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Ask Slashdot: How Should Tech Conferences Embrace Diversity?
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting on how debate over diversity has managed to get a Ruby conference in the UK cancelled, as the speakers were 100% white male. The person running the conference, Chuck Hardy, said he 'was not prepared to put [himself] in the position of legal liability and cost ramifications if a sponsor were to pull out under social media strain.' He added, 'The ramifications of comments such as race and gender can have financial and legal consequences for the conference organizer. Raise these issues but allow the conference organizers the chance to highlight and act on these industry level issues. Accusation and slander is not a solution.' Should conferences embrace diversity from the start, or should they go forward even if the speakers are all of the same denomination? How far do we have to go to ensure we are diverse?"
I think the United States experience has proven that adequately.
Have all the presenters in blackface, and then have them announce that they are embracing diversity.
How stupid of an idea is this? Just treat everyone fairly, how hard is that?
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The best way for a tech conference to handle this is to focus on the tech.
Racial and sexual diversity have precisely zero to do with a tech conference. Unless you're running a KKK rally, don;t look at diversity. Look at the tech!
Shouldn't a conference be about the technology, not the people speaking about the technology?
My opinion is that I don't care if the information is presented by a black homosexual woman or a white middle-aged heterosexual man, I just want the knowledge.
You should exert absolutely no effort to be diverse, and you should exert absolutely no effort to not be diverse. What matters is the merit of the speakers, not their diversity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Instead of complaining that a conference is all white, run your own conference and make it as diverse as you want. My experience concludes that most of the time, those who complain don't do anything themselves. They work as peons somewhere, and have never made any decisions on their own.
Start your own business, it's never been difficult. And show that you're better than others. What a great competitive advantage you'll have.
Quit complaining when someone else does what they want. I don't imagine that in this case the organizer turned away non-white speakers. You wanted it to be random, and sometimes random is uniform. So sorry, that's how math works.
Again, be responsible for something of your own, and you'll find that you won't care what others do on their own.
There were only 15 speakers, not nearly enough for any assumption of bias. Britain is a predominantly white country and programming is a male-dominated profession. If they have selected 15 British Ruby programmers at random they would also get 15 white males with a high chance.
I know, silly suggestion. But lets try getting the most qualified speakers we can, and ignore what color they are.
How far do we have to go to ensure we are diverse?"
Instead of having race quotas to treat the symptom, explore the cause by investigating various demographic breakdowns of those in STEM fields. Note I said explore the cause, not impose an ad-hoc solution to treat the symptoms. If certain socio-economic groups are not present (note I said not-present, and that I did not say excluded) in what society deems as positions that should be diversified, then look at the upward mobility of those demographics and the barriers to entry into a particular career vertical. Which is things like place of birth, education, parenting, finances, etc. Forcing quotas solves nothing and only creates more social stigmas relegating certain classes of people as being special or protected. The sooner we stop treating the symptoms of lack of diversity, the sooner focusing on the causes can be examined (which we already know generally what they are). But most folks don't want to look at and try solving the hard part.
A gang-banging thug from Detroit could be white/black/purple. Said gang-banging thug will probably not go into STEM not because he is anything but white, but instead because he is a gang-banging thug. Solve the gang-banging thug problem and BAM, you've got another person who may rise to the top of a given field other than slanging blow.
And if all your gang-banging thugs are of one color, fixing the numbers at the top as far as who gets to participate in what event based on color breakdown will not solve your gang banging thug problem. Now instead you have quotas at the top but still no solution for the bottom.
Why can't people understand this? Or am I by default a racists for not giving special treatment to non-white classes of people (a distinction sooner forgotten and ignored the better). People are freaking people.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I can sympathize. Once I wanted to ask this woman out on a date, but I did not because I *might* be liable for sexual harrassment. Therefore, I can never ask a woman on a date. I have 30 cats at home instead.
Why do you assume that only people of other races can have different perspectives?
What exactly are these perspectives they bring to the picture?
This sounds like people who want "diversity" so they can have different ethnic foods to get at the drive-thru.
Futurist Traditionalism
More accurately, it's a type of discrimination.
Being biased in favor of a mixed-racial group is racism against all who aren't mixed-racial.
Futurist Traditionalism
You can have that diversity within a single ethnic group.
Just go find people with different approaches to life.
Your approach seems to be racist, in that it assumes members of racial groups are all identical.
We're not. We are diverse as individuals. Quit trying to turn us into the Cosby Show or The Brady Bunch.
