How do you even argue with some who dismisses you like that?
They were basically approaching her to give a talk at an event here known for advanced technical topics even though she was at hello world level ability with React, and she felt very uncomfortable how persistent they were and it was obviously straight pussy pass.
They always seem to have a high representation among authority figures at conferences for some reason.
May be they are afraid of the alternative - being branded as non-inclusive, male-chauvinistic, etc. if they don't bring enough women to make the quota sufficient enough to avoid the branding (as we've seen such branding is no joke in the modern environment and can be painfully damaging when it comes to real things like employment/etc).
You won't magically increase the number of women in tech by opening conference spots. Conference spots are open to at least somewhat-experienced people who already are committed to the industry, and no one joins to speak at a conference.
That's quite a bold claim. Can you delineate this "structure", since you seem confident that the organizers are making use of it to be certain that women won't be able to participate?
But there are actually qualified women. Putting up unqualified candidates to meet some notional quota is the best possible way of enforcing the status quo.
A weird but predictable side effect of using affirmative action to promote women is that statistically attendees will see female presenters as worse. (Availably heuristic / selection criteria bias).
Good thing that's not why they are withdrawing from the conference. Specifically, they are pulling out because the conference wasn't even wiling to work with them to find a more diverse speaker lineup. If nothing came out of that, then they would have gone. But the conference didn't even do that.
> Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?
Then PHPCE wouldn't have been for you, along with all the other tech conferences I've attended, as they generally had talks that weren't strictly PHP.
I couldn't find the (now cancelled) schedule for 2019, but to be fair it looks like PHPCE was a very focused conference: https://2018.phpce.eu/de/#agenda
Compare that with the holistic schedule of RubyConf, for example: http://rubyconf.org/schedule
^^ From the second link, blog post about a guy dropping out.
I'm so lost. So this guy drops out because the organizers won't go to great lengths to find women, and then admits that in his own experience it is sometimes completely impossible to find women speakers.
I think we're missing the forest for the trees here.
> If they had tried and were unsuccessful I'd be more forgiving, but you need to at least try. And when multiple speakers offer to work with you to reduce costs so that you can at least try, that should be taken seriously.
It sounds like he took issue with what he took as a complete lack of effort in trying to solicit submissions from women.
I think that is quite reasonable, especially since he went out of his way to frame this as a "way to improve" rather than a "reason to hate"
If you belong to a group, especially one that hosts events at least once a year, and you feel like it's run "adequately well", it's probably run better than 95% of the organizations out there. Head and shoulders above. You should take the time to thank the organizers for doing as well as they do. It's like being a member of the City Council, only you get paid even less (dollars or influence).
> “Everyone has the same chances” is the exact problem. What are you doing to elevate women and POC? How are you showing your support as an ally and actively encouraging access to these “equal chances”?!
These people have gone off the deep end. If you aren't actively following their political playbook you're to be shouted down. You can't even just opt out of participation in their crusade, if you're not elevating their chosen classes you're as good as the Klan.
This is a tech event, not a political rally.
It's a shame though because these groups do face actual hardships but I don't get the impression that the Twitter warriors are actually interested in how they fare, outside of scoring virtue points by being up to date on all these privilege topics. In my experience those who do real work for underrepresented groups are usually pleasant people tolerating opposing views and they don't search for the least charitable interpretation to get offended by, unlike how it looks on Twitter and Reddit.
As long as there are no good alternatives that fit their perfectionist ideological worldview then no one can have fun or live their life without constant disruption.
I used to be involved in access work for those from underprivileged backgrounds.
It's very difficult to get poor kids to apply to University even if they have the grades, for reasons I expect are pretty similar (social environment, not 'fitting in', having few role models, etc).
Going back further - tons of them simply don't have the grades or skills, because they weren't interested early on, or weren't supported, or whatever else.
They fall behind at an early age. They're stuck in an environment that doesn't support them.
Changing the statistical makeup of people at that sort of level - at the end of the funnel, after all of the filtering - is really difficult. You need good reason to do so. It's still not clear to me that it actually makes sense - is the world actually better off if half the Ivies are made of poor kids, or have you just shuffled around status (is it zero sum)? Do you get better results - what are the better results you're looking for?
This stuff is difficult.
That said, what is the focus on individual diversity good for? It's the system that holds people back, and as the parent poster says, no amount of individual effort at the end of the funnel is going to make any difference.
I'll believe that when I see recruiters from high end universities out on the reservations in the US, but I guess imposters are easier.
i don’t think it’s that difficult. the government finds a way to spends billions and trillions of dollars on tons of stuff that has no meaningful impact. if the government cared, they would increase the budgets of schools to fund good teachers’ salaries. if i could pull a six figure salary teaching, i would do it in a heartbeat. but there’s no way i would teach in this current educational environment. hyper focus on standardized testing and curriculum, which also needs to be changed, seems suffocating.
