When you see offensive things about women in tech like the ones mentioned here, what does it make you feel, and how do you decide what your public response, if any, will be?
Amanda Snyder
I don't think it's fair within an panel, conference, or job position to mandate diversity. You're making too many assumptions when you create this mandate. First, you're assuming equally qualified women applied to the position, and were rejected simply because they are women. The mandate just creates a pressure on the company or conference to add in one women, who may not have an equal skill set, just to fill a quota. This is unacceptable, and in the end this really won't be helping others perception of women if we lower the bar for their acceptance. However, this isn't to say that there isn't a problem with having only men in a work area or conference, where women are clearly present in the field.
We need to create a mandate where it can put the responsibility on the conference organizers to draw more women in. When a business is looking for more women to hire, the responsibility should fall to the recruiters to add more women to the applicant pool. This is where it all really begins. The recruiters have to go out and advertise the company to more women organizations, and find creative ways to get more women to apply. That way, there is no responsibility from the interviewers to hire the one percent of women who applied just to get numbers up. This same idea should be applied to conferences. There should be a mandate that speaker applicants must be an equal percentage of women. Now the responsibility is on the conference to appeal to various women in the industry to get them to apply, and not the job of the selection committee to be picking the one or two women.
Sarah Hutchins
Seeing offensive things just makes me think this contributes to the problem. Women already require a lot of work to get to speak up, regardless of whether it is true, there is a feeling they just will not be as welcome as men.
Seeing all male speakers or being in the minority contributes to feelings of having to represent or that there is little representation because there was no one qualified. Women feel a lot of pressure not to go to tech conferences and the high male ratio, unconscious male-targeting marketing, the idea that conferences just don’t have much to offer them, and horror stories from other conferences all contribute. There are even other women urging them not to go since they felt it was a waste of time or because they feel like other women so frequently tend to “contribute to the problem”.
It is hard to put together a public response to this, because of the feeling it will be dismissed. I am a woman and there is already a feeling of being little more than a token at this sort of thing. The frequency you hear something like “More women should apply because there aren’t enough women” or “You should apply so there is are more women candidates” contribute to the feeling that even if we start getting women on panels, they will be there as tokens, not as qualified speakers in their own right.
As a result, I have to come to what will be an unpopular decision. While the website which prompted this article missed the point made (no women on panels sends a bad sign) it brings up a good point. Diversity of gender for diversity’s sake is meaningless. Forcing your speakers to fit into ratios will not result in better conferences and instead will tend to dilute the quality as the focus shifts from interesting and well designed presentations to gender.
Perhaps we should focus on the fact there tends to be few women candidates. Studies and experiences of organizers show that so long as they get a pool of qualified candidates with significant representation, the speakers chosen (even when chosen blind to the gender of the candidate) will tend to match the representation in the pool.
So instead of a public outcry at one person missing the point, perhaps this should be a public call to answer this question: Why is it so hard to get women and minorities to apply as speakers?
Rose Fan
Last week I attended a session by a fellow ThoughtWorker on the topic of effective communication. He asked us the question “When somebody, anybody is communicating, whether in speech or writing or any other way - do they ever think they are in the wrong? Are they ever saying something that they believe is the wrong thing to say and that has no justification in their mind?” We pondered that for a little bit and agreed that the answer was “No. Nobody ever intentionally does that - we’re all acting in our best interests, whatever those may be.”
In this case it’s easy to sneer at Andy Rutledge’s parody website. It’s easy to point fingers at him and use unsavory words to describe his character. It’s easy to make fun of how much time he must’ve spent lining up his divs and thinking of mean acronyms to troll this subject. It’s easy to blame him - a face, a man, a name - and unite against him as a public enemy. We are those who advocate for diversity on panels, conferences, etc! Andy is not! Burn him at the stake. Am I right or am I right?
But that’s focusing on the person, not the problem. And in Andy’s case he does bring up some valid points despite them being presented in an immature, sarcastic and hurtful way. It’s those points I’d like to examine and counter - those best interests that he has for doing what he has done.
I read Andy’s follow-up post entitled “Much-needed explanation”. There I found a much more reasonable argument that he sums up as: “I’ll say again: the cult of diversity is blind to individuals and recognizes only categories and demographics...People are not categories, but sovereign individuals.” I chose to take this as the core message that he built his site upon. It doesn’t excuse the site, but again the site isn’t worthy of discussion - the core message is.
At face value it’s not a disagreeable proposition. Yet I do not support it 100%. Despite the ideal of people being treated as sovereign individuals, we can’t hide the fact that categories of people have been discriminated against in the past or have faced barriers to entry in technological fields that other categories have not faced. I’m not talking about just tech conferences here - I’m going back as early as grade school education. Over time as they are funneled through narrower and narrower paths that routinely disfavor or marginalize these groups - degrees, programs, jobs, promotions - these categories are what end up underrepresented in tech panels and conferences.
Echoing Amanda, I think widening the pool of qualified speakers who are women and minorities by actively recruiting them is the way to go here. Proactively seeking those candidates and encouraging them to apply is what we can do for them - but once they are in the pool, admit them on their merits and force no pressure to meet any diversity quota. If there is enough diversity in the pool of those who are putting themselves out there for tech panels, the increased presence of women and minorities in these areas should unfold naturally.
Some including Andy argue that such women do not have a presence because they simply don’t exist; as such, the pool of qualified speakers always results in men not out of discrimination but rather out of lack of well, anyone else. But I disagree. The women are out there. The minorities are out there. They’re hidden because they are more cautious. Less likely to raise their hands when they are unsure. More aware of how they may be scrutinized and more afraid of uttering a mistake that would negatively reflect on their entire gender or race than on themselves as idyllic “sovereign individuals.”
If we recognize this difference, then as an industry we should seek out those women and encourage them to put themselves out there to apply. After the application, all is fair game and admission truly may be gender and race-blind.
Linda Goldstein
To me, the issue that the original topic was trying to address was that the percentage of speakers at technical conferences who are women is much lower than the percentage of women in the industry at large, and that since it is unlikely that this is due to a skill differential, possibly some kind of social bias or intimidation factor is at work. The post then goes on to describe one person's overreaction to a suggestion on how to increase the percentage of women speakