[phillmv]

I did read what you wrote. You just spelled out a very common fallacy.

It is racist, and/or sexist. It's just a kind of wholesale discrimination, visavis the retail, personalized kind of racism/sexism we're more accustomed to.

It's not intentionally evil, there may not be any malice behind it, but it's still… discriminatory.

As white dudes, it's especially hard to see as we're largely unaffected by it, blah blah privilege, etc.

[harshreality]

How do you propose to fix things? Selecting speakers that are not as preferred by the selection committee simply because of being a minority race (minority in the context of the community in question)? i.e. the committee ranks all speaker applications, figures out the necessary demographics to mirror the conference's targeted community, and then allocates speaker slots for each demographic to the best speakers who are in that demographic?

If you artificially make minorities (based on the community's demographics) a majority on the selection committee, in the hope they will select speakers that more closely mirror the larger community, and if they pick more speakers who are members of minority groups, how do you know they aren't being subconsciously racist/reverse-racist in exactly the same way you're complaining about whites/males being racist?

How do you objectively evaluate the race-blind quality of a set of potential speakers if your claim is that everyone on any possible selection committee is potentially subconsciously biased?

What if you make an effort to select speakers that mirror the demographics of the larger community, and conference attendees rate this new anti-racist conference lower than they rated the last ("racist") one? Is this demographics equality campaign to be pursued at the expense of attendees' perceived value of the conference?

[phillmv]

>How do you propose to fix things?

Make sure you pick two or three females for at least every eight to seven males. Aim for as high a mix as you can.

>how do you know they aren't being subconsciously racist/reverse-racist in exactly the same way you're complaining about whites/males being racist?

That's easy; there's no such thing as 'reverse racism'. There's discrimination, and anyone can be discriminated against. Furthermore, few if any conferences are organized in the matter you described. There's no selection committee. Only 1-to-3 people are involved picking speakers.

>How do you objectively evaluate the race-blind quality of a set of potential speakers if your claim is that everyone on any possible selection committee is potentially subconsciously biased?

You misunderstand my claim. My claim isn't that people are subconsciously biased, my claim is conference after conference filled with white dudes is a sign the conference speakers aren't doing their jobs of presenting their audiences with the widest range of interesting ideas.

>Is this demographics equality campaign to be pursued at the expense of attendees' perceived value of the conference?

This assumes that your pool of potential speakers is only slightly larger than the number of speaker slots. There are fewer potential female speakers, but this does not automatically mean that you can't provide a full slate of A+ speakers - only that you have to work a little harder at it.

See: http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got... and http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got...

[harshreality]

So the problem is the underrepresented groups aren't sending in talk proposals unless they get personal encouragement.

That's tragic, and in that case I agree that underrepresentation is a problem, but I don't agree that organizers are discriminating if they don't make that extra personal effort to reach out to potential presenters from underrepresented groups.

I agree there should ideally be more encouragement, but I don't think it should be required for conference organizers to do that, to avoid allegations of discrimination.

[phillmv]

>I agree there should ideally be more encouragement, but I don't think it should be required for conference organizers to do that, to avoid allegations of discrimination.

So, it gets more complicated than that.

Most conferences can't fill their rosters via just calls for proposals. Instead, it is the director of speakers that has to individually invite speakers to attend. As a result, they tend to be dominated by people they know, which tend to be white men.

The only way to escape being dominated by your social network is to invest the extra energy.