Our industry sucks for diversity and conferences are only showing up the fact

http://fberriman.com/2013/01/06/conferences-arent-the-problem/

by jaffathecake • 14 years ago

28 49 14 years ago

zxcdw4• 14 years ago

Why is lack of diversity considered a problem in the first place?

> I think at this point we should start asking questions as to why we feel the need to poke hard at conferences, why are we positively discriminating, and what should we really be fixing for lasting change. Why are our starting numbers so low?

Discriminating. Positive or negative. Is wrong. Just because you are XYZ doesn't mean you somehow could expect to be treated differently. No. You are equal. You are just like anybody else. You are not special. On the other hand people in minorities whine(in many cases rightly so) that they are treated differently, while people in non-minorities call for positive discrimination which further promotes inequal treatment.

You're a woman/gay/trans/whatever in tech? Cool, now get back into line just like everybody else. Nobody cares -- hopefully.

diziet5• 14 years ago

How about all the 'XYZ' that could be contributing a lot and bettering the world via their work in software development but aren't getting a chance to do that?

Tichy6• 14 years ago

What makes you think they don't better the world in whatever else profession they choose?

patrickaljord3• 14 years ago

How are they not getting a chance to contribute to software development? Github doesn't require an ID card, git push doesn't check for your gender or sexuality last time my wife used it. Any women that have done significant contributions to open source projects on github or else are always invited everywhere, give many conferences and have tons of followers on twitter. If you know of any gem that don't get any attention, someone who has made amazing contributions on github and that is completely unheard of (including their code? though that would be hard to imagine), please share.

zxcdw4• 14 years ago

What makes you think 'XYZ' aren't bettering the world in more suitable fields for persons themselves? What would prevent 'XYZ' from "getting a chance" to do that in tech/"our field"? Why should the 'XYZ' contribute if they refuse to contribute without special benefits because they somehow are "special"(which they are not)?

Just because Jamal is black doesn't mean he's any worse/better/special than Henry who happens to be white. Just because Sally is a lesbian doesn't mean she's any worse/better/special than Cindy who is straight. You get the point.

Stop categorizing people. There are no categories. There are only people. All equal regardless of age, sex, sexual preference, "race", origin, religious beliefs, ... Only people. Equal people.

betterunix• 14 years ago

"How about all the 'XYZ' that could be contributing a lot and bettering the world via their work in software development but aren't getting a chance to do that?"

This is not a simple matter of people being actively or even passively discriminated against. This is the result of the environments, decisions, and treatment people receive from their earliest elementary school days; there is almost nothing that can be done by the time people are in college. I have watched EE and CS departments do everything imaginable to try to increase diversity, yet they have made extremely modest improvements.

Somewhere between the beginning of middle school and the end of high school, girls seem to stop being interested in math, science, and things that are relevant to engineering and CS. Somehow, my female classmates who had high scores on the AP calculus test all wound up somewhere other than engineering -- psychology, accounting, management, etc. Despite every possible opportunity being made available to women, despite departments running the gamut of things that could attract women, despite women representing a majority of students at many colleges, women continue to avoid engineering.

So don't say that women are not getting the chance to be engineers or computer scientists. Women have more chances than anyone else; they are choosing not to take advantage of those opportunities. Figure out why that is the case, and maybe you can actually do something to solve the problem.

andreasklinger• 14 years ago

The problem is that people care - even if they are not aware of it.

The reason for reinforcing positive discrimination is that you are not aware of your own bias towards negative discrimination.

And honestly we aren't. We cannot judge equal, because we are extremely biased. Artificial skewing to confront people with more and more of XYZ is a good thing as it help estimating objectively.

I caught myself questioning a young woman who said she was working in machine learning several times, to get to the root of what she was doing really (turns out the real stuff). I wouldn't have done it in the same way with a guy (i assume).

zxcdw4• 14 years ago

> The reason for reinforcing positive discrimination is that you are not aware of your own bias towards negative discrimination.

So in other words you think it is perfectly fine to treat people inequally based on what they are? Some people just happen to be "more equal" than others?

> And honestly we aren't. We cannot judge equal, because we are extremely biased. Artificial skewing to confront people with more and more of XYZ is a good thing as it help estimating objectively.

Who decides how much "artificial skewing" is enough and on what grounds? There can be no correctness or authority over this, and as such any kind of skewing is wrong.

> I caught myself questioning a young woman who said she was working in machine learning several times, to get to the root of what she was doing really (turns out the real stuff). I wouldn't have done it in the same way with a guy (i assume).

