[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).

[fatbird]

If you're saved from competing against a certain number of potential competitors in getting accepted to a conference, you have an advantage. If you're saved from such competition because of historical demographic imbalances, you have an undeserved advantage, and removing that advantage is not discriminatory, any more than forcing the conference organizer's nephew to go through the blind judging process is discriminatory. Or do you think systemically mitigating nepotism is discriminatory to those with familial connections?

Perhaps a different question is in order: If men have an advantage in getting selected for conferences because they're men, then do you think the blind judging is discriminatory? After all, it removes an advantage they have.

I've responded elsewhere about how diversity at conferences assist in addressing the root cause of the imbalance. I would observe here that your prescription to address it in middle school rather than at conferences is too cute by half: lack of female participation at conferences is part of the lack of participation in STEM generally that serves to dissuade girls in middle school from continuing in STEM.

[betterunix]

"lack of female participation at conferences is part of the lack of participation in STEM generally that serves to dissuade girls in middle school from continuing in STEM."

Do middle school girls go to conferences? Do they read conference proceedings? Are they even aware of conferences?

[fatbird]

I've replied to this in responses to you elsewhere.

[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.