1. Instead of girl-tickets, which is insulting, they should be called "Chickets."
2. Not all girls -- especially adult professional girls -- subscribe to traditional princess gender roles. Offer a variety of pretty pastel and rainbow colors beyond staid and confining old pink. Maybe men could also have some nice alpha earth tones for their lanyards for contrast so that nobody with a gender dimorphic identity could ever feel welcome.
3. Conference fees in the $1000 range are usually paid by employers. Try rewarding the actual girls who might come instead of just lowering the price for the boss who won't share with them anyway. For example, girls could be rewarded with many $5 bills generously slipped into their pants by passersby.
4. If this system prospers, it is certain not to inspire any kind of backlash from non-girls who feel the price differential is unfair to them.
This is one of the things that confuses me so much about the feminist movement in tech and in society at large. The conference organizers are trying to encourage female attendance by giving discounted tickets to women and someone immediately finds fault with them; however, if no effort were made then a multitude of posts would probably show up lamenting the lack of female attendance at the conference. This type of catch 22 is extremely detrimental to the feminist cause in my mind as it paints a picture where there is no good way out so why not just ignore it and take the flak that's coming anyways?
Also, the bar/nightlife industry has had great success with discounted "girl tickets" increasing female and male attendance.
This is one of the things that confuses me so much. Why anyone in our industry wouldn't understand the difference between "professional conference or event" and "ladies night", or between pointing out how common entirely male dominated speakers and panels are vs. merely complaining that there are no free tickets for women with pretty lanyard colours.
I think you're looking at a false dilemma here. Your choices aren't limited to "don't encourage women and take flak for it" versus "encourage women in a ham-fisted way and take flak for it". I believe that in this case there were a lot of ways the organisers could have encouraged participation respectfully. I'd start by getting in touch with some of the relevant women-in-tech groups - this is kind of their area.
If you're attempting to reach a group of people of which you're not a member, you really need to be doing it in consultation with someone who is. Otherwise you're just going to make obvious outsider mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot. That goes just as much for women as it does for hardcore gamers or scotch enthusiasts.
I think you do have a good point, though: it feels like there's a lot of negativity around tech feminism sometimes without much positive to aspire to. As the article says, the organisers were well-intentioned but doing it wrong - which is, at least, a good start. It's a shame we don't see many articles praising the conferences that do a good job encouraging women to participate, or sharing best practices and advice. I feel like that would do more to prevent mistakes like this and ultimately improve the community.
I'm not speaking for some imaginary strawman-feminist. I would rather that the event organizers treat me like anyone else and assume that my attendance would be based upon my interest in the subject and not offer me some affirmative-action ticket that automatically separates me from everyone else.
Are normal tickets called "boy tickets"? Are they required to be in blue lanyards? Will women caught with blue lanyards be kicked out of the conference? -_-
She also mentioned that it wouldn't deter her if she was already going. I agree with the author that the email itself could have been worded better, but the intention of the conference organizers seems to be sincere.
This discussion will go off the rails like always, but I just want to point out that not all women (girls?) are the same. Many women will take this positively and attend because this would make them feel welcome, while many others would be put off by this. Simply being female does not give you the ultimate say on whether this is fine or not. You are not some spokeswoman for your entire gender.
I'd judge this as a success or not based on how many of these tickets are used, which will be found out after the conference. Hopefully they do a post on the statistics at the end so we can make proper conclusions.
Well then let me (as a man though) cast my vote on this not being so fine (judging by other posts I'm not alone). I'm not calling outright sexism on it, but it was misguided at best.
By the way, conjuring up imaginary "other women" to argue against the author just doesn't come across well to me. You want to argue the point just do it.
"As a random person with no stake at all in this yet a strong opinion on it, I can tell you that if your opinion is the opposite of mine then it doesn't matter even if this issue directly affects you".
That's the kind of lazy, passive-agressive, statement that has no place in proper discussion.
In other words: trying to make your event more welcoming to women, in an effort to compensate somewhat for the industry's systemic sexism - sure, that's a good idea, and there are experts and nonprofit organizations who can advise you on how best to do that. There are also lots of blog posts about good strategies. Handling this clumsily, with pink stuff and calling women "girls" - not so good execution.
No reason to try to get your ratio up artificially.
Why shouldn't they?
If they do this they may attract more girls (ladies, women?) to Angular which will improve the Angular ecosystem overall. Perhaps there are a number of women who have been tempted to go but aren't that committed to Angular and this might tip them over the edge.
