An open Letter to Women in Tech

http://johnwilker.com/2012/05/an-open-letter-to-women-in-tech/

by mikecane • 14 years ago

14 36 14 years ago

jamiew• 14 years ago

I'm amazed anybody, male or female, would speak at an event where tickets cost $600 and they won't even pay for speakers' airfare & lodging.

aspir2• 14 years ago

Conferences are lower margin than you think, particularly in tech. They're normally thrown for the good of the community or as a loss leader for some other business/product. If you're lucky, there's a slim profit that can be reinvested into the next conference, or that allows you to pay yourself for the insane hours put into planning. In all, tech conferences are generally a labor of love.

factorial7• 14 years ago

This certainly does not apply to conferences that cost a cool four figures to attend and are geared towards the corporate market. Nobody can tell me that the organizers are not making money.

wpietri3• 14 years ago

I think that's pretty typical for a conference the speaker would have attended anyhow. I've certainly spoken at conferences like that and been quite happy about it.

ckolderup• 14 years ago

One of the things I think he's overlooking:

Frequently the reason that people don't go the extra mile of giving talks or otherwise sharing their thoughts and experiences is that they think that they're not good enough or worth less than other people. Sometimes this results in someone with a really great idea or a unique voice staying quiet.

In an industry dominated by men, women have been discouraged from participating or speaking up. It takes time and effort to reverse that damage. I'm glad that he took the time to invite women specifically, but I think his anger at the result is misplaced when it could be more effectively directed at a system that holds decades of inequality in place.

roopeshv6• 14 years ago

fuck. same can be said of geeks who don't speak up. there is no one advocating for them. if the stage is open, and you don't take the fucking chance to get in, don't complain.

sp3329• 14 years ago

Having "too few" women give talks isn't a problem. It's just a symptom of the fact that the community is unwelcoming toward women. That's what we're really trying to fix.

wpietri3• 14 years ago

Two interesting aspects of your argument here. One, you've quietly dismissed any possible sexism. And two, after accurately pointing out a problem, your solution is basically, "well fuck them, then." Nice.

I've been involved in selecting conference speakers, and we went out of our way to find geeks who aren't used to speaking up. Quiet people often have the most interesting things to say.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Just a quick question: has there been any research indicating that more females want to be in tech? That females are unfairly (ie other than ability) excluded?

I realize this may seem a silly question, but so far all I have heard is what percentage of females are programmers, but by the same argument men are being prevented from getting a career in nursing.

sp3329• 14 years ago

This article has some information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643180

adrianhoward2• 14 years ago

This post prompted me to go check the people we accepted onto the UX stage of Agile 2012 - and we have a 50/50 male/female split. Merit based - sex wasn't a factor in picking speakers. Makes me rather proud of the community we've built up in that particular field over the years.

And community building is what changes things in my experience. People attend conferences to have fun and learn. Speaker or audience. Lose some of that in however small a way for some group and you start losing traction with that group.

I know people who don't attend particular events, or in a few cases conferences in general, because various attendees or organisers or sponsors acted like asshats. Word spreads and it affects future years attendance and submissions if the organisers aren't proactive about dealing with the situation.

Even worse it casts a general air of malaise over the whole field. Attend two different conferences in a row where you're made to feel uncomfortable in one way or another, and it makes you a little less likely to attend the third.... an so things spiral...

The door maybe open - but people's views are tainted by discovering what was actually behind some other supposedly open doors.

ryandvm• 14 years ago

> we have a 50/50 male/female split. Merit based - sex wasn't a factor in picking speakers

In a field overpopulated by males at a rate of about 9:1, half of the most qualified speakers you picked were female? Statistically, that doesn't reflect well on the skill of men. I would have expected a merit-based selection process to produce candidates in the same sex ratio as the sampled population.

I had no idea a woman was four times as valuable as a man...

adrianhoward2• 14 years ago

In a field overpopulated by males at a rate of about 9:1

Intriguing. Where did you get this statistic on folk qualified to speak on integrating UX and Agile? It's a fairly narrow field that I'm intimately familiar with and I've never come across a gender breakdown.

Oh wait... the Agile 2012 submission process is an open one... so I can just go look to see what sessions were submitted.

Of the 51 session proposals submitted to the UX stage there were 19 female and 40 male speakers (this adds up to more than 51 because some sessions had multiple speakers) - so judging by submissions that ratio is 2:1. If we only look at the primary speaker of each session we have a 8/5 split. So, statistically, the men don't come off too badly. Good for us boys.

If you're worried about a gender bias in the CFP then you can find an example at http://www.ixda.org/node/31640 - they were sent to many other places but were all pretty much variations on the same theme.

The session reviews and session submissions are public. Just register at http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/ and browse around. If you detected a bias that has caused us to reject an excellent submission please let me know. Wouldn't want that. We try an make the submission process better each year.

One way that the Agile 20XX conferences differ from many others is that we have a public review process. The review panel gives feedback on proposals - and submitters have a chance to clarify and improve their session proposals. I'm too lazy to go through the history of each session to see whether women were more likely to improve their sessions based on feedback. Can't say I noticed any difference at the time - but it's possible that may explain the difference.

[Edit: Hmmm... it might be a factor at that. More men submitted at the last minute when there wasn't enough time for submissions to be updated after the reviewers feedback - so they lost out on a couple of potential feedback loops.]

I had no idea a woman was four times as valuable as a man...

Or maybe it's just that we try quite hard not to say things like this.

[Edit: removed one unnecessarily harsh word]

hej2• 14 years ago

Nice victim blaming.

roopeshv6• 14 years ago

oh, fucking stop with the victimization complex.

hej2• 14 years ago

Get off your blinders is all I can say.

An open Letter to Women in Tech

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