
Why We Care About Inclusivity - carols10cents
http://steelcityrubyconf.org/blog/2012/05/08/why-we-care-about-inclusivity/
======
adrianhoward
I like seeing stuff like this. I especially like the explicit call out of
vendors and sponsors who too often get a free ride.

It makes me more likely to attend the event - and I'm saying that as a white,
middle-class, middle-aged male developer.

Because, quite frankly, I'm getting too old and tired to deal with the crap
boys-club behaviour I occasionally encounter at technical events. I certainly
don't see it at the majority of events - but I see it far too much. And since
I am a white, middle-class, middle-aged male I'm probably not seeing all the
crap that does happen.

Getting a guarantee that the organisers aren't going to stand for it will
encourage me to attend their event. Hopefully it will encourage some of the
folk I know who've stopped attending technical events due to repeated
asshattery. With any luck it will self-filter some of the asshats of the world
from attending too.

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zhivota
Just to counterbalance all the negative commenting going on in this thread, I
think that this is a great step forward. This is setting the bar for future
conferences in tech.

As a community, we have a huge opportunity to bring in a new generation of
people into our field. We will squander that opportunity if programmers and
startup workers get stereotyped badly. To me, it's not about the details of
the policy, it's the fact that the organizers care about the issue and are
doing something to signal that much to their attendees.

I have a hard time empathizing with anyone who claims that such a simple
policy is a bad thing. I don't know anything about the posters of those
sentiments and their backgrounds. In the end, we should treat people the way
we want to be treated, and I don't want to be harassed. That's the end of the
story for me.

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tomjen3
Great. Now I have to avoid the elevators -- if I go in and a female feels
harassed by being "trapped" with a guy in an elevator I get kicked out. If I
don't, I get kicked out because I won't share an elevator with a female.

Not to mention the crap about respecting peoples religion. It is literally
impossible to do that while being inclusive of LGBT people since homosexuality
is an abomination in Christianity and Islam (or Islamic customs) mandates
separation of the sexes. Not to mention that religion is a choice, whereas the
race you were born isn't.

I am not advocating tricking muslims to eat pork at the conference or
anything, but some groups happen to complain a lot over relatively
insignificant things.

And in the end the goal is not inclusivity. It is the sharing of code, tools
and practices related to these things.

~~~
tptacek
I'm from a huge Catholic family and my life is full of people who (a) go to
church and (b) are horrified at discrimination over sexual orientation. I'm
sure there are plenty of Muslims who are equally frustrated over being
automatically judged by the standards of the worst members of their community.

Similarly: I know plenty of people with moral dietary restrictions --- and the
hipster-friendly vegan mentality is surely more common than Kosher and
Halal/Haraam --- who don't make a giant stink over pork being served at
conferences. I don't keep vegan, Kosher, or Halal, but I'm not enough of a
close-minded idiot to _literally be offended_ that those people exist.

Incidentally: accused of harassment just for getting in an elevator with
someone of the opposite sex? Huh?

~~~
parfe
_Incidentally: accused of harassment just for getting in an elevator with
someone of the opposite sex? Huh?_

He's referring to an incident where a conference speaker had drinks in the
hotel bar with other attendees and at 4am said she was tired and left to go to
her room. A man left the bar and followed her into the elevator and only after
being secluded asked to continue talking with her in his room. edit: Found the
video
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=uKHwduG1Frk#t=241s)

Her point was that his approach made her uncomfortable. He had the opportunity
to speak to her in a public place in the bar but chose an elevator.

I think he chose the elevator because it was less stressful to approach a
stranger with no one to witness a probable rejection. Of course it made it
more stressful for her to turn down a stranger while trapped alone with him.

She received some serious backlash from men who think it was perfectly
acceptable to tail a woman into an elevator to engage them in conversion while
they are trapped with you, and she would be completely wrong for feeling
threatened.

Coincidentally it's the same type of guy who would have told her it was her
fault for getting attacked if the man had raped her.

Edit: Also, I can't believe HN is supporting tomjen3's comment. It's
borderline parody, but not.

~~~
chc
> _Coincidentally it's the same type of guy who would have told her it was her
> fault for getting attacked if the man had raped her._

You're way over the line with that one. It's one thing for a man to think, "I
don't owe it to women to walk on eggshells around them." That view might be a
bit naive, but it is a very different and much less despicable thing than
supporting rapists and blaming rape victims for what happened to them.

I thought what he did was poorly considered, but he didn't show any ill
intent, so it's very unfair to associate him with men who harm women. Why do I
care about this? Because drawing that association actually plays into rapists'
common delusion that trying to rape women is a normal and acceptable thing. It
is important to draw the line between behavior that is merely inconsiderate
and behavior that's actually evil, even if you dislike both.

