
Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013? - luigi
http://www.threechords.org/blog/diversity-in-tech-still-an-issue-2013/
======
whalesalad
You can't assume that this was intentional. The author writes that when he
tried to inquire about why there weren't any women asked to speak, he wasn't
given a very detailed response. This can mean anything! If these guys
deliberately decided to exclude anyone who wasn't a white male: that sucks.
But it's extremely possible that this is a coincidence. I know a handful of
super-smart female designers and hackers. I'd ask them to join my team any day
of the week. I see no difference in their ability due to their gender. That
being said: all of them, now that I think of it, are on the extreme end of
shy. Not "nerdy basement dweller anti social shy" but the kind of shy that
would prevent them from speaking at a conference, let alone volunteer to do
so.

I really don't think there is enough ground to say this is one way or another.
It's a toss up. Why are we jumping to such harsh conclusions? In my 5-6 year
career I've yet to experience gender discrimination. I've worked in Hawaii,
LA, DC and Sweden: all of which I've worked alongside respected and talented
female coworkers. I really feel like this recent gender inequality stuff is an
example of the 80/20 rule. A few edge cases are making us feel like everyone
is out to get the girls. Relax! We aren't!

~~~
rorrr
Agreed, we actually would love to hire more females at my last job, but there
are just not enough qualified women in tech. Most candidates are white young
guys.

I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not
Computer Science on average.

~~~
spacemanaki
> I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not
> Computer Science on average.

Easier majors like mathematics, physics, biology, the other "real sciences",
medicine, etc? Those fields apparently don't have quite the same gender
imbalance that computer science does.

I don't think it's that useful it is to be looking for someone to place blame
on, but I doubt the reason there are fewer women than men in tech is because
they are choosing easier majors than computer science.

~~~
jiggy2011
"Easier" is probably a bit of a troll. But it certainly seems the case that
women are attracted to certain majors.

Sciences is a funny one, when I was at university I met plenty of female
students studying Biology, Psychology and Medicine but very few in Chemistry ,
Physics or CS.

I wonder if there is some intrinsic reason that women are attracted to certain
types of science more than others?

~~~
kscaldef
But then there's also relatively more women in Mathematics and Astronomy.
There's definitely not a simple relationship between how "hard" the science is
and how many women are in the field.

~~~
jiggy2011
True, I wouldn't necessarily think there is a difference in difficulty. But
sciences that have a hard time attracted women seem to be those that might be
considered "lower level". I'm wondering if there is some reason for this which
might be either cultural or just a product of biological differences?

~~~
kscaldef
To clarify, I meant "hard" in the sense of more fundamental or "lower level".
In that ranking, mathematics is more "hard" than any of physics or chemistry
or biology. Astronomy is a little less clear but I think it's fair to say that
it's a "harder" science than biology, and more-or-less on par with physics and
chemistry.

~~~
jiggy2011
I would really consider mathematics to be extremely high level because it
deals very much with the abstract, but I suppose that could depend on your
point of view. Difficult to comment on astronomy because I not sufficiently
familiar with the topic.

Maybe my point is more that when people think of biology/medicine/psych they
will often put it in a context of people,animals,plants which is more
stereotypical "women stuff". Whereas physics/chemistry/CS is more often
thought of in the context of "things" like buildings,bombs,cars,computers etc
which is stereotypical "guy stuff".

Mathematics is difficult to generalise because it has such a wide range of
applications.

------
natrius
_"... I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100%
male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22
possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the
remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women."_

This suggestion is a bad one. It is blatant tokenism.

Try this instead: [http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-
speake...](http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-
my-tech-conference/)

Key takeaway: _"The easiest way I saw for getting more women on stage at the
actual event was to get as many women to submit speaking proposals as
possible. Selecting presentations was done without speaker information
associated with the titles and pitches, so I wasn’t able to “reserve” spaces
in the program for anyone based on aspects of their identity — and I wasn’t
interested in that sort of reservation system for this event, anyway."_

Telling people that an unintentionally all-male conference is "inexcusable" is
an unproductive (and incorrect, in my opinion) way to address the problem. The
industry has a diversity problem, but it's not wrong for someone to not take
action to address it. It'd be nice if they did, though. When I try to get
people to do things that would be nice, I never use that sort of tone. People
who improve diversity issues in the tech industry are doing us a favor. Treat
them that way.

