[Narkov]

“get as many women on stage as I possibly could.”

Isn't enforcing a gender ratio just more gender discrimination? How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"? You are just discriminating against the other gender.

Counting a 50/50 gender split as a win is silly if you have put together a shitty conference just to satisfy some ratio. Why not have the best person for the job? I don't care if you are male/female, black/white/pink/purple/transparent, straight/gay/transgender, human/animal/robot/script, able bodied/disabled or anything in between....put the best person in the job - that is real gender equality.

[metajack]

She knew the issue was the lack of submissions, so she worked hard to get lots of talk submissions from women. When she actually selected the talks, she did so without knowledge of the person's gender. She got the ratio she wanted by encouraging submissions, not by enforcing a quota.

[Narkov]

"She got the ratio she wanted"

That's my issue - the ratio she wanted just perpetuates this gender discrimination. Unless the gender ratio of expert speakers in this industry is somehow exactly 50/50, she has discriminated against one gender just to satisfy her magical ratio.

Whether she did this blind to the applicants gender is of no consequence - she thinks it was a win when IMHO, is just gender more discrimination.

[fatbird]

Her blind judging produced an even gender split. How are men discriminated against?

[betterunix]

Is it unfair to point out that discrimination is evident if the proportion of women speakers at the conference is not equal to the proportion of female experts in the field? That the general population is a little over half women does not imply that every profession's demographics are 50/50. Before claiming that the true problem is that women are less likely to apply and therefore a system based on people applying of their own accord must be flawed, perhaps we should first take a look at the demographics of the field itself (and eventually we'll have to go all the way back to middle school, when girls with a talent for math or technical subjects seem to suddenly lose interest).

[fatbird]

In this (and other similar) case(s), we can conclude that there's no difference between male and female speakers, since the gender ratio resulting from blind judging matches the submission pool. In other words, there's no essential gender difference in technology, there's just a demographic artifact of sexism.

So if the larger demographic continues to mirror that artifact, that's not an argument for reproducing that artificial split in the conference. Indeed, taking care to mix the submissions pool to reflect the larger gender split does nothing but perpetuate an artificial and historical and culturally driven imbalance, when we can clearly see that no essential difference between the sexes exists. It's not discriminatory to balance out a contingent happenstance that doesn't accurately reflect essential differences.

A bit shorter: There's nothing discriminatory about the removal of undeserved advantage.

[betterunix]

"It's not discriminatory to balance out a contingent happenstance that doesn't accurately reflect essential differences."

It is when you are doing something that gives people a career boost, and being a speaker at a conference is definitely a career boost. If you keep targeting a minority in some field to speak at conferences, then the members of that minority will have an advantage in advancing their careers -- they are being given more of a voice than other people. If the imbalance in the field itself is large, which is the case in technical fields, then that minority is getting more of a boost.

In other words, what you are doing is trying to hide the fact that you are giving an advantage to a particular group. It is no different than asking GRE questions about polo.

"A bit shorter: There's nothing discriminatory about the removal of undeserved advantage."

That is not what happened here. Nobody had an undeserved advantage in the conference admissions process; the problem lies elsewhere. Conference speakers are a surface-level problem.

If you start in a field where women and men are equally represented, but where men dominate conferences, this sort of thing might make sense. You are starting in a field where that is not the case, painting a "fix" on the surface of it, and calling it a victory. It's not a victory, it is discrimination, and the effort spent on this farce should have been spent on solving the broader demographic problem (but I suspect that the author of the article has run out of ideas on how to solve that problem, and has instead chosen something easier to work on).

[Gormo]

> Is it unfair to point out that discrimination is evident if the proportion of women speakers at the conference is not equal to the proportion of female experts in the field?

It's not unfair to point that out; it's merely wrong to "point that out".

Any number of contingencies could yield a distribution of speakers at a conference whose sex ratio doesn't neatly align with the corresponding ratio in the population of experts, however that's defined. The existence of such a distribution of speakers is not in itself evidence of discrimination on the basis of sex.

Discrimination on the basis of sex is, however, present in any situation in which the sex of applicants was in any way considered as a criteria of their admission to the conference. This is the definition of discrimination.

In other words, by considering individuals' sexes at all, one is actively engaging in sex-based discrimination. It's absurd to suggest this as the remedy to a situation that isn't necessarily the result of discrimination.

The only way to ensure that no discrimination takes place is to stop looking at the sex ratio of conference attendees in the first place, as it's no more relevant than distribution of shoe sizes among attendees.

[Narkov]

Selecting the best person for the job isn't discrimination but IMHO, celebrating a 50/50 split is discrimination if that isn't the natural gender split.

[neumann_alfred]

WTF is a "natural gender split"? This is a cultural problem, and that culture like to hide behind a supposed nature which in large parts really just is learned behaviour, resulting from that culture.