Just like we dislike that guy with long hair. Or that guy with pink bread. Or that terribly tall guy. Or that bald woman. Or that .... whatever doesn't fit the "mainstream" what would be expected from a person in that field. This is a symptom of people not understanding that we're all people, and we're all equal and should be treated as such, regardless of our differences. It's first and foremost a mentality issue, whether that can be solved or not is another thing. Adding more discrimination to "balance" things is like giving opposing forces more weapons to "balance" the odds and thus avoid the slaughter. No need to mention where it leads to.

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

"Discriminating. Positive or negative. Is wrong."

Wow. Such bold words. Except it's meaningless (or worse). Every person who submits a topic (PHP? jQuery?) to a conference that doesn't fit what the organizer(s) wants is 'discriminated' against. Every topic that is selected is 'discriminated' for.

Uh. Oh. That. Is. Wrong.

Sounds so much better when you. use. lots. of. periods. right?

FWIW, I organize what has so far been a 3-track 1 day tech conference with 21 slots. I go out of my way to make sure there are female speakers there (IIRC we had 5 or 6 this year).

Why? It's a factor that helps bring more audience in. Based on surveys and f2f chats, women have told me they're more likely to attend because they'll be more comfortable knowing women are presenting. More potential audience means more potential sales means lower losses or perhaps even a small profit.

There's other reasons I do this. The notion of saying that the organizers can pick "the best" presenters and topics is, at best, a guess, but is more often delusional. I've been to plenty of conferences where some 'big name' presenters were utter crap and the lesser known people were a mixed bag.

Getting a more diverse audience to attend - made easier by a more diverse speaker panel - will help improve networking opportunities, as you'll have people from more walks of life and with more diverse networks and opportunities of their own mixing and meeting. If everyone thinks the speakers and topics are the sole reason to attend tech conferences, you've either only been to one or two, or you're asocial, or perhaps trying to justify the non-diverse speaker range after the fact (yes, there's more options, but those spring to mind, especially the first one).

Mixing/mingling/networking at conferences - a place to let your hair down and meet others with common interests but different backgrounds - is (for me and several others I know) one of the prime reasons to attend conferences now. Many conferences put up speaker videos; many times the sessions are the 5th time a topic has been presented, or you've seen it before, or it's from the speaker's book; ask him (it's almost always a him, right?) about something in the hallway.

Hallway chats and networking sessions are never put up on video sites afterwards, yet are probably the most important parts of face to face conferences. These are the events where we can be human with a range of people. When that range is 200 white men under 30, it's less valuable overall, and when those people all hit 40, and are still seeing conferences that are all featuring under 30s white men, they'll probably start to understand the 'discrimination' thing.

Tichy6• 14 years ago

"Why? It's a factor that helps bring more audience in."

So let the market fix it, no need for affirmative action. It's just targeted advertising to move your product, at the end of the day.

yummyfajitas5• 14 years ago

Let me see if I get this straight.

Sexist women will choose conferences based on the gender of the speaker. Due to greed, and because these women are so desirable to have at conferences (why?), we should therefore discriminate in speaker choice.

Have I missed anything?

zxcdw4• 14 years ago

Never thought of that. Thanks.

RyanZAG• 14 years ago

So you're proposing to push people to speak at conferences who aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable speakers, simply because they have the correct gender or skin color?

This is an extremely bad idea. Firstly, it reduces the value of the conference itself as a means to share the best possible information. Secondly, it lowers the esteem and respect of the speakers by allowing the audience room to question their abilities. Lastly, and most importantly, it allows politics into the selection of speakers, and moves the system further towards a popularity contest from a meritocracy, where people argue for speakers based on increasingly superfluous factors.

These are technical conferences, and you guys need to keep them this way. The selection of speakers need to be done on merit.

tomstuart• 14 years ago

I honestly don't understand why you've left this comment, because the OP is arguing against positive discrimination, not for it.

alextp• 14 years ago

The fallacy behind arguments like this is that when someone says that we're "proposing to push people to speak at conferences who aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable speakers" it is implicitly assumed that it is known how to rank the speakers, and that doing so is easy.

In practice, however, while one can often tell a really bad speaker and a really good speaker apart there are plenty of bordeline cases and the variance is big, so using minority-biased criteria to "break ties" will not necessarily lead to worse speakers on average, as long as these criteria are uncorrelated with actual skills.

