[antonID]

The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities is foolish and offensive. This is similar to I believe a couple summers ago when Square had their summer intern program going, and all of the interns were male (because no females applied) and Jack Dorsey was attacked on Twitter for it. Square did not discriminate against people, but of course people leap to turning these people into the villain instead of thinking that it may be possible that no qualified minorities/women were able to speak at the conference for one reason or another. The organizer of this event is right to ignore this straw-man argument of trying to call him a racist/sexist because he knows that the allegation is ridiculous.

[raganwald]

"automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities..."

Whoa, nellie!

That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak.

I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world.

Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride.

Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends.

OI have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.

So I raise my hand and ask, "Could this process be improved?" No accusation of deliberate malice or even incompetence, just asking how we can do this better.

[eaton]

"The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an INTENTIONAL act by the event organizers..."

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You're missing the point. The concern expressed about the predominantly white-dude lineups at popular conference IS NOT that individual conference organizers are purposefully excluding non-white-dude speakers. The people talking about these issues generally go out of their way to explain the difference between INDIVIDUAL bias and SYSTEMIC bias. The latter is not a matter of a conference organizer saying, "Hey! Let's make sure we don't have black speakers!" Instead, systemic bias is the way the status quo of a particular group or culture leads members to make assumptions or automatic decisions that UNINTENTIONALLY exclude certain people.

Think of a web developer building a new site. All of their friends use iOS, they use iOS, and although they don't have anything against Android, their unexamined default assumptions will steer them towards building the mobile version of the site with iOS in mind. Some Android users might still use it, and even get a lot out of it, but many will also be lost to bad UX collisions, mistaken assumptions about browser feature support, and so on. The result can easily turn into a spiral: Android users don't use our site, so working to support them would just be platform zealotry!

A stretched analogy? Perhaps. But it's an example of how unintentional assumptions can leave important groups of people -- with lots of really valuable stuff to contribute -- out in the cold unless work is done up front. It's not about tokenism, or quotas, or assuming bad faith and evil intentions. It's about keeping our eyes open, and listening when people say we're missing something important.