[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.

[pluma]

I found this quick glossary helpful when I first started educating myself about these issues:

Privilege is about access. If you're born into wealth and have good connections, you can get into a lot of spaces other people would work hard to even be considered for. In many cases it's enough to just "look" the part, i.e. being white and male opens many doors (even if you aren't even aware of those doors because you didn't know they are barred for others).

Underrepresentation is about numbers. Representation alone is not obviously important, but being underrepresented almost every time can affect how a group is perceived. Representation "normalises" people, especially members of groups you might not think about even if there are many of them. E.g. if x% of people are non-heterosexual but far less than x% of movie characters are, and stigma or social exclusion means you barely ever see any actual people like that either, you'll think the actual percentage is far lower.

Marginalisation is about treatment. It often goes hand-in-hand with underrepresentation because minority groups tend to be mistreated more than if they are in the majority. This doesn't have to be actual physical violence or direct insults, it can also simply be a lack of consideration: if an event is planned by young fit men they might think chairs are unnecessary although it excludes people who need to sit down occasionally for health reasons.

Diversity is about variety. It's not nearly as important that your event includes "one of everything" as that it doesn't just consist of variations on the same theme (e.g. white 20-something guy from Eastern Europe, white 50-something guy from Western Europe, white 20-something guy from the US). White men shouldn't be your default -- in fact you should try not to have a default at all. Try to have a mix, the more varied the better. Having a "default" leads to everything else being somewhat of an "other" and thus easier to dismiss (leading to marginalisation). And even if an event doesn't already include people from a particular group they might feel safer to join if there's a healthy mix of different people from all walks of life than if it's dominated by a single group.

Inclusion is about experience. In other words, even if you invite a black woman speaker to your all-white mostly-male event, nobody will benefit if she's just a token. Diversity (i.e. making "othering" more difficult by making the groups more balanced) can help achieving this but for smaller events inclusion alone can already be a good start: if your all-male monthly meetup has a woman attending and she feels included (rather than just being "the woman" or having to try to "fit in") that might lead to more women participating.

So when I say "marginalised groups" I mean not simply underrepresented groups but groups the tech community treats poorly. A lot of spaces in tech are very unwelcoming if not actively hostile to women.

This isn't a new thing, I experienced it even when I grew up in the 90s although as a boy I didn't think of it that way at the time: it was "normal" that women were underrepresented, so that clearly meant women weren't interested and any woman showing interest was either not really a woman (because "there are no women on the Internet") or not really interested (because "everybody knows women aren't interested in tech"). This behavior results in women being excluded even when they want to participate and in being forced to "play along" (i.e. prove "they're not like the other girls").

You're right that there are many multiply-marginalised people. This is what intersectionality acknowledges: a black woman is treated differently from someone who's just black or just a woman.

But the solution isn't to just shrug it off and decide that nothing can be done. It's still about real people suffering and limiting that suffering is a worthwhile goal even if you think it's unrealistic that it can ever be abolished completely.

Picking one WILL result in a fairer society. Because as soon as you normalise women in tech spaces, you can focus on something else. Tech is no different from any other part of society. You will screw up, everybody does, but it's important that you simply own your mistakes and learn from them and then try better next time. Yes, people will shout at you for anything you got wrong, but that just means there's room for improvement. They may have a point, though, if you're willing to listen.

Feminism has achieved a lot, especially for white women (and men, btw -- "toxic masculinity" is not about cancelling manhood but about calling out shitty behavior people previously got to excuse with "boys will be boys" or absurd standards of "manliness"). Many places including the US have made broad strides towards equality for gay and lesbian people. It's hard work and progress is slow and incremental (with the occasional leap in between), but there's definite progress.

EDIT: I guess downvoting counts as an argument these days.

[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.

[vogre]

It's a PHP conference. What different living experience would you expect? "I prefer to name my variables by diminutives because I am a woman"? "I am black person and I detest dark themes for PHPStorm?"

Politics should be discussed on political events, not technical ones.

[pluma]

You are aware that you're not being paid to "write code", right? You can't just deliver a bunch of nicely formatted for-loops and call it a day, your code actually has to do something, it's part of a product.

While implementing that product, everybody involved makes myriads of tiny decisions. Even if you're not in project management or any official "decision maker" position, you likely still make tiny (or not-so-tiny) decisions that affect the experience of users of your product.

If it's a web or mobile application for example, you might decide between different libraries or build tooling and that in turn could affect the download size, which affects people on slow connections. Or you could make certain assumptions about connectivity, affecting people who frequently need to work on spotty connections or high latency. Or in software in general you might pick a component or implement one in a way that makes it inaccessible or harder to use for vision or motor impaired users.

And those are just generic examples that apply to most products regardless of the actual intended use cases. There's of course the obvious examples of Google image recognition categorising photos of black people as apes (which I as a white person might shrug off as an inoffensive glitch but someone with a lived history of racist slurs in the same vein might be extremely hurt by) or soap dispensers not reacting to black hands (which is genuinely silly but betrays a lack of consideration on the part of the people who built the technology).

There are many, far more subtle examples.

Like a woman is more likely to have experienced abusive relationships and might therefore find it more obvious how certain "inoffensive" tech might be used by an abuser.

Or someone who's experienced intense trauma (like the death of a child) might not enjoy your social network's "remember this day from last year" surprise feature.

Or someone who's trans might not want their identity be revealed to untrusted people automatically (or might even prefer to use different identities when interacting with e.g. their ultra-conservative parents who come from a cultural background that encourages honor killings).

Or a member of a group that is frequently on the receiving end of racial profiling might have concerns about what data you are gathering that you may have to hand over to law enforcement (not because it might hurt the guilty but because it might help building a case against someone innocent the jury is likely to be already biased against).

Or you might implement a payment gateway a certain group of people can't use because it requires documentation they can't provide or because it denies them service for some reason.

It's not about having a black person at your all-white all-male event. It's about having a diverse group to maximise the chances of having a diverse set of experiences present. It's about empowering marginalised speakers because by definition their voices frequently remain unheard and their marginalisation means their experiences are likely going to be very different from yours.

I'm a code monkey like anybody else. I see an article about a new JavaScript framework, I'm gonna click it. I see a hip new editor trending, I'm gonna check it out. But there's more to our jobs than just punching strange symbols into a machine to make stuff appear on the screen.

It's about building products (or projects, at least) and those products are going to be used by people and will affect them. So the least we can do is learn how to avoid actively making their lives worse with the products we help build.