(and I'm not sure they are, as the mean quality of a woman-presented talk in conferences I've attended has been consistently higher than the mean man-presented talk)

mtrimpe4• 14 years ago

Indeed. It's more a case of 'we know we collectively have an unfair bias against women, let's try to consciously adjust our bias a bit.'

yummyfajitas5• 14 years ago

The fact that a decision process is noisy and imperfect doesn't mean that deliberately adding errors to it won't give worse results.

All it does is give you statistical noise, making it easier to bury your head in the sand.

rsheridan6• 14 years ago

When you have a 22:1 male to female ratio and a 23:0 white to non-white ratio, it'll take more than a tie-breaker to make it look as diverse as a PBS cartoon.

doktrin• 14 years ago

> So you're proposing to push people to speak at conferences who aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable speakers, simply because they have the correct gender or skin color?

On the contrary :

   Conferences are simply showing up the diversity problem    
   in a particularly acute way – we will never fix it by 
   pretending the industry is more evenly distributed than 
   it actually is, and later blaming organisers for it.

Did you read the OP?

reinhardt• 14 years ago

Still waiting for an HN frontpage article with the same or similar title but where the industry is, say, nursing or elementary school teaching. Not holding my breath though.

mtrimpe4• 14 years ago

Don't forget that those industries have similar discussions going on..

[1] http://www.minoritynurse.com/men-nursing/recruiting-men-nurs... [2] http://www.degreesfinder.com/online/articles/should-there-be...

anu_gupta• 14 years ago

Have you tried searching for some and submitting them?

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

Maybe it would be worthwhile to look at female-dominated industries to see how they're handling gender diversity? According to this: http://www.minoritynurse.com/men-nursing/men-nursing the percentage of males in nursing is about 5%. According to the article, they are pushing for diversity at the recruitment level.

yummyfajitas5• 14 years ago

Nursing is also one of the few fields where gender is actually relevant to the job - think about some of the more unpleasant parts of nursing (e.g., washing people's genitals).

Tichy6• 14 years ago

You mean it is easier for women to wash men's genitals than for men to wash women's genitals, and easier for men to accept women washing their genitals and easier for women to accept women washing their genitals? Or what exactly is the gender relevant aspect?

elliatab• 14 years ago

As a counterexample I think Microsoft conferences represent well diversity (from what I saw watching MIX and Build videos on channel9). This is probably the result of their HR strategy (speakers are mostly Microsofties).

xentronium• 14 years ago

What is the usual process for organizing such an event? Is it calling for participation and then picking the best speakers for the deck (candidates -> organizers) OR is it a sort of organizers choice of speakers who are then contacted (organizers -> candidates)?

In either case, shouldn't organizers have the right to pick whatever they think is most interesting and then let their auditory choose, whether to participate or not in their event? By the very same logic, shouldn't editors have their right to choose what content they publish, with their readership voting for that choice using their wallets? I think in the end, if it is really important enough, underrepresented parts of community are still able organize their own conference, with all the right speakers.

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

Two points:

1) Diversity is valuable when it represents diversity of life experience and problem-solving methods, not when it represents some external characteristic like skin color or gender. To substitute these terms out is to be prejudiced, that is, to believe that we can look at someone externally and make informed decisions about their internal makeup. We cannot.

Two, you do not manage complex systems by simple statistics. If you could, then all the billions being spent in root cause analysis and so forth would be unneeded. Complex systems, such as those involving people, are, well, complex. For example, if the inputs to the system are heavily skewed, that is, if applicants for speakers come in at a heavily skewed ratio, then the process itself can't be responsible for the outcome. Of course, if the process only serves to facilitate an outcome, then that's fine, but it's no longer a process optimized for finding the best speaker or whatever. You can't have it both ways.

I can provide more examples of how trying to reason about these systems in a simplistic fashion is not only a waste of time, but can actually lead to counter-productive results.

I refuse to be sexist or racist and I won't tolerate those around me who are sexist or racist. But I also refuse to continue to consume material that promotes this kind of mushy-headed way of looking at something as important as diversity. If you don't understand the problem and don't understand how to deal with it even if you could manage to identify it, then any resulting conversation or action is not going to be very productive.

GiraffeNecktie• 14 years ago

"Diversity is valuable when it represents diversity of life experience and problem-solving methods, not when it represents some external characteristic like skin color or gender."

First of all, gender is not exactly an "external characteristic". Secondly the life experiences of men and women are inherently diverse.

Hopefully, someday the colour of your skin won't influence your life experience, but that is not the case in any human society that I am aware of.

stevoski• 14 years ago

Are there countries where a significant proportion of IT workers are female? Or representative of the country's ethnic makeup?

If so, please tell us!

Our industry sucks for diversity and conferences are only showing up the fact

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