I don't think we can acknowledge that there is a problem attracting women to our industry and not provide these sorts of concessions and special treatment, at least in the short to medium term. In the long term the industry culture and perceptions should be such that this isn't needed but that isn't where we are yet.
It's not that I necessarily disagree with the goal of attracting more female attendees, but as a girl (and maybe I'm just speaking for myself,) I don't feel like I would be "tipped over the edge" by a demeaning pink "Girl ticket."
I think their intention is good, and they deserve a little slack.
I totally get the whole "don't treat me any differently because I have a vagina" thing, but the conference organizers really do seem to have good intentions.
Yes, making the lanyard pink prompts a momentary mental picture of someone putting a pink lanyard over my head while babbling incoherent baby talk, but then I realize that maybe the person who decided on pink really just has that culturally ingrained boys = blue, girls = pink thing. Or maybe the person who picked the color is a woman who likes the color pink. Or maybe, there are so many other details to plan for the conference that picking the color of the discounted lanyard didn't get a whole lot of consideration.
Yes, someone should have told them we don't call women above a certain age "girls". They do say woman and women a couple times in the email, and I can see how maybe Woman Tickets or Lady Tickets or Gal Tickets just sound awkward compared to Girl Tickets. I don't get the sense they mean girl in a derogatory fashion at all.
Or, I could be totally wrong, and they could all be misogynist jerks.
And, to answer your question, the top three discounts/free money for women I can think of are:
Bars and clubs
Auto insurance
Scholarships
Conferences often offer "student tickets" at a much lower rate and I think these "girl tickets" should be thought about and handled in a similar fashion. Certain groups are allowed to attend conferences at a lower rate because they might not otherwise and it is advantageous to the conference or industry that they do.
Instead of calling them "girl tickets" they should perhaps be called "women in tech" tickets or the conference should partner with one or more women in tech groups and name the tickets after them (i.e. PyCon could offer PyLadies tickets.) Conferences could even use membership in the women in tech groups as a way of certifying that people deserve the discounts similar to how a student ticket might require proving that one attends a university.
(These are just some ideas; one problem may be that some women in tech groups may also allow males to join, although it could be enough of a hurdle to prevent abuse.)
I like the idea of naming the ticket after one of the organizations, maybe even having them be a sponsor. I'm taking notes, thanks for great ideas like this!
I came from a country where there is 80/20 women/men ratio in it's engineering schools. In Iran girls are doing much better in school and engineering degree is super hot, as a results girls will enter universities way more than boys. All those graduated women that come out of school do very well shoulder to shoulder to their men schoolmates, in middle east where it's hard (for real) to be a women at workspace.
My take in United States culture is that young women are too afraid of looking nerdy if they go after math and engineering. Those who are brave enough to not care about stereotypes get pissed off by this kind of artificial "culture fixes".
"In what other industry is it okay to give discounted “girl tickets”?"
To provide, at least, an objective answer, airlines will discount tickets if they have a given level of certainty that the passenger is female -- except, interestingly, on Thanksgiving and Mother's Day, when female demand is higher than male demand.
I've just come back from co-running my conference last week. We were way up on female attendance and speakers compared to last year, which I'm really glad with. Women don't need discounted tickets to decide whether or not to come to a con. They definitely don't need their own colour lanyards and if they had one it doesn't need to be pink.
Most importantly, what women need are reasons to come, not discounts. We're limited in what we can do at 44CON[1] to change the sausagefest nature of the industry by the number of women, but we're happy to help where we can. We should focus on improving the conference experience for women (and everyone) so they'll tell their colleagues and friends in industry to come along. Women buy tickets too, is it so hard to listen to customers instead of singling them out?
Discounts could make sense because of the evidence that women tend to be paid less than men, but that would have to be handled with a ton of tact - I don't know how I'd do it.
I've also seen these forms of practical support from conferences that want to encourage participation from women:
* Enacting a harassment policy and/or code of conduct to provide a signal that the organizers care about maintaining a healthy conference environment, which can help women feel more comfortable attending (see http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/).
* Helping make arrangements for childcare, such as setting up inexpensive group childcare for children of attendees, since women tend to have more responsibility for children than men do.
* Offering advising for qualified people interested in submitting talks who don't have much speaking experience, or having lightning talk opportunities for less-experienced speakers, to help fix the self-reinforcing cycle of few women speakers at conferences.