~~~
parfe
I agree with most of your comment, thank you. It was a good response to what I
wrote.

> _so it's very unfair to associate him with men who harm women._

I wasn't associating the person in the elevator with people who victim blame.
I was speaking of people who responded in a backlash to her video describing
the incident.

Allow me to expand on that line you quoted to clarify.

Let's take this comment, for instance:

> _The reason there was a huge shitstorm over it was that all he did was to
> ask -- he didn't do anything else._

What he's doing here is invaliding her discomfort. He's implying she should
have some way to detect a rapist and her danger-detection is faulty. She
shouldn't have been uncomfortable _because he didn't rape her_.

It only works in hindsight and it's "not" victim blaming only because she
wasn't victimized.

Claiming a person should know someone _is not_ a rapist necessarily requires
thinking a person can know someone _is_ a rapist.

edit: removed repetitive sentence for clarity.

------
tjic
> We wanted to increase the likelihood of attendees seeing people who they
> share something in common with

Great. Steel City Ruby Conference thinks that the color of someone's skin or
the shape of their genitals is the way that audience members might share
something in common with a speaker.

Personally, I care a lot more about whether a speaker shares my interest in
coding, entrepreneurship, etc.

Beyond that, sharing interests in reading materials, history, woodworking, or
gaming might be nice.

But, no, what we get is racism and sexism: "We think the only commonality
worth talking about are the superficial physical ones".

I think Martin Luther King would be sad about how far short these folks have
fallen from the goals he set out.

~~~
idm
When the problem is murder, and you adopt a policy that condemns murder, you
don't call the policymaker a murderer. The first action (murder) constitutes
taking someone's life, and the other (the policy) amounts to a prohibition on
that. They're opposites. See?

> But, no, what we get is racism and sexism: "We think the only commonality
> worth talking about are the superficial physical ones".

You do realize that there is a very real problem with sexism, right? That is,
there are people who are already behaving badly on the basis of superficial
physical differences. If you can step back from what you've written, maybe you
can realize the absurdity of labeling an anti-harassment policy as "sexism and
racism."

In short: chill out. If you're at the conference for the speakers, then this
policy isn't about you. If you're there for the booth babes, then you're the
type of brogrammer being targeted, and your comment would then make complete
sense. I don't think that's who you are, though, so seriously: chill. This
anti-harassment policy isn't sexism.

~~~
batista
> _When the problem is murder, and you adopt a policy that condemns murder,
> you don't call the policymaker a murderer. The first action (murder)
> constitutes taking someone's life, and the other (the policy) amounts to a
> prohibition on that. They're opposites. See?_

When the problem is not X, and your main policy is "condemn X", then you
aren't addressing the real issues behind conference attendance, etc.

So I'd argue the whole "harassment"/"sexism" thing is an overblown out of
proportion thing, and I'd rather hear about your bloody actual content.

Not to mention that the me-too emphasis on "inclusion"/"sexism-fighting" etc
fad sends people away. I want to come there to learn about Ruby and have some
nice chats with other developers, etc, not to fight social ills the presense
of which I might not even agree with in the first place ("Oh, someone show
some slides that included some humorous sexual innuendo in a programming
conference, we must stop this sexism and condemn it for all eternity"). If
someone stomps an ant or bites a bat a la Ozzy in his next presentation, will
we also get the obligatory PETA references in every conference program?

> _You do realize that there is a very real problem with sexism, right? That
> is, there are people who are already behaving badly on the basis of
> superficial physical differences._

Superficial as regards to programming and intellectual capacity. Because, in
other ways not only are they not superficial but an extremely powerful
biological mechanism is at play regarding those differences. I.e men are
attracted to women and vice versa, and this is even how the whole species
(including conference organizers) currently exists.

------
parfe
Great to see man-child behavior being so directly addressed in their anti-
harassment policy.

~~~
maybird
True, but it's also a shame that it has to be addressed at all.

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aidenn0
I hope this pans out; the Ruby community has historically had a lot of
behavior at conferences that isn't just slightly offensive, but genuinely
disgusting.

In general I often find myself on the "the line was blurry, the intent was not
to offend, so let's educate" side of things, but when there is a track-record
of behavior like I have seen, something set out in black and white like this
is clearly needed.

------
niete
They have discovered buzzwords!

