference organizers. What we need is more of the underlying data. To start, I'd like to know how many women submitted technical talks to begin with.
[+] [-] kamaal|13 years ago|reply
The only place where reservations make any impact is areas where there are too many good candidates and somebody from the lesser privileged sections of the society who is equally good can't make it due to the limited availability of opportunities. In such cases it makes some sense to offer the minorities a degree of reservation as the culture is unwelcoming to a meritorious minority person.
Any thing apart from this and what you will see is, the social problems remain totally unchanged. Reservations and quotas means some one from privileged class who is deserving of a position will be denied the opportunity, and some one oppressed class who is not deserving will get the opportunity instead. The net result is the whole system will be poisoned. Work never gets done, more and more hard working people are denied opportunities. At the same undeserving people get the same opportunities and make a big waste out of them.
If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't.
Our job is to create a level playing field. So that anybody who want's to, can deliver.
[+] [-] shabda|13 years ago|reply
There is a provable, significant difference is earning/wealth between different castes in India[1]. If you believe that there is no difference between people depending on their caste, this is situation you want to remedy.
If there has been systematic discrimination against a class of people, spanning centuries, they can not compete without providing affirmative action. Quota's are a way to level the playing field.
"If some one is good, they will win anyway. If they are not, they can't and won't."
Not if the means of productions, wealth and power is hoarded by a few.
[1] http://www.ras.org.in/income_inequality_and_caste_in_village...
[+] [-] anuraj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brador|13 years ago|reply
That's actually a great way of doing things and i'm surprised it's not used more.
[+] [-] anthonyb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Morendil|13 years ago|reply
A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process".
One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
What's interesting is when people do the opposite. When they A/B test the name. Same content. Half the people have male names, half female. Now, if gender doesn't matter, and people are judged purely on their achievements, and we are in a real meritocracy, then there should be no difference, right? If there a statistically significant difference in how people treat the male vs. female applicant, then there's some bias going on.
Turns out if you do that (e.g. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201... ), you get men getting more job offers and getting offered more money. And this is scientists judging applicants for a science job!
Something is wrong here....
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women.
The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
[+] [-] olgagalchenko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjterry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tankbot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natmaster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianbreslin|13 years ago|reply
Part of the issue is that you need well known speakers to sell more tickets, that coupled with the fact that the % of women working in tech is a minority, you're left with a shallow pool of possible speakers. Furthermore, if you're looking for certain skill-sets in tech to be speakers, you're further diminishing your pool of available candidates.
[+] [-] dspeyer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|13 years ago|reply
Take Sweden education system. In the 1990s, they thought it would be a good idea to encourage minority groups by giving them an bonus when applying to a area of study where the applying individual would be a minority. It was a very simple rule, and it backfired, got scraped by the early 2000, and declared illegal. What the Swedish Education board found out was, that in 90% of the time where a applying individual would become a minority in a class, it was a white male trying to enter a female dominated area of study. The concept was scraped short after, with statements that the initial goals was not achieved, and that affirmative action was found as counterproductive to the concept of education. The second part was also reaffirmed in the courts and is now made illegal.
There are also much better alternatives to affirmative action which has been proven to be effective. Outreach programs works. Just a few months ago, there were a article describing how they reached around 50% or above female speaker participation through just doing outreach. They even made it a large point that they did no distinction what so ever when picking speakers, and the only work towards equality was outreach.
There are also social studies. We need more of those. As a scientific society, we should even demand it before listening to anyone arguing about problems within this society, and more importantly, when the discussion turns to causes or suggested solutions. If we do not demand it, those studies won't happen, as there will be no pressure to do so or money invested into it.
[+] [-] smoyer|13 years ago|reply
The short version is that women won't put up with the (lack of) work-life balance, long hours and constant on-call status. The successful women I've worked with all stayed because they simply love it (like I do) but it's entirely possible that this is something that even young girls notice when they avoid IT related curricula.
To get back to the topic at hand, I think the best way to get women involved in more conferences is to have more "tenured" women in the industry. And the best way to do that is to that is to recruit more into the industry and to make the industry more aligned with their desires.