And pleasantly enough, those policies also benefit attendees of all genders and support other kinds of diversity as well.
if you don't like the use of the word girl, eh. I don't really like boy much, either, but it wouldn't offend me. 'Boy's night out', 'one of the boys', whatever. It's not professional, but tech companies tend to be pretty fringe on the word professional, anyway.
if you don't like the idea of giving a specific sex a discounted ticket for simply having been born with different genitalia , right on. I totally agree.
Hey everyone, I'm one of the organizers of ng-conf. We appreciate your feedback! Hopefully our genuine intent wasn't lost in our (perhaps clumsy) wording.
Our only goal with this is simple: promote the cause of women in tech. We all work with extremely talented women and recognize their value in our industry. For example where I work (Domo) one of our VP's just won the "Women in Tech" award, which is awesome. We just want the women in the Angular community to know that they're appreciated, needed, and welcome at ng-conf.
To that end, we wanted to make sure that those interested would have a ticket available. Today we sold all our early bird tickets in less than 2 minutes. Next week we are opening up the next round of discounted tickets for the general public. We anticipate these and all other tickets will also sell out quickly. So to succeed in our goal - despite the inevitable statistics - we decided to reserve a number of these tickets for women. This way, women that wanted to attend wouldn't have to worry about the luck of the Eventbrite draw. So the primary benefit is the guarantee (not the discount) of the ticket. We felt that was the least we could do to show our thanks and appreciation.
The pink lanyard does seem a bit silly out of context, we should have explained that idea better. As we've seen with other conferences with limited availability (JSConf, Google I/O, etc.) competition for a ticket can become intense. We didn't want men to buy up all the women's tickets using their significant other's name, or the whole thing would be pointless. We figured if the lanyard was clearly for women, that would deter most abuse of the initiative.
We really do appreciate the feedback on our execution. Let me recap what we're received so far:
- Most generally agree with the idea that getting more women out to ng-conf is a worthwhile initiative.
- Pink lanyards was a terrible idea.
- Some prefer to be referred to as women, not girls. That's understandable. We took our cues from some of the organizations championing this same cause: "Girl Develop It", "Girl's Who Code", "Black Girls Code", "Girls Write Now", etc. In our minds it was "guys and girls", not "boys and girls". Both are valid semantics of the word, but we hear you.
This has been a great learning experience, and it's clear that we need to brainstorm this a bit more. If you have other ideas that accomplish the same goals in a less polarizing fashion we're all ears. Thanks for the positive feedback, we appreciate it. We really want to do this right - it's too important not to. Thanks!
Hey, thank you for posting in this thread! I didn't realize one of the organizers would see this. I hope I didn't come off as overly harsh about you guys' good intensions. It looks like an awesome conference and I do hope to attend someday(if it happens again in the future).
I get that lots of groups use the term girl, though I think some of them actually deal with teaching girls (actual school aged ones) to code. In general I dislike being called "girl" in a professional setting. (But maybe I am in the minority for this opinion)
Wow...I don't know how much more stereotypical sexist male you could get in one email..."girls", "pink lanyard", gender binaries...
The way to attract more women, stike, people to your conference is not through tokenizing them...it's by making the conference interesting (having some diversity in the organization group would be a start!)
If women in tech don't want people referring to them as "girls", perhaps they shouldn't create organizations like "Girl Develop It", "Girls Who Code", "Girls Teaching Girls to Code" and "Black Girls Code".
That's called neo-sexism, like affirmative action was neo-racism ( i dont deny the social implications of racial segregation and slavery, but these politics did not make people less racist). If I was a girl I would definetly feel offended. Now what about tickets for us black people ? We too are a minority in the IT sector... how does it sound now ?
I often wonder why there isn't the same big fuss in the industry about the lack of black men and women in tech. In my experience, there are fewer black people in the software industry than there are women.
[+] [-] WildUtah|12 years ago|reply
2. Not all girls -- especially adult professional girls -- subscribe to traditional princess gender roles. Offer a variety of pretty pastel and rainbow colors beyond staid and confining old pink. Maybe men could also have some nice alpha earth tones for their lanyards for contrast so that nobody with a gender dimorphic identity could ever feel welcome.
3. Conference fees in the $1000 range are usually paid by employers. Try rewarding the actual girls who might come instead of just lowering the price for the boss who won't share with them anyway. For example, girls could be rewarded with many $5 bills generously slipped into their pants by passersby.