Futurist Traditionalism
The blatant crypto racism is exhibited in most of these posts... Guess what, your reaction is what proves the racism, not your quasi logical statements explaining your reaction...
No one bother to read the opposing views, or the reason why this was brought it.. just an immediate.. " Those women and brownies always want to be included... reverse racism"
To quote a SPEAKER that realized this after the fact
So I started asking around. I thought of all the prominent non-white-dude Ruby conference speakers I could in the space of a couple minutes. Just people who came easily to mind, nobody too obscure. I wanted to know if they had been invited to be part of that initial group of 15, and had said no.
Sandi Metz. Bryan Liles. Reg Braithwaite. Angela Harms. Sarah Mei. Katrina Owen (Norway). Keavy McMinn (Scotland). None of these people were invited to be part of the initial line-up. In fact, I couldn’t find a single woman or minority Rubyist who had been invited to be part of that 15.
Oh.. that changes the picture... doesn't it?
This whole "the world isnt racist anymore so just get over it" is a bunch of BULLSHIT. It's been barely a generation in most areas.. heck, we have people in the south holding to grudges and behaviors 6-9 generations deep. But someone, racist behaviour is supposed to be completely expunged in one generation, and well, any mention of it just shows reverse racism... bleh.. most of the above posters disgust me.
are we to believe that no women or any non-whites sent in good presentations?
You think it's more likely that they really are all racist misogynists, and would rather cancel their own event than let a woman speak?
It sounds like the problem was they were working on it until this Susser guy implied on Twitter that they're racist misogynists. From there it turned into a typical Twitter shitstorm, and the organizer realized that anyone making the panel at that point would be seen as the token speaker, and no sponsor would want to be associated with something that became high profile for bad reasons.
Assuming the article is accurate, people should really just mind their damn business until there's something concrete and legitimately wrong to make accusations over.
The whole skin colour / gender thing is a red herring. The difference between living in America and Africa is not. If fifteen elite athletes from North America and Europe cross the finish line in a clump on their titantium carbon-fiber wonderbikes and then some Congolese kid crosses the line a few seconds later on a second-hand paper bike how do you score the merit function? The African boy has nothing but guts and determination. No world-class coaching, no decent bike. Useless.
One has to step back from merit to at least look at what a person a accomplished on the foundation of what they've been given.
I count an Ethiopian Ruby developer who writes a small Ruby application to manage the coffee trade as worthwhile diversity, even if far less competent as a Ruby specialist than other available speakers. I really don't give a damn if he or she is black or any other pigment.
The main difference between men and women has nothing to do with aptitude. It has to do with the higher willingness of men to immerse themselves in their expertise at the expense of everything else in their lives. He who sacrifices accomplishes more. And this derives directly from reproductive variance. Low status males face the worst reproductive odds. It's just not possible for a woman to squeeze other women out of the gene pool the way Ghengis Khan squeezed out a quarter of the men in all of Eurasia.
Merit-based promotion doesn't encourage balanced lifestyles. It tends to mainly reward fanatics. Women complain about this, and well they should, but it's no trivial matter to decide which man who sacrificed more should be excluded to the benefit of a women who sacrificed less, but did so within a rich and balanced lifestyle (raising children, being active in the community, etc.)
I also think that if you don't invite people from around the fringes to participate, the fringes tend to stagnate.
There are other risks run by the whip-snappers of inclusion. Statistically, small conferences run more risk than large conferences of getting busted by the diversity police.
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Considering that the native population of Europe is almost all white, I'd say it's about as disgraceful to have all white speakers at a European conference as it is to have all East Asian speakers at a Chinese conference. Jeez. I can't take this nonsense seriously, no matter how hard I try to force myself.
I'm a member of a racial minority that works in technology.
The idea of some kind of minority outreach or affirmative action, if you will, is offensive to me. It belittles and draws into question, my accomplishments. I worked hard to get where I am. Let it be about merit, not political correctness.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I am omitting any reference to my gender in my college applications. Should it matter whether I am male or female for college admissions? Should I be given a different cutoff for acceptance for being female rather than being male? Should I be given a different cutoff in ACT/SAT/AP scores based upon my gender or what people call race? Aren't all of those "re-biasing to unbias" options the same as discrimination?
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I would rather be judged on my merits and abilities than on my name, my gender, my background, my parents' background. I don't want to be told or hear that I'm an affirmative action acceptance to MIT or GaTech or CalTech: but I bet that's what I'd hear anyway even if I get accepted on my merits. So the easiest way to get rid of that doubt ( that little click of suspicion that I was admitted for my gender or that the bar was set lower for me because of my gender ) is to abolish looking at gender or any sort of discriminatory sorting techniques.
