
The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued - msq
https://2019.phpce.eu/en/
======
curiousgal
As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a
conference because it has no female speakers. Why should anyone care about
anything other than php in a php conference?

~~~
abeisgreat
Well one way to think about it is to view the current structure (one of male
dominated events) is already enforcing a system that isn't just about PHP.
It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently
sit in the back. The attempts by speakers and organisers to level this field
_is_ trying to get the events to just be about PHP. However they realize that
things are very off balance already and without push back we'll continue to
enforce a technological patriarchy. The only way to make things just about the
tech is to address these things, however painful, and rebuild an environment
where women feel equally accepted, respected, and praised.

~~~
curiousgal
Do all men feel accepted, respected, and praised just because they are men?
No, the ones that do have earned it. Like so, I personally would like to get
invited to give a talk _only_ because I am the best person out there who can
do so on the topic at hand, not because some organizers feel like they have
some sort of obligation to be politically correct.

~~~
sp332
Men are encouraged to go into CS just because they are men.
[https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-
go-...](https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-into-the-
tech-industry-but-things-are-changing-18151047)

~~~
nf8nnfufuu
Yet another silly feminist statistic, cleverly cropping context to make things
look bad.

This is about advisories given to 16 to 18 year old boys and girls.

Does it seem possible that the advisors took the track record of the person
they advise into account. Like for example their choices of subjects at
school, their grades in Math, those sorts of things? And perhaps those aspects
were more important in advising for or against STEM than the person's gender?

To me, that seems rather likely. But creative feminist statistics make it seem
as if gender was the only determining factor, PROVING discrimination.

It's actually a pretty nice example of how typical feminist propaganda works.

~~~
sp332
Annoyingly, I can't find the study itself, even on the Internet Archive. I'm
drawing on knowledge that I have about America and just used this to confirm
that there's a similar bias in Europe. I can see how it would be less
convincing if you don't have the same background info.

~~~
nf8nnfufuu
I don't know what background info you mean? You mean you already know that
bias exists, from your experience in America, and that Europe study only
confirms it?

How/what do you know about the situation in America? Tbh it seems more likely
to me that US studies made the same "mistake". European feminists also like to
copy methodology from US feminists.

However, if you have an article regarding the US, I will take a look.

------
ngngngng
> we always struggled to get women from outside of Drupal to submit to that
> track, despite Drupal itself having a relatively large female population. We
> actively reached out to women both in the PHP community and local to the
> event and still sometimes had no submissions from women

^^ From the second link, blog post about a guy dropping out.

I'm so lost. So this guy drops out because the organizers won't go to great
lengths to find women, and then admits that in his own experience it is
sometimes completely impossible to find women speakers.

I think we're missing the forest for the trees here.

~~~
shkkmo
> Sadly from what the organizers told me they actively don't want to do
> outreach, and just let whoever wants to submit submit.

> If they had tried and were unsuccessful I'd be more forgiving, but you need
> to at least try. And when multiple speakers offer to work with you to reduce
> costs so that you can at least try, that should be taken seriously.

It sounds like he took issue with what he took as a complete lack of effort in
trying to solicit submissions from women.

I think that is quite reasonable, especially since he went out of his way to
frame this as a "way to improve" rather than a "reason to hate"

~~~
hinkley
I don't think anyone appreciates how goddamned difficult it is to run an
organization, especially a volunteer one, well.

If you belong to a group, especially one that hosts events at least once a
year, and you feel like it's run "adequately well", it's probably run better
than 95% of the organizations out there. Head and shoulders above. You should
take the time to thank the organizers for doing as well as they do. It's like
being a member of the City Council, only you get paid even less (dollars or
influence).

~~~
shkkmo
At least 2 of the presenters have direct experience doing exactly this, they
appreciate how hard it is and they also offered to help.

~~~
hinkley
I think I tried to hard to make it short and sweet but lost a bit in
translation. I'm not supporting their reaction but there aren't enough people
out there crazy and skilled enough to run an annual event that pulls people in
from hundreds of miles away. I belonged to such a group when I was too young
to understand how much work it took for them to make it look easy. And I
recall someone trying to replace the leader at some point.

What I have is sympathy for people who discover at the "last minute" that they
have fucked up. It's never a situation I like being in, and it brings out
better things in some people and worse things in others.

Uncle Bob started one of his presentations with a call out to notice the
shortage of women in the room and an ask that people try to think about fixing
that. I think a more productive approach for these presenters would be to say,
"Look, I'm gonna present this year, but I'm gonna mention this in my
presentation, and I'd like to help you figure this out for next year or this
is the last time I'll be presenting with you." Nobody is on the spot, you have
time to reason with people and appeal to their values instead of threatening
them and their conference.

