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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone was wondering as to the point of the parody:

> If you are looking for speakers for your conference, why not ask one of the wonderful people featured here? They are all listed with their Twitter accounts, and a link to some of their prior talks.

> Do you really need another conference lineup of all men? Or as many female speakers as speakers called Steve?

I suspect it is a direct rebuttal to the argument that it's difficult to find female speakers for conferences, which is one I've heard a few times before.

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> "Do you really need another conference lineup of all men?"

If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.

When the subject is one's technical knowledge, the actual genetic makeup of the person making the presentation doesn't matter. It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.

> It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.

What you are saying is not controversial, but nor does it reflect reality. Conference speakers are not solely selected on the basis of being the best at what they talk on.

This is not a call to add people who are inexpert, it is a call to find experts where you don't usually look.

> If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.

My understanding is that the complaint is not "these men are not qualified", but "there are women who are qualified who are systematically being ignored".

There isn't an objective ranking of subject matter experts, from which conferences simply invite the top N people. Nor, as far as I know, is anyone in favor of inviting non-qualified minorities to speak. The question is "why are qualified [women, people of color, trans people, etc.] not being invited?".

Implying there are no female subject matter experts.

The problem isn't that people choose expertise and skill over gender. The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason, despite the availability of qualified women speakers.

It's not faux diversity. The fact that you just assume any change from the all-male status quo must be a step down is amazingly sexist and insulting.

> "The fact that you just assume any change from the all-male status quo must be a step down is amazingly sexist and insulting."

I never said anything of the sort and it's quite interesting that you read that into what I wrote. It's very clear what I meant: I don't consider the gender makeup of the people presenting to have any value, as long as the people presenting are the best people available.

> "The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason"

The reason is simple: there's a lot more men in tech. For instance, StackOverflow found that 92% of devs are male. So one would expect that ~90% of presenters on software dev topics would be male. http://fusion.net/story/115998/survey-says-92-percent-of-sof...

Even today, women only receive ~20% of engineering and CompSci degrees. So, unless things change dramatically, you're still going to be looking at a pool of candidates that's significantly more male than female.

In response to the idea of an all-male speaker lineup, you said:

> If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.

I assumed that hypothetical was meant to be plausible, because otherwise what's the point? So yes, you're strongly implying that an all-male lineup is likely to be because of qualifications, and that including women would make it worse.

I stand by my "no reason." The StackOverflow survey is obviously flawed (women often get treated badly online, so tend to be discouraged from participating in communities like SO) and if 20% of relevant degrees go to women, why do conferences typically have far less than 20% women?

He's saying that if the top 3 people in the field happen to be male, then yes, he'd prefer them over 2 of them and 1 random women added for the sake of diversity.

Also, all of you are acting like children. This is getting pretty ridiculous.

Conferences usually have way more than three speakers, and the context is clearly talking about actual real-world conferences, where indeed the lineup is often 100% male. And they're implying that this typically happens because they're the most qualified.

Agreed that this is ridiculous. This is a pretty mild bit of satire, but a ton of people here are going out of their way to be offended by it. It's a great example of how many men are completely oblivious to the advantages they receive.

I had a panel in mind, not an entire conference (we had a similar discussion in Germany a year or two ago about all-male panels). I got them mixed up for some reason.

-- edit --

I just remembered something; wasn't there a post going around the web some time ago about a woman (in Britain?) who got her talk accepted (in some sort of academic setting?) because she's a woman and not because of her talk and she didn't know that this kind of thing was going on and got really upset about it when she found out? Might be interesting to look at the situation from her angle as well. (Interesting to those of you who didn't read her story back then.)

It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.

For a conference to say "we couldn't find enough subject-matter-qualified women", one of the following must be true:

* The least qualified speaker on their roster is still more qualified than literally every woman currently living, or

* Something about their conference failed to attract (or worse, repelled) half the population of the planet.

The first is statistically extremely unlikely. The second is more likely, and represents a problem with the conference rather than the pool of potential speakers.

Unfortunately, telling people "the problem is with your conference and not with the pool of speakers" is a controversial statement despite being painfully obvious.

This is without getting into the "faux diversity" insult which implies that there is something about women as a class which naturally makes them less qualified (since, obviously, conferences select purely on qualifications and just coincidentally end up heavily or often entirely male) -- if you didn't believe women are inherently less qualified, you wouldn't think that having women speak was necessarily a relaxing of qualifications or only done for "diversity".

Here's another true-but-sadly-controversial statement: if you believe what you're saying, then the kind of tech conferences you'd likely run are actually affirmative action for people who look and think like you. And I bet you wouldn't want anyone saying you only got in because they give preferential treatment to people like you, right?

http://lanyrd.com/2012/benconf/

Having attended Benconf (which was really, really great), and only having skim read this page (I'm not called Katie, it's not in the UK), I didn't realise this was a parody...

How absolutely British of you to do that for the sheer eccentricity of it.

Wow, that really says it all, doesn't it?

Set up "BenConf" with an all-male lineup clearly not chosen purely based on their qualifications, and dozens of people will pay money to attend.

Set up "KatieConf" and you get people coming out of the woodwork complaining about faux diversity, saying that gender doesn't matter and you should only choose speakers based on qualifications, saying that conferences shouldn't have to care about combating sexism, complaining that it's patronizing, etc.

It's incredibly patronising.

Edit: Controversial comment, so let's say something positive here. I found this site to be unfunny and unclear about its message. However it's easy to improve it.

The first thing I would add to the site at the bottom would be a list of recommendations for avoiding bias in selection of candidates. These would include things like always doing blind evaluation of speaker candidates.

Secondly it would be good to talk about how to get more people involved in projects, so that in future you have a more diverse range of speakers. How to broaden access, easier onboarding, removing toxic people.

Thirdly, talk about why it's good to have more diverse opinions. Give some motivation for doing this apart from some hazy feelgood factor. (See references here: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...)

Number four, the site could link to projects like Outreachy which are already doing the above.

Not for nothing, but "being patronised" is usually right up there on the list of common female developer complaints.

I'd just note that blind evaluation could be hard because of systematic discrimination biasing how you evaluate a candidate. For example, if you look at who has spoken at conferences before in your blind evaluation, it's blind, but biased by previous discrimination. it's the same sort of issue that crops up regularly in machine learning, where people assume that the data isn't the result of bias.

I'd say the correct way to avoid bias is to set a blind baseline of expectations (Like 3+ years in industry working with the topic) and then reach out to minorities. That said, even someone who doesn't have experience can be a good presenter if given the right support, I've seen great conference talk made by total newbies to a technology who were encouraged to write code making use of a new feature. They presented what they learned, problem spots that they found that might trip up someone new to the technology, and open sourced their app as a learning tool.

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