~~~
mattpointblank
Article author here. Thanks for the feedback.

I perhaps didn't word that paragraph as well as I could -- my point there
wasn't to introduce quotas, but to attempt to nip the problem in the bud. If
I'd been organising EdgeConf, and had got to ~80% of my speakers being male
with no female representation, I would've dropped everything and made sure
that the rest were women. I guess when you include the numbers then this feels
like tokenism, but it was mostly arbitrary. My point here was that they should
have realised they had a problem before it reached 100%, not start out with
the intention to recruit x% women (no matter how relevant or qualified they
were) -- that's tokenism, right?

~~~
natrius
Choosing people primarily because they add diversity is tokenism. There are
processes that are effective in obtaining underrepresented speakers that are
effective and don't require choosing people because they're a minority. We
should use those.

I really don't think we should label conferences failures because they do a
poor job on the diversity front. Instead, we should encourage them to do a
better job next time and show them how.

------
betterunix
My experience in university CS and EE programs is this: schools are under
enormous pressure to bring more women into tech, yet none of the "typical"
techniques for doing so seem to work. At my alma mater, the EE department
could not attract _any_ qualified female applicants in my year; they published
flyers showing women in class, they sent female students to speak at high
schools as representatives of the school, etc., but nothing seemed to work.
Where I am now, we are told to use female pronouns in our lectures and
research papers and to be as gender inclusive as possible, and professors
struggle to find ways to make CS seem more interesting to people who did not
spend their teenage years hacking; still, women remain a small minority in the
CS and computer engineering programs. There is something happening here that
is beyond what schools can do; somehow, high school girls are being convinced
that technical fields are not something they can or should pursue.

~~~
jiggy2011
This was my experience too, when I did my CS degree the brochures etc made
sure to prominently show female students and the testimonials were balanced to
provide around the same amount of female quotes as male.

The end result was still the same though, out of maybe ~90 students there were
about 6 females at the start. By the end of the course I think only 2
remained, the numbers were slightly better for the "business computing"
courses rather than the hardcore CS but not by much.

There was roughly the same experience at the job fairs towards then end. The
companies recruiting were desperate to talk to the female students about
technical roles. Even so from what I'm aware most of the female students ended
up taking non tech roles.

------
invalidOrTaken
"The population is not uniform, yet our sample is? SOMETHING IS WRONG."

[http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-
randomness...](http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/21/what-does-randomness-
look-like/)

Finding a cluster doesn't necessitate a bias.

~~~
naftaliharris
Well, possibly.

Let's compute some simple p-values: Suppose that some fraction p of potential
speakers are female. Then the probability that all 22 of the speakers are male
would be (1-p)^22.

For p = 0.1, we have a p-value of 0.098, which could reasonably arise by
chance.

But for p = 0.20, we have a p-value of 0.0074, which is not so likely to arise
by chance.

So if you assume that at least 20-25% of potential, qualified speakers were
female--a reasonable assumption, I think--then this "cluster" does indeed
suggest a bias.

------
catshirt
this topic is so complex that i am left convinced that anyone who has a strong
enough opinion as to write a blog post on the topic, doesn't respect it's
complexity.

what is particularly offensive about this post is that the author infers the
question "why are there no women speaking at this conference?", yet they
completely ignore the possibility that no qualified women applied to speak at
the conference. statistically speaking, would this really blow anyone's minds?
by doing this you are defaming the organizers by calling their character into
question.

the responsibility is left up to the organizers because they did not go out of
their way to find women to seed the speaker list. but putting this
responsibility solely on the organizers without even exploring other
possibilities is irresponsible.

i think i can make my point best with some rhetorical questions directed at
the author: why didn't you recommend any of your female peers for
consideration as a speaker? what good do you hope to bring to the argument by
outright ignoring possible causes of the effect that concerns you?