Daryl Davis doesn't get people to leave the KKK by issuing ultimatums. If a
black blues musician can have a productive conversation with a Klan member we
can have an adult conversation about representation in volunteer run tech
conferences.

What kind of pisses me off about this SJW thing is that it's a lot of people
who have only recently discovered that their world view is wrong and they are
in what someone brilliantly called 'the asshole phase' of new understanding.
Now they're punishing people for being a couple years behind them on the clue
train.

My classmates _decades ago_ were pointing out and volunteering to address
these sorts of inequalities. One in the general case, the other in the
specific case of CS degrees. None of this is even a little new and I have some
pretty bad whiplash from the sudden uptick in activity and anger.

I love safe spaces. Some of the best, most at-ease times of my life have
happened in someone else's safe space. I may not know everything about how
they get built, but I know this for sure: You can't create them by threatening
people.

~~~
shkkmo
You mentions "ultimatums" and "threats" and a lack of an "adult conversation",
what is your basis for that?

The presenters who canceled their presentation didn't go out and say "nobody
should go", they didn't accuse anyone of being sexist. They saw an issue and
reached out privately first to address it. There organizers were unable to
address it this year have said they would open a dialogue to address it.

Their response has been pretty darn level headed and non-acrimonious. What I
don't understand is what they deserve the bilious language you are directing
at them? It seems to me like you are having the exact type of knee-jerk
reaction that you are accusing other people of.

------
AlexB138
From the Twitter thread:

> “Everyone has the same chances” is the exact problem. What are you doing to
> elevate women and POC? How are you showing your support as an ally and
> actively encouraging access to these “equal chances”?!

These people have gone off the deep end. If you aren't actively following
their political playbook you're to be shouted down. You can't even just opt
out of participation in their crusade, if you're not elevating their chosen
classes you're as good as the Klan.

This is a tech event, not a political rally.

~~~
toxik
Spare yourself the headache of reading politically charged debates on Twitter.
It’s been a megaphone war platform since day one. Shout the loudest to win. I
think it’s a real shame to cancel what seems like a useful conference for an
undesirable truth about their demography.

~~~
dmix
Preferring to have nothing at all if things aren't exactly how they like them
is quite common in that ideology.

As long as there are no good alternatives that fit their perfectionist
ideological worldview then no one can have fun or live their life without
constant disruption.

------
esotericn
Tangent that may be relevant here.

I used to be involved in access work for those from underprivileged
backgrounds.

It's very difficult to get poor kids to apply to University even if they have
the grades, for reasons I expect are pretty similar (social environment, not
'fitting in', having few role models, etc).

Going back further - tons of them simply don't have the grades or skills,
because they weren't interested early on, or weren't supported, or whatever
else.

They fall behind at an early age. They're stuck in an environment that doesn't
support them.

Changing the statistical makeup of people at that sort of level - at the end
of the funnel, after all of the filtering - is really difficult. You need good
reason to do so. It's still not clear to me that it actually makes sense - is
the world actually better off if half the Ivies are made of poor kids, or have
you just shuffled around status (is it zero sum)? Do you get better results -
what are the better results you're looking for?

This stuff is difficult.

~~~
nikofeyn
> This stuff is difficult.

i don’t think it’s that difficult. the government finds a way to spends
billions and trillions of dollars on tons of stuff that has no meaningful
impact. if the government cared, they would increase the budgets of schools to
fund good teachers’ salaries. if i could pull a six figure salary teaching, i
would do it in a heartbeat. but there’s no way i would teach in this current
educational environment. hyper focus on standardized testing and curriculum,
which also needs to be changed, seems suffocating.

~~~
DannyBee
These are very complex systems with lots of variables and
interdependencies/connections between the variables.

Suggesting that simple, direct, change of the variable that has direct linkage
to pretty much all other parts of the system, will achieve some specific
result, is almost certainly wrong.

In fact, pretty much every mechanism taught of how to effect change in large
scale systems says _not_ to do that.

In this case, this is pretty easy to see - As an example - If you could pull
six figures teaching, everyone would want to teach, regardless of whether they
should or not.

Solutions to this have obvious affects on other things

(IE increasing credential requirements, or performance reviews ...).

These in turn have effects on other parts of the system, ...

If you really think this is just simple, i'd suggest looking at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#Complexity_mana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#Complexity_management)
and going from there.