[Narkov]

"WTF is a "natural gender split"?"

When I said "natural gender split" I meant the real gender split amongst the population of capable speakers and not the wider (world) population.

[fatbird]

As this case and others (c.f., GoGaRuCo, which uses the same method) shows, the natural gender split is 50/50. When the submissions pool is 50/50, and they do a blind judging of the submissions, they end up with a 50/50 split in speakers. In other words, they keep demonstrating that there is no essential difference in technology based on gender. When they hide from themselves the gender of the speaker, they end up choosing equally from men and women.

[azakai]

> She knew the issue was the lack of submissions, so she worked hard to get lots of talk submissions from women.

This is a complex issue, there isn't a single root cause. Lack of submissions is just one factor among many.

[metajack]

I didn't mean to imply there was. Sorry.

It does seem to be the lowest hanging fruit.

[CJefferson]

The fact she selected the talks without looking at the gender is great, and I missed on my first read (woops, I blame HN encouraging fast replies for more karma).

[jimzvz]

With only 18 applications and with her specifically encouraging people that she knew to apply it must be very likely that she knew who the individual was when going through the applications. So even though she claims that it was gender blind, it wasn't really.

[wollw]

The most interesting part of the article for me was this:

    To keep the selection process fair, Courtney chose applicants
    based on their pitches only, without looking at the speaker’s identity or gender.

Based on this it doesn't look like she was discriminating.

[betterunix]

She went out of her way to convince a particular demographic group to make submissions. That is where the discrimination lies.

Let's put it this way: if I went around giving extra encouragement to white men to apply, and then proudly announced that I had a blind review process, would you deny that there was discrimination? What exactly is the difference?

[marquis]

I recently attended 2 birthday parties for young kids, one on a weekday and one on a Saturday afternoon. The first, was mostly mothers, immediate family and their kids. For the second, the couple went out of their way to make sure that men could come to the birthday party. They send out adult invites encouraging alcohol beverages to be brought, and called all their women friends and asked them firmly to bring their boyfriends. I brought mine, who was begrudgingly included because of his perception it would be full of kids and women but he ended up having a wonderful time talking to other men (as well as hanging out with kids and their toys and of course some classic kids party food). Is this discrimination on the couple's part to try and reach past a culture of birthday parties full of just mothers and their kids?

[betterunix]

See, the difference there is that the kids parents are already half men, half women. Professional technology workers are not half women, and unlike a child's birthday party, being invited to speak at a conference is a career-boosting event.

If disproportionate representation is not discriminatory, what exactly is it?

[jb17]

> Professional technology workers are not half women. > If disproportionate representation is not discriminatory, what exactly is it?

You seem to answer your own question.

[betterunix]

Hm...

51/49 ratio among the population -> 5/95 ratio in tech fields -> 50/50 ratio at tech conferences.

Problem solved? Or did we just skip solving the problem and direct the audience's attention to the sparkling fire?

[marquis]

> the kids parents are already half men, half women.

Biologically yes, but there is a wide range of single/mixed parent families and I disagree that the similarities are far different in terms of the need to make an emotional call for attendance.

[betterunix]

So you are saying that this child's friends were mostly from single-parent homes? Are you denying that most of the child's friends had both a mother and a father?

Can you claim that the demographics here are even remotely close to the demographics among tech workers?

[wollw]

If the review process was blind and the proposals were evaluated on their merits alone then in the selection process would have removed the author's demographic as a discriminating factor. The sample itself would likely be skewed (as in the discussed example), but as long as the speakers gave interesting, relevant presentations I don't see the issue.

I'll agree that there was obvious discrimination in who she personally sought out as speakers, but when it came time to select speakers for the event she didn't turn men away for being men or select women because they were women. She didn't sacrifice the quality of her conference to showcase women speakers, and each candidate that did apply had a fair shot as becoming a speaker. Personally, as it was her conference I don't see a problem with her seeking out the people she wanted to hear from for submissions; it appears it was discrimination based on the quality of the submissions that was the deciding factor, and for me that's what really matters.

[jb17]

That one of them is the norm and the other one isn't.

[betterunix]

In other words, instead of ending discrimination, we should just pile more layers of it on top -- rather than paint your white car pink, you'll load your white car into a pink 18-wheeler and just drive that to work, proudly proclaiming that you have diversity in your color choices (and then one day, someone will point out that you don't have a rainbow-colored ride, so you'll load your pink truck on a rainbow-colored train and demand that someone lay tracks from your house to your office).

[jb17]

I don't think ending discrimination is a simple thing and that in this case increasing the visibility of female experts in an area can have nontrivial antidiscriminatory effects (e.g. encouraging young women to go into an area, making women feel more comfortable at a conference, etc.) even if it involves positive discrimination.