4. If this system prospers, it is certain not to inspire any kind of backlash from non-girls who feel the price differential is unfair to them.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] abduhl|12 years ago|reply
Also, the bar/nightlife industry has had great success with discounted "girl tickets" increasing female and male attendance.
[+] [-] lucisferre|12 years ago|reply
Seriously.
[+] [-] sgentle|12 years ago|reply
If you're attempting to reach a group of people of which you're not a member, you really need to be doing it in consultation with someone who is. Otherwise you're just going to make obvious outsider mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot. That goes just as much for women as it does for hardcore gamers or scotch enthusiasts.
I think you do have a good point, though: it feels like there's a lot of negativity around tech feminism sometimes without much positive to aspire to. As the article says, the organisers were well-intentioned but doing it wrong - which is, at least, a good start. It's a shame we don't see many articles praising the conferences that do a good job encouraging women to participate, or sharing best practices and advice. I feel like that would do more to prevent mistakes like this and ultimately improve the community.
[+] [-] LadyMartel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octatone2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekalon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RyanZAG|12 years ago|reply
I'd judge this as a success or not based on how many of these tickets are used, which will be found out after the conference. Hopefully they do a post on the statistics at the end so we can make proper conclusions.
[+] [-] lucisferre|12 years ago|reply
By the way, conjuring up imaginary "other women" to argue against the author just doesn't come across well to me. You want to argue the point just do it.
[+] [-] weego|12 years ago|reply
"As a random person with no stake at all in this yet a strong opinion on it, I can tell you that if your opinion is the opposite of mine then it doesn't matter even if this issue directly affects you".
That's the kind of lazy, passive-agressive, statement that has no place in proper discussion.
[+] [-] britta|12 years ago|reply
In other words: trying to make your event more welcoming to women, in an effort to compensate somewhat for the industry's systemic sexism - sure, that's a good idea, and there are experts and nonprofit organizations who can advise you on how best to do that. There are also lots of blog posts about good strategies. Handling this clumsily, with pink stuff and calling women "girls" - not so good execution.
[+] [-] hartror|12 years ago|reply
If they do this they may attract more girls (ladies, women?) to Angular which will improve the Angular ecosystem overall. Perhaps there are a number of women who have been tempted to go but aren't that committed to Angular and this might tip them over the edge.
I don't think we can acknowledge that there is a problem attracting women to our industry and not provide these sorts of concessions and special treatment, at least in the short to medium term. In the long term the industry culture and perceptions should be such that this isn't needed but that isn't where we are yet.
[+] [-] LadyMartel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaila|12 years ago|reply
I totally get the whole "don't treat me any differently because I have a vagina" thing, but the conference organizers really do seem to have good intentions.
Yes, making the lanyard pink prompts a momentary mental picture of someone putting a pink lanyard over my head while babbling incoherent baby talk, but then I realize that maybe the person who decided on pink really just has that culturally ingrained boys = blue, girls = pink thing. Or maybe the person who picked the color is a woman who likes the color pink. Or maybe, there are so many other details to plan for the conference that picking the color of the discounted lanyard didn't get a whole lot of consideration.
Yes, someone should have told them we don't call women above a certain age "girls". They do say woman and women a couple times in the email, and I can see how maybe Woman Tickets or Lady Tickets or Gal Tickets just sound awkward compared to Girl Tickets. I don't get the sense they mean girl in a derogatory fashion at all.
Or, I could be totally wrong, and they could all be misogynist jerks.
And, to answer your question, the top three discounts/free money for women I can think of are: Bars and clubs Auto insurance Scholarships
[+] [-] jaredsohn|12 years ago|reply
Instead of calling them "girl tickets" they should perhaps be called "women in tech" tickets or the conference should partner with one or more women in tech groups and name the tickets after them (i.e. PyCon could offer PyLadies tickets.) Conferences could even use membership in the women in tech groups as a way of certifying that people deserve the discounts similar to how a student ticket might require proving that one attends a university.
(These are just some ideas; one problem may be that some women in tech groups may also allow males to join, although it could be enough of a hurdle to prevent abuse.)
[+] [-] geddski|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aegiso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msoad|12 years ago|reply
My take in United States culture is that young women are too afraid of looking nerdy if they go after math and engineering. Those who are brave enough to not care about stereotypes get pissed off by this kind of artificial "culture fixes".