Suggesting that simple, direct, change of the variable that has direct linkage to pretty much all other parts of the system, will achieve some specific result, is almost certainly wrong.
In fact, pretty much every mechanism taught of how to effect change in large scale systems says not to do that.
In this case, this is pretty easy to see - As an example - If you could pull six figures teaching, everyone would want to teach, regardless of whether they should or not.
Solutions to this have obvious affects on other things
(IE increasing credential requirements, or performance reviews ...).
These in turn have effects on other parts of the system, ...
If you really think this is just simple, i'd suggest looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#Complexity_mana... and going from there.
I’m moderate and think that anyone who wants to should program for a living should but stuff like this hurts my head enough I don’t engage with them on Twitter as it results in a mud slinging match that nothing improves from.
It’s frankly tiring seeing the same crap repeated ad nauseum.
Still, a mature adult would have recommended someone for the next version of conference and if all points out your recommendation is being taken seriously you do your part and deliver your conference in the current version.
What would you propose those speakers do differently?
A follow up question: why do you say that would be more effective than what they did?
(And, I would ask you, is that something that still maintains their commitment to diversity, since they all mentioned that was more important than speaking opportunities?)
I always find in life that you get better traction when you approach people with a solution instead of just a problem.
So perhaps they could've said "Hey, I think it'd be good to increase speaker diversity, and I really recommend person X, she's amazing at Y, I could approach her and ask if you'd like?"
Instead of just yelling "There's not enough women!"
They could donate to software engineering schools in poor districts in their home countries or developing countries, but they decided to do something absolutely meaningless that benefits noone.
I would suggest every person who finds this behaviour acceptable to look towards Effective Altruism (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) and drop this ridiculoius posturing.
"Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.
"Here, take back some of the money you were using to pay for our travel and use it to bring in some female speakers" said the male speakers.
That's not why they aren't attending. They aren't attending because the conference wasn't willing to put in any effort to try.
Props to the speakers who stood up for their values.
The problem isn't simply "there aren't enough women", the problem is "we only hear from the same group of people with similar lived experiences". The problem is self-reinforcing: because women are underrepresented at those events, they're not attending those events, thus becoming more underrepresented and ultimately marginalised.
Ironically a good solution for that is having more "women's events". Women-only events to strengthen the marginalised group, women-presenting-but-open-to-all-attendees events to settle in and finally quotas in general events to counteract the bias.
Except this is not only true for women but for all marginalised groups.
Except that is not the case. There are disproportionately more male speakers than there are male PHP developers.
> Do we cancel future events solely on this premise? Seems like a terrible idea to me.
The events were not directly canceled due to a lack of diversity, but due to a complete lack of effort to solicit a diverse range of submissions.
The organizers have committed to making an effort in future years.
There are things in life more important than tech conferences. Quality in tech should not override human rights, civil rights, people's health and relationships, etc. This could be a long list, tech isn't even close to the top.
The only number I've seen for this conference is one woman submitter out of 250, which isn't even close to matching the proportions of the community.
Did the organizers select a lower ratio of diverse speakers than applicants? Were there very few diverse applicants and the organizers decided none of them qualified?
Mark didn't cite a source for this, which is what I was looking for in the Twitter thread.
Regardless, the conference organizers are at least partially responsible for lack of diverse applicants if their speakers were able to find candidates on short notice.
But I'll go to the next PHP meetup in Dresden and try to confirm my suspicion.
Lots of discussion on twitter about how talks were chosen. Not many brought up the fact that the submissions process itself was apparently broken.
Would be good to hear female voices in here... why was there only 1 application?
Having studied in an all boys school, this looks to me as the times when me and my friends would get together to discuss how to approach a girl, or what would girls like. As you grow and mature, you understand that you only have to ask THEM, same as you would ask a random guy.
Until it was revealed to be real footage...
It's become increasingly clear that no, tech is not just about tech. Tech has a huge impact on society and if your tech conference only has male speakers you aren't trying hard enough to make your conference reflect this.
Further, if your tech group isn't actively working to bring people from other backgrounds into it then it becomes an echo chamber.
Echo chambers are the worst, because people don't realise that's what they are in.
This isn't some random political position, it's something based on real, measurable results where echo chambers make horrible technical decisions because of real-world blindness.
I do machine learning for a living, and there are some particularly notorious examples of this happening in my field. The most obvious one is "Gender from Iris Images" where an entire series of papers by male-only teams ended up being discredited by a single devastating paper by (apparently) the first female to look at the problem. The paper title gives away the whole story: Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?[1]