I'm actually not opposed to quotas for female participation at conferences ... I simply want to learn something from anyone that's put in front of me.
[+] [-] stephenbez|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignostic|13 years ago|reply
-The author doesn't seem to know either.
-Insofar as criticism of conference excluding women is uninformed, the defense that the author provides is equally uninformed.
If there are fewer women speaking, applying to speak, or in the industry as a whole, there's a reason why. It seems to me we should spend less time going back and forth with vague abstractions, and more time looking for the underlying cause. Anything else is just cheap uninformed opinion. In this case, it's probably just linkbait.
[+] [-] Smudge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inokon|13 years ago|reply
To share a personal reflection, I just applied to speak at a conference in June. I submitted two ideas and I have many more I could share. I would love if the conference organizers were interested in diversity of viewpoints and gave me feedback that would allow my topic to be accepted. I think there is a nuance here between a handout and a handup.
It's the same experience I have applying to accelerators. I want to make it into the next YC class but I may not, not because of my race and gender but that I don't know the technique. Teach me to fish. I will be the captain of fishing.
[+] [-] kens|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Udo|13 years ago|reply
When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).
[+] [-] briancurtin|13 years ago|reply
For 2014 we're more than likely going back to 95 slots, and I'd expect the number of proposals submitted to be roughly the same or higher. That'll put us closer to 20%.
Plenty of mere mortals get on stage at PyCon. Speaking experience does hold some weight with reviewers, but a well organized and interesting topic will take you pretty far.
[+] [-] mst|13 years ago|reply
We always schedule at least some first time speakers, because, well, that's how you get your next batch of experienced speakers.
On top of this, anybody whose talk isn't scheduled tends to be encouraged to give a lightning talk (5 minutes), and anybody who gave a particularly memorable lightning talk one year is almost certainly going to be accepted the following year.
I would expect that a lot of non-profit community conferences end up along these lines; the expensive commercial ones much less so.
[+] [-] groby_b|13 years ago|reply
But let’s say a larger percentage of the pitches came from women. Then people are also assuming that of the pitches that came from women, 100% of them were awesome pitches that organizers passed up solely because the presenter would be wearing a bra.
No, people are assuming that pitches from women and men are on average of equal quality. It's an assumption borne out by experience. So we do need to ask the question why there are less women. If indeed 95% of the proposals were from male speakers, it's not a problem with the conference. If there were more than 5% of the proposals coming from women, but the final selection looked like it did, the organizers should take a look at their process - something is likely to be off if that's the case.
[+] [-] jtbigwoo|13 years ago|reply
If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot.
I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.
[+] [-] jlees|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jongold|13 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/about-work/405b2d12d213
[+] [-] jerrya|13 years ago|reply
Interesting how she characterizes it throughout her piece as a very violent gender war, but at the end claims it to be a class war at then end.
I think that's the crux of many of the problematic perspectives of contemporary feminism, that what are class differences are jammed into the square box of gender war.
[+] [-] Crake|13 years ago|reply
Oooh, it's one of those tumblr-style feminists. You always know you're in for a psychotic, incoherent rant when they start dropping the f-bomb repeatedly. (not to mention blaming everything from car engine troubles to a stubbed toe on the nebulous yet infamous "Patriarchy"...)
[+] [-] joyeuse6701|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theorique|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peripetylabs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briancurtin|13 years ago|reply
Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
[+] [-] vickytnz|13 years ago|reply
At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.
[+] [-] rcirka|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] septerr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azurelogic|13 years ago|reply
We work in a hyper-logical field (the only thing more logical is math). Why can't people involved in the field see that the only thing that truly matters is furthering the progress of our craft/art/discipline/whatever-you-call-it. I don't care who wrote my framework/language/IDE/whatever. I just want it to be quality.
This is the same problem that plagues things like education. No child seems to be allowed to be special or exceptional anymore. Everyone wants a damn participation ribbon. Screw your participation ribbon.
[+] [-] tunesmith|13 years ago|reply