~~~
mattpointblank
Hello, blogpost author here.

I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write about
it don't "respect" it?). My goal with writing this (as stated in the article)
isn't to launch some Twitter hate mob or cancel a conference, but to start a
dialogue (which I couldn't continue with the organisers). I don't claim to
understand every facet of the issue but I'm most definitely an interested
"amateur" if that makes snese.

I don't think it's fair to say I "ignore the possibility" that women could've
been invited / applied. My whole point is that we have no idea about this
process because the organisers are being opaque about their methods, and in my
opinion, if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why
that ended up being the case, otherwise we're left to assume that you think
there's nothing wrong with that. If they genuinely tried every approach they
could to make things more diverse and weren't able to, good -- I'm happy to be
proven wrong. But we have no idea whether they did and we can only assume from
the communication that it isn't an issue for them -- that's bad.

No need for rhetorical questions:

In the "Postscript" below the entry itself I recommended a good amount of
local-or-close-to-London female devs who could've spoken. For all I know, they
were approached. But I don't know (see above).

I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by
highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it, and starting this discussion. It
needs to be on everyone's minds.

thanks!

~~~
catshirt
>>> I don't really buy that logic (if something is complex, people who write
about it don't "respect" it?)

you're right. i was being too broad and my intent was to suggest that anyone
who places the blame on one thing does not understand the complexity. your
tone here feels less accusatory than the blog post.

>>> if your speaker list is 100% male, you should explicitly explain why that
ended up being the case

i agree in that i think this would be the proactive thing to do. i disagree in
that i don't think this is a requisite. and that's my point of contention:
your post is criticizing and questioning a group of people for not being as
proactive as you think they should be. this seems arbitrary. and by this
definition, hardly anyone is as proactive as they could be. and that is
certainly a problem. but i don't think the way to approach that discussion is
by singling out (for most intents and purposes) one guy.

>>> I also tried to answer the question of what "good" I hope to bring: by
highlighting an "injustice" as I perceive it

what is the injustice you perceive, while admitting you don't know any of the
details? is the injustice that the speaker process is not transparent? if they
had a 50% female roster, would you be ok with it not being transparent? what
about 20%? again, your flag for concern seems arbitrary and hyper-directed.

------
icegreentea
I would think that part of the organizer's response is due to the use of
'inexcusable' in what looks like the initial contact. If a stranger contacted
me and used that word in reference to my actions, I would certainly
immediately be on the defensive. This could have definitely led to the future
lack of communication.

------
chestnut-tree
Here's a take on getting more female conference speakers from a female blogger
(who is a copywriter):

[http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-
your...](http://rel.ly/2012/09/conference-organisers-a-point-for-your-
consideration/)

I'd say many of the points in the above link are equally useful to all
speakers and attendees (regardless of gender or colour). So perhaps some
simple forethought in planning and prepaparation can go a long way in
encouraging a wider range of attendees and speakers.

------
anonzmouse
Would you rather them have less qualified speakers for the sake of equality?
give it a rest.

~~~
raganwald
I find the assumption behind this statement offensive, deeply offensive.
Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers," people are saying "Don't
overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or
fifty years old."

If you could find someone beige AND fifty with 40,000 points on hacker news, a
popular blog, and experience keynoting conferences, that would be great,
wouldn't it?

~~~
jonallanharper
No one cares what color or age you are raganwald. That's the entire point. If
you identify yourself by your skin color, then you are in fact racist.

~~~
raganwald
"If you identify yourself by your skin color, then you are in fact racist."