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
To provide, at least, an objective answer, airlines will discount tickets if they have a given level of certainty that the passenger is female -- except, interestingly, on Thanksgiving and Mother's Day, when female demand is higher than male demand.
[+] [-] _b8r0|12 years ago|reply
I've just come back from co-running my conference last week. We were way up on female attendance and speakers compared to last year, which I'm really glad with. Women don't need discounted tickets to decide whether or not to come to a con. They definitely don't need their own colour lanyards and if they had one it doesn't need to be pink.
Most importantly, what women need are reasons to come, not discounts. We're limited in what we can do at 44CON[1] to change the sausagefest nature of the industry by the number of women, but we're happy to help where we can. We should focus on improving the conference experience for women (and everyone) so they'll tell their colleagues and friends in industry to come along. Women buy tickets too, is it so hard to listen to customers instead of singling them out?
[+] [-] britta|12 years ago|reply
I've also seen these forms of practical support from conferences that want to encourage participation from women:
* Enacting a harassment policy and/or code of conduct to provide a signal that the organizers care about maintaining a healthy conference environment, which can help women feel more comfortable attending (see http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/).
* Helping make arrangements for childcare, such as setting up inexpensive group childcare for children of attendees, since women tend to have more responsibility for children than men do.
* Offering advising for qualified people interested in submitting talks who don't have much speaking experience, or having lightning talk opportunities for less-experienced speakers, to help fix the self-reinforcing cycle of few women speakers at conferences.
And pleasantly enough, those policies also benefit attendees of all genders and support other kinds of diversity as well.
[+] [-] serf|12 years ago|reply
if you don't like the idea of giving a specific sex a discounted ticket for simply having been born with different genitalia , right on. I totally agree.
[+] [-] penrod|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geddski|12 years ago|reply
Our only goal with this is simple: promote the cause of women in tech. We all work with extremely talented women and recognize their value in our industry. For example where I work (Domo) one of our VP's just won the "Women in Tech" award, which is awesome. We just want the women in the Angular community to know that they're appreciated, needed, and welcome at ng-conf.
To that end, we wanted to make sure that those interested would have a ticket available. Today we sold all our early bird tickets in less than 2 minutes. Next week we are opening up the next round of discounted tickets for the general public. We anticipate these and all other tickets will also sell out quickly. So to succeed in our goal - despite the inevitable statistics - we decided to reserve a number of these tickets for women. This way, women that wanted to attend wouldn't have to worry about the luck of the Eventbrite draw. So the primary benefit is the guarantee (not the discount) of the ticket. We felt that was the least we could do to show our thanks and appreciation.
The pink lanyard does seem a bit silly out of context, we should have explained that idea better. As we've seen with other conferences with limited availability (JSConf, Google I/O, etc.) competition for a ticket can become intense. We didn't want men to buy up all the women's tickets using their significant other's name, or the whole thing would be pointless. We figured if the lanyard was clearly for women, that would deter most abuse of the initiative.
We really do appreciate the feedback on our execution. Let me recap what we're received so far:
- Most generally agree with the idea that getting more women out to ng-conf is a worthwhile initiative. - Pink lanyards was a terrible idea. - Some prefer to be referred to as women, not girls. That's understandable. We took our cues from some of the organizations championing this same cause: "Girl Develop It", "Girl's Who Code", "Black Girls Code", "Girls Write Now", etc. In our minds it was "guys and girls", not "boys and girls". Both are valid semantics of the word, but we hear you.
This has been a great learning experience, and it's clear that we need to brainstorm this a bit more. If you have other ideas that accomplish the same goals in a less polarizing fashion we're all ears. Thanks for the positive feedback, we appreciate it. We really want to do this right - it's too important not to. Thanks!
Dave Geddes @geddski
[+] [-] LadyMartel|12 years ago|reply
I get that lots of groups use the term girl, though I think some of them actually deal with teaching girls (actual school aged ones) to code. In general I dislike being called "girl" in a professional setting. (But maybe I am in the minority for this opinion)
[+] [-] hartror|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EllaMentry|12 years ago|reply
The way to attract more women, stike, people to your conference is not through tokenizing them...it's by making the conference interesting (having some diversity in the organization group would be a start!)
[+] [-] danellis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] penrod|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brennenHN|12 years ago|reply
"If you don't look like our idea of a girl, we'll throw you out of our conference for identifying as one."
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulocal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danellis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|12 years ago|reply