~~~
tptacek
You can definitely pull 6 figures teaching, for what it's worth; the median
comp at my kids' high school was over $100k.

~~~
JJMcJ
Top districts in Bay Area (Palo Alto, Saratoga, Cupertino in Silicon Valley,
e.g.) pay senior teachers in that range.

With a pension, lots of vacation.

------
noir_lord
I sometimes think they value signalling over actually constructively working
to fix things.

I’m moderate and think that anyone who wants to should program for a living
should but stuff like this hurts my head enough I don’t engage with them on
Twitter as it results in a mud slinging match that nothing improves from.

It’s frankly tiring seeing the same crap repeated ad nauseum.

~~~
bonoboTP
This whole topic is something I'd never touch or even begin to discuss in
public. It's very easy to put a negative spin on anything one might say.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. In today's algorithmic sort-by-
controversial outrage culture, they will crucify you for anything and its
opposite. It's the wisest to just switch the topic as fast as you can when it
comes up.

------
mattigames
Instead of every of them recommending a woman for one of the time slots at the
conference or any non-white-male they just throw a fit like spoiled kids and
say they are not going until someone else fixes the issue at hand for them,
this kind of behavior is one of the things that deepens the gap between people
in favor of diversity everywhere not by increasing diversity but alienating
people that think different and considering that as a win.

~~~
abeisgreat
If you read the second post linked he tried very hard to help. He encouraged
multiple solutions, offered to help from his experience and they opted not to
take the help.

~~~
mattigames
The answer to this is summarized pretty well by another comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797869)

Still, a mature adult would have recommended someone for the next version of
conference and if all points out your recommendation is being taken seriously
you do your part and deliver your conference in the current version.

------
LudwigNagasena
All of these people are so brave when "taking a stand" doesn't hurt their
wallets and they seem comfortable to let millions of people live in poverty as
long as female poc quotas are met.

They could donate to software engineering schools in poor districts in their
home countries or developing countries, but they decided to do something
absolutely meaningless that benefits noone.

I would suggest every person who finds this behaviour acceptable to look
towards Effective Altruism
([https://www.effectivealtruism.org/](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/)) and
drop this ridiculoius posturing.

------
Yver
There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not
enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the
organizers to find more women for them.

 _" Bring me some women!"_ said the male speakers.

~~~
shkkmo
There is something heart warming about people making personal sacrifices to
promote divirsity.

 _" Here, take back some of the money you were using to pay for our travel and
use it to bring in some female speakers"_ said the male speakers.

~~~
PunchTornado
cancel the entire event and leave everyone with their plans in the air.
tickets, hotels, trips, everything lost. that makes sense.

~~~
shkkmo
The organizers canceled the event. The presenters just canceled their talks.

~~~
PunchTornado
because you can have the event without the scheduled talks. of course the
event was going to be cancelled if main speakers don't attend

------
larkeith
That's a shame, but I can't say I disagree with the two blog posts linked in
the page. Such speaker lineups only exacerbate the lack of diversity in tech,
and, given the prior year's lineup, the organizers had the opportunity to work
on outreach this year. Hopefully a new conference will supersede this one (if
there's not already alternatives, I'm unfamiliar with the PHP community).

Props to the speakers who stood up for their values.

~~~
Yver
Wouldn't it be better to leave outreach programs to outreach groups? This is a
conference about programming and "single responsibility principle" is a fairly
popular concept there.

~~~
pluma
From one techie to another: people aren't code. We're not rational actors in a
vacuum, treating us like we are is a leaky abstraction that will break in
prod.

The problem isn't simply "there aren't enough women", the problem is "we only
hear from the same group of people with similar lived experiences". The
problem is self-reinforcing: because women are underrepresented at those
events, they're not attending those events, thus becoming more
underrepresented and ultimately marginalised.

Ironically a good solution for that is having more "women's events". Women-
only events to strengthen the marginalised group, women-presenting-but-open-
to-all-attendees events to settle in and finally quotas in general events to
counteract the bias.

Except this is not only true for women but for all marginalised groups.

~~~
sz4kerto
All marginalised groups? What are those? Are people living in poorer countries
marginalised? Older developers? Obese people? People with childhood traumas
who suffer from anxiety disorders? Should we have quotas for all these?

I see where are you coming from, but the solution you're proposing is not
workable as there are infinite amount of marginalised groups, unfortunately.
:( picking one (eg. women) won't result in a fairer society.

~~~
shkkmo
> Should we have quotas for all these?

Nobody proposed a quota. The idea is to improve outreach so that you get a
wider range of high quality submissions to pick from.

> the solution you're proposing is not workable as there are infinite amount
> of marginalised groups, unfortunately.

Clearly, there are not a infinite number of marginalize groups.

> :( picking one (eg. women) won't result in a fairer society.

It would. The society would not be perfectly fair but it would be fairer.

That doesn't even have to be about fairness. There is knowledge and experience
that is going underutilized because it is held by groups of developers that
are underrepresented in these conferences.

~~~
sz4kerto
The comment in replied to proposed a quota.

~~~
shkkmo
Oops I missed that, you are correct. I agree, I do not think quotes are a good
idea.

However, I think my other points still stand.

------
toxik
Do metal working conferences cancel due to a lack of female participation?
Getting women into the mix is nice, but... it’s computer science?

~~~
nl
I've done some work in (metal) mining, and I can say that absolutely has
female speakers at conferences.

~~~
toxik
I feel like you missed the point of the analogy by taking it too literally.

~~~
nl
No I understand the point and gave a good example showing how misguided it is.

~~~
toxik
So because some mining conferences you were at had female speakers, every
conference must have? I again think you didn’t really understand the point
being made as you did not counter argue it very much at all.

------
adonnjohn
What a weird and frustrating circumstance to be in. It's definitely
disappointing that the organizers could not work through this. I understand
that women candidates may be disproportionately hard to line up, but is there
any evidence that the promoters put in the extra effort to find them? More
importantly, should they be obligated to do so in the first place when the aim
of the conference is quality in technology: nothing more, nothing less?
Optimizing for non-sex factors, you would expect the selected lineup to more
or less match the proportions of notable men and women in the space. If that
holds true, then the issue is much further up the line in this case: there are
still not enough women in technology. Do we cancel future events solely on
this premise? Seems like a terrible idea to me.

~~~
gshdg
Except those proportions don’t hold true.

~~~
adonnjohn
Agreed. And as a result, more information is needed on why that turned out to
be the case.

------
hn_throwaway_99
Everything in this story points to the heart of why I hate Twitter, and why it
so often just leads to people dug in, further apart on an issue, and
demonizing the other side.

------
cdubzzz
Tangentially related, the second post linked in that announcement is from
Larry Garfield, who was involved in some PHP/Drupal controversy a few years
back — [https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2017/10/drupal-gor-
ayelet.htm...](https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2017/10/drupal-gor-ayelet.html)

~~~
toxik
What a fascinating set of characters, and what fortitude it must take to go
public with such an unorthodox relationship while being a public character. I
find it difficult to change my hairstyle and letting my colleagues know.

------
o_p
Women are too smart to use php

~~~
conradfr
Ahah. And yet they seem more present in that mad front end JavaScript world.

------
numakerg
I'm reading through the Twitter thread, but I can't decipher the exact
issue(s).

Did the organizers select a lower ratio of diverse speakers than applicants?
Were there very few diverse applicants and the organizers decided none of them
qualified?

~~~
larkeith
From the second and third links (both blog posts rather than Twitter), only 1
out of 250+ submissions was from a woman, so the latter. Presumably a similar
situation occurred in 2018, as there was a single female speaker out of the
39-person lineup.

~~~
numakerg
>only 1 out of 250+ submissions was from a woman

Mark didn't cite a source for this, which is what I was looking for in the
Twitter thread.

~~~
larkeith
Oh, that's a good point. It might be sourced from crell's post: "According to
them, they had only a single woman submit a session proposal this year...",
which was from conversations with the organizers, so potentially
nonverifiable.

You could probably check Mark's other claim more easily: "...the line-up last
year was almost all male as well, just one woman out of 39 speakers."

------
rurban
Position yourself into the minds of the conference organizers. Do you really
want to deal with such an angry mob? Na, better resign and give up. It's not
worth it.

But I'll go to the next PHP meetup in Dresden and try to confirm my suspicion.

------
sp332
_The reason given was that only one woman submitted a proposal from over 250
submissions._

Lots of discussion on twitter about how talks were chosen. Not many brought up
the fact that the submissions process itself was apparently broken.

~~~
abeisgreat
If you read through the second link he mentions how he tried to work with the
organizers to improve their submission process and reach more diverse speakers
and they opted not to.

~~~
ngngngng
That's not what I read, I read in the second link that he wanted to cancel a
bunch of the male speakers, and then have everyone work like mad to reach out
to women to come speak. That's not a submission process at all. That's
outreach.

~~~
neilv
> _That 's not a submission process at all. That's outreach._

A lot of conferences seem to have a sort of selective outreach component to
their call for papers.

Conference organizers will go and post the CFP in various forums from which
they'd like to get papers -- particular programming language forums,
particular theory or practice forums, particular universities, etc. Some of
this seems creative, like "we'd like to get more foo-lang people involved with
bar-con this year." All that sounds like selective outreach.

If the conference values, say, diversity of background brought to the table,
then those conference organizers could seek out and post the CFP in places
that diversity might be found.

One of the difficulties is that it's hard to know what all diversity you're
missing out on (much of it isn't visible, and much of it doesn't have familiar
labels), but other of the diversity omissions are glaringly obvious.

Including the glaringly obvious omissions in one's outreach seems a good
start.

~~~
belorn
Would be very insightful to learn where they did seek out and post a CFP.

From the article it implies they did not do that.

------
tiku
What group will be offended next year..

~~~
xtracto
What I find hilarious os that all this storm is coming from a group if men, as
well as the vast majority of comments here in HN. Men trying to rationalise
something related to women.

Would be good to hear female voices in here... why was there only 1
application?

Having studied in an all boys school, this looks to me as the times when me
and my friends would get together to discuss how to approach a girl, or what
would girls like. As you grow and mature, you understand that you only have to
ask THEM, same as you would ask a random guy.

~~~
nf8nnfufuu
So how to find women who decided not to apply to the conference?

------
Wilem82
I've only ever watched one programming talk by a lady. The talk was about
Rust, so I was interested. I thought: a lady, wow cool, let's hear it out.
Like 5 minutes in, she said something like "we know Nodejs is _fast_..." and I
did a double take. What? Who in their right mind would claim that, except
frontend devs who don't know better? And this talk is about Rust, which is
even more bizzare, as it's full of competent people who won't take such
bullshit. I did not watch until the end, got quite disappointed. So... where
are those excellent female specialists? In 15 years of programming, I've met
exactly one and that's in a 20 million population city with tons of
programming jobs.

~~~
lamaster
You could take a look at the talk about Entity Component System in Rust, by
one of the creators of starbound(as far as i remember), she is a woman. And i
don't understand your rage about nodejs. It's in fact very fast. That's wrong
about that?

~~~
Wilem82
Very fast compared to what? Certainly not to Rust, and that was a Rust
conference. Anything with a VM, even if it has JIT, is slower than a systems-
level programming language that got no runtime overhead. VMs are slow by its
very nature, simply because there an additional layers and more work needs to
be done. If she meant support for non-blocking IO, that got nothing to do with
Nodejs, it's an OS-level feature that's been around for almost 20 years. JVM
can use non-blocking IO, doesn't make JVM fast, it's still relatively slow due
to being VM in the first place.

------
orzi
This is insane.

------
ffksq
There are few brilliant female developers. Even fewer good presenters. If the
talk given by female is strong and interesting, it is really enjoyable. But if
the talk is weak comparing to the other talks given by males, it is not
helping with diversity, but only makes argument what women not good in science
stronger. If I’m attending conference and instead of attending interesting
talk you have to listen very weak presentation from female because of
diversity, I’d feel really bad about the organization of conference.

------
megakluntjes
Maybe this shows how smart female developers are because they avoid PHP.

------
conradfr
That reminds me when they criticized the Silicon Valley show for the lack of
women in their Techcrunch reenactment.

Until it was revealed to be real footage...

------
lyusinator
If you withdraw from a conference cuz of speakers skin color and gender that's
racism and sexism.

------
grayed-down
I don't know Karl Hughes, but I think I hate him. Gray me down.

------
danmg
PhpCE should have just blocked him, as this was an argument in bad faith, and
moved on.

------
nl
I find it surprising that people here are defending an all-male speaker line
up at a conference as being ok because "it's just about tech".

It's become increasingly clear that no, tech is _not_ just about tech. Tech
has a huge impact on society and if your tech conference only has male
speakers you aren't trying hard enough to make your conference reflect this.

Further, if your tech group isn't actively working to bring people from other
backgrounds into it then it becomes an echo chamber.

Echo chambers are the worst, because people don't realise that's what they are
in.

This isn't some random political position, it's something based on real,
measurable results where echo chambers make horrible technical decisions
because of real-world blindness.

I do machine learning for a living, and there are some particularly notorious
examples of this happening in my field. The most obvious one is "Gender from
Iris Images" where an entire series of papers by male-only teams ended up
being discredited by a single devastating paper by (apparently) the first
female to look at the problem. The paper title gives away the whole story:
_Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?_ [1]

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01304](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01304)

~~~
bonoboTP
You linked a paper written by three men.