That is the most offensively ignorant thing I've ever read on HN. And I've
been around a good long while.

~~~
jonallanharper
Identifying yourself by your skin color means you perceive the color of your
skin to imply something about you.

Anyone who asserts that the color of an individual's skin implies something
about that individual is a quintessential racist. It implies nothing about you
as an individual. Anyone who says it does (including you), accepts the
premises that every racist accepts: that a color somehow defines the identity
or nature of that individual.

"Offensively ignorant" #1) I can't control what offends you, that's your
choice. If you are offended, then choose not to be. #2) Ignorance means lack
of knowledge or information. What specific information am I lacking in this
context?

"I've been around a good long while." Again, no (rational) person in this
forum cares how long you've been around. What does that have to do with my
argument?

~~~
raganwald
These arguments have been going on for nearly a century, and you're trotting
out the same tired old arguments. Either you're trolling me, or are ignorant
of the ongoing debates/discussions/history of this issue. That's specifically
what I mean when I say you're ignorant. Your words display zero awareness of
the larger context.

The "We aren't racist or sexist, we're colour-blind and gender-agnostic, we're
a meritocracy, and it just happens to be the case that our country club is
full of white people isn't important, and you people are racists/sexists for
constantly trying to disrupt our happy existence" is old. If you know that,
you need to do more than whip it out, you need to acknowledge the many, many
arguments against it and explain why you don't think they apply.

If you don't know that, you are ignorant of the subject matter. If you know it
but do not address it, you are trolling. Some people call that being
"intellectually dishonest," but I prefer to say trolling.

Of course I identify myself by all of the my characteristics that have a
significant contribution to my life's experience. I have size 11 feet, but
that has never meant much to me, so I don't think of myself as a "Size 11
Guy." I've been assaulted on the street and called a "Nigger" and "Spook" by
strangers, so guess what? My skin colour does contribute to defining my
experience.

When you call that racist, you're either ignorantly redefining the word
"racist" or trolling me. I prefer to think you're ignorant of the
implications. Conflating having a life experience that has been affected by
his skin colour with white supremacism and Jim Crow laws _is_ wrong. It's also
deeply offensive.

I'm offended. I choose to be offended. I choose to speak out against it.
That's not the same thing as being "Jerry Springer" angry with you, or curling
up in a fetal ball and sobbing, but it is enough to motivate me to act.

And let me tell you flat out, this "I'm not being offensive, you're just
choosing to be offended" argument is nonsense, it's like that Simpson's
episode where Bart windmills his arms and says "I'm just windmilling my arms,
and walking forward, if you get hit that's your problem."

Do yourself a favour, and remove it from your toolbox of arguments.

------
jayzalowitz
Alright, Got to weigh in here.

I used to work at the ft, and spent a good deal of time dealing with the labs
division.

Andrew probably went out of his way to ask for diversity, seriously, he is
awesome like that.

I think the issue may be time constraints and the fact that within 3
companies, no females/minorities/etc offered to speak and had the relevant
high level of expertise.

~~~
mattpointblank
Hi, article author here.

I did state in the blogpost that I know Andrew is a good chap and I respect
him and his intentions, and I don't for a minute think he set out to make this
event 100% male. My issue is in his response to my challenge on it, and the
lack of acknowledgement by the organisers that an 100% male lineup isn't
ideal.

I also find it quite hard to believe that amongst companies like Google and
Facebook, there aren't enough highly-qualified female/minority devs who
could've spoken. And besides, the speaker roster isn't exclusive to those
three companies, either.

thanks!

~~~
jayzalowitz
I dont disagree about paragraph 3, what I am saying is the very specific, very
fast mobile serving technology experts may have very few women, or at least
few who wish to travel to london.

------
jacalata
Funny, looks like britruby will be held in spirit after all.

------
aaronsnoswell
Only if we keep talking about it...