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I've never presented at a conference or meeting. I've barely presented more than the four or five teams a year I have to get up at school to present an essay. But my feeling is that for a conferecne, the same concepts should apply. A presentation or presenter should be selected based upon its content, its merit, its interestingness, its possible validity or intrigue, and its appropriateness to the conference goals. A presenter/presentation ought not be selected based upon their gender, their ethnicity, their national origin, their age, their corporate sponsorship (haha, I almost forgot about that, buying your way into a talk, eh?), or their deep-pockets, or their relatives, or their looks, or their "coolness factor", or to correct for any past biases/insensitivites/prejudices/blockages.
The reality which (apparently) no-one can face is that society is *in transition*.
Have racism and other forms of discrimination gone away? Of course not. Are reverse discrimination and other well-meaning attempts to rectify systemic injustices excessive? Probably they are.
Deliberate, malicious racism has mostly vanished, and that is significant progress that really does deserve more recognition than it gets. Some people are actually unhappy that there's been so much progress because they are deeply invested in fighting racism, and they go looking for it where it has ceased to be found, creating new injustices and hurting the credibility of everyone else on their side. The unconscious and/or systemic racism is rapidly diminishing but certainly has not completed disappeared, and some people are not completely sure what the right strategy is. That's a good thing - it means we're halfway to the goal and perhaps it means some mental effort because it's time to consider new tactics.
In this case, however, a little statistical thought should tell us that if "the speakers were 100% white male", then we can be highly confident that there is something wrong. And therefore how to respond to the statistical anomaly is a perfectly valid question.
Considering that the native population of Europe is almost all white, I'd say it's about as disgraceful to have all white speakers at a European conference as it is to have all East Asian speakers at a Chinese conference.
It's always interesting to ask people who mumble about diversity why this does not apply to China or Africa.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
To map "diversity" to skin color is superficial and reflects the bias of the viewer more than anything. As a white male programmer I've more in common with other male programmers, no matter what their color, than with male football players, male drug dealers, male prostitutes, male athletes. Skin color has literally nothing to do with it. It's cosmetics.
Gender arguably is more relevant but seriously... there is no bias against women participating in free software projects. It's literally a sport open to anyone, with as few barriers as you can imagine. Age, gender, skin color, origin, perhaps the only filter that reduces diversity is the need for reasonably fluent English.
And still, the number of women in our communities is extremely low. That means the detailed technical world of software appeals to fewer women than it does to men. That's not a problem, it's just a fact, and easily observable. It would be offensive to choose women speakers just for their gender. Tokenism is a nasty form of discrimination. At the same time it would be offensive to refuse people on any basis except their work. I don't think that was the accusation here.
Diversity simply means, different points of view, perspectives, and opinions within the group. It does not mean creating a Star Trek experience.
Then again speaking as a white male it's quite likely that my perception of this is totally biased.
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Actually it's a shame he cancelled because (a) any publicity can be good and (b) this now sets up the stage for hysterical attacks on the tech scene in general and (c) this is worse, not better, for 'diverse' speakers. What does it mean now to be a non-white or female speaker at a conference? That you're there because the organizers wanted some token diversity? Insurance?
"Hi, I'm the diversity insurance speaker. Name's Token. Here's my card."
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...MIT is sexist. The students are 50% male and 50% female. This translates into a wonderful 26% acceptance rate for females and a 9%(average) acceptance rate for males. Welcome to "diversity," everyone. (Data taken from 2006-2009, the data available when I applied.)
This is just another example of why mandatory diversity of arbitrary attributes like skin color or gender is a terrible, terrible idea. For this conference, it would mean that the non-white and/or female presenters would likely be *worse* than the white presenters, white male presenters would be discriminated against, and the perceived abilities of non-white and/or female participants would be lesser precisely because their standards for making the cut are lower. For MIT, it means that the average female student is literally less qualified to be at that school. I'm sure that does wonders for discrimination, a la "You're a girl, therefore you are statistically likely to be dumber than the guys in your class. I'm not taking you in my research project."
Now, if your approach to diversity for a Ruby conference is seeking out presenters who have minority(but valid) opinions on the implementation of an algorithm or an interface, *that* is productive. Diversity is good, just make sure it's diversity in an area that's actually relevant to the situation. Ethnic and gender diversity in a biological study can be great. Diversity in the coding practices of the participants in a biological study... probably not so important.
Tl;dr -- Mandatory diversity breeds legitimate discrimination.