Anyway, I'd still be interested to hear from you how (following your metaphor) you would suggest to dismantle the white car directly.

[betterunix]

"in this case increasing the visibility of female experts in an area can have nontrivial antidiscriminatory effects (e.g. encouraging young women to go into an area, making women feel more comfortable at a conference, etc.) even if it involves positive discrimination."

It may make women feel more comfortable at conferences, but there is a much deeper problem here. Discrimination is discrimination, regardless of whether or not it affects a disadvantaged group in a positive way. There is also the risk that such discrimination will only deepen the problems that caused the disproportionate representation in the first place: people might conclude that a woman's success in a technical field was the result of the advantages she was given (e.g. by being given an unfair boost in being invited to speak at conferences), and in the worst case this will reinforce notions that women are not as good as men. I have heard the last concern from women in computer science and technical fields -- women who worked hard to get where they are, who now worry that other people will doubt their abilities because of this sort of thing.

"Anyway, I'd still be interested to hear from you how (following your metaphor) you would suggest to dismantle the white car directly."

The car is not the problem; the paint on the car is the problem. While it is more expensive in the short-term to repaint the car, in the long run you realize savings (less fuel than the truck, no need to lay down rails, etc.). The point here is that the problem can be attacked head-on: the problem with female representation at conferences is a reflection of the problem with female representation in the field, which may be harder to solve but whose solution will ultimately save effort and pain in the long run. Why waste resources on solutions that make the situation even more complicated, when we could spend resources on solutions that simplify the situation?

Yes, it is hard, but there are people working on it. The woman who organized this conference should have worked with those people. I see efforts on the part of the professors in my department to bring more women into the field by focusing on the 101 course. It is not clear which approach works best; some professors have tried making the introductory course more graphics-oriented, theorizing that young women would be drawn to something more visual; others have tried to make the intro course more relevant to fields where women dominate, hoping to make the material more comfortable or familiar to potential dual-majors. I know one professor whose idea was to make the course more like a math course, with intellectually challenging problems and with the idea that high-school boys are more likely to have spent their time hacking, and thus will have an advantage in any course that is "hacker oriented" (and so making a theoretically rigorous course would help level the field).

There are probably other approaches that could potentially work better, but the point is this: the root of the problem is in the lack of women choosing to apply to or enroll in engineering and CS programs. I saw this problem first-hand as an undergrad (there were no women in my EE class; the department simply had no applicants at all), and I see it now in a CS grad program. This is not a problem that can be solved by layering more discrimination on top of it; instead, we need to remove the discrimination at the deeper levels. If women are being turned off the CS by 101 courses, or if they are not even bothering to take 101 courses or even apply to schools with CS programs, that is the problem that must be solved. I suspect that the ultimate solution will be found in middle school, because that is the age where girls with talent for math and science seem to lose interest in technical fields.

[fatbird]

Correcting an imbalance is not the same as unbalancing something.

Looking to increase X at Y's expense is only discriminatory against Y if Y's current state is deserved. Unless you're prepared to argue that men deserve all the slots at a tech conference, it's not discriminatory to enlarge the applicant pool to seek greater female representation.

GoGaRuCo famously achieves high female participation with blind judging of submissions, simply by making sure that the applicant pool has a large number of women through efforts to reach out to, and evangelize in, female tech communities. Is that discriminatory against men?

[geofft]

The selection process was gender-blind. At no point did she enforce a gender ratio; it just worked out that way.

It is entirely fair to count that a 50/50 split as a win if you have a theory that gender is irrelevant to whether they are the best person for the job. (If you have a theory that the split ought not to be even, well....)

[betterunix]

"(If you have a theory that the split ought not to be even, well....)"

Well...what? My theory is that the demographics of speakers at a conference should be equal to the demographics of the field itself. If the field is 95% men and 5% women, just how many women should we expect to see on a panel of ten speakers?

"The selection process was gender-blind"

Sure, but so what? She went out of her way to convince women to apply and did not do so for men. Masking that sort of discrimination with a gender-blind selection process is just as dishonest as masking the bias towards white upper-class men in university admissions by pointing to a blind review process.

[CJefferson]

I agree. However, the majority of speakers end up being male, white, able bodied. The question is, are these the best people for the job, or just the easiest to get to fill your slots?

It is unfortunately hard to know the answer to that question. Possibly the only way to find out is to get more speakers outside this group and see how well they are received.

[oftenwrong]

>How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"?

If $x already experiences discrimination that is beyond the control of the organizer, the organizer discriminating against $y merely helps to balance things out.

Also, in this case gender was not considered in candidate selection.

[coryrc]

Define "best person".

[Narkov]

My definition of "best person" has nothing to do with gender. This article is suggesting getting a gender balance is a win when selecting people to speak.