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Comment by abduhl | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things that confuses me so much about the feminist movement in tech and in society at large. The conference organizers are trying to encourage female attendance by giving discounted tickets to women and someone immediately finds fault with them; however, if no effort were made then a multitude of posts would probably show up lamenting the lack of female attendance at the conference. This type of catch 22 is extremely detrimental to the feminist cause in my mind as it paints a picture where there is no good way out so why not just ignore it and take the flak that's coming anyways?

Also, the bar/nightlife industry has had great success with discounted "girl tickets" increasing female and male attendance.

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This is one of the things that confuses me so much. Why anyone in our industry wouldn't understand the difference between "professional conference or event" and "ladies night", or between pointing out how common entirely male dominated speakers and panels are vs. merely complaining that there are no free tickets for women with pretty lanyard colours.

Seriously.

I think you're looking at a false dilemma here. Your choices aren't limited to "don't encourage women and take flak for it" versus "encourage women in a ham-fisted way and take flak for it". I believe that in this case there were a lot of ways the organisers could have encouraged participation respectfully. I'd start by getting in touch with some of the relevant women-in-tech groups - this is kind of their area.

If you're attempting to reach a group of people of which you're not a member, you really need to be doing it in consultation with someone who is. Otherwise you're just going to make obvious outsider mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot. That goes just as much for women as it does for hardcore gamers or scotch enthusiasts.

I think you do have a good point, though: it feels like there's a lot of negativity around tech feminism sometimes without much positive to aspire to. As the article says, the organisers were well-intentioned but doing it wrong - which is, at least, a good start. It's a shame we don't see many articles praising the conferences that do a good job encouraging women to participate, or sharing best practices and advice. I feel like that would do more to prevent mistakes like this and ultimately improve the community.

Unfortunately, positive articles about conferences encouraging participation from women are less likely to get voted up on HN - as these comments show, there are many people here who are uncomfortable with the whole idea of conferences trying to adjust for sexism.

I see lots of positive messages because I follow tech feminists on Twitter and subscribe to tech feminist email lists - they post happy updates about the latest conferences that have adopted anti-harassment policies, links to conferences that make genuine efforts at inviting diversity (so many tweets about PyCon!), and so on. There's not much actual basis for a "tone argument" (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument) - HN is just a weird place.

I agree. It seems like positive articles get less attention on HN, and in general for that matter. I guess the internet flocks to angry more easily than happy. Even accounting for that, though, it seems like there's less positive material out there. I actually went a-googling as I wrote my original comment and couldn't find much in the way of material that would be helpful for someone in the position of organising a conference, even in terms of exemplary behaviour by other conferences.

After your comment I went looking for information on PyCon and it really does seem like they're doing a lot right. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd definitely vote up a post that went into a bit of detail about it.

I'm not sure I understand your link. Are you accusing me of being a "concern troll" or engaging in "derailment" to "ruin conversations and silence people"? I thought I was being pretty civil, but I'm happy to modify my behaviour if you can point out something specific.

I wrote a blog post on this recently: http://jeweledplatypus.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/text/conferen... - the strategies there aren't going to fit with all conference styles, but they can be adapted and used as inspiration for other ways of thinking carefully about conference experience. Here's also what seems to be the main place to look: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Resources_for_conference_... - and the Ada Initiative website has more. I'd be curious if there's anything you can think of to add to the wiki page to help it show up in searches better; I agree that making these resources easier to find would be useful.

I didn't get the sense that you were asking for positive examples in a silencing/derailing way, but it's a pattern that happens with this stuff in general.

I'm not speaking for some imaginary strawman-feminist. I would rather that the event organizers treat me like anyone else and assume that my attendance would be based upon my interest in the subject and not offer me some affirmative-action ticket that automatically separates me from everyone else.

But isn't that how tech conferences usually work? And doesn't that result in the kind of gender ratio problem about which there is much dismay?

Agreed, they did this in a clumsy way, but hey, they are trying something.

The problem is not gender parity at conferences, but gender parity in the industry. You see the inverse at conferences in fields dominated bg women, and there are no "boy tickets".

Maybe gender parity in a conference could help improve gender parity in industry?

It could make sense for boy tickets (perhaps with a better name) to exist in conferences in women-dominated fields, but it would be up to each conference to decide if gender parity is something they want and if they want to encourage it in this way.

Are normal tickets called "boy tickets"? Are they required to be in blue lanyards? Will women caught with blue lanyards be kicked out of the conference? -_-

No. A woman with a normal ticket just missed out on a discount that they could have gotten (either because they didn't know about it or by choice.) Same thing happens if you're a student but you buy a full-price ticket.

She also mentioned that it wouldn't deter her if she was already going. I agree with the author that the email itself could have been worded better, but the intention of the conference organizers seems to be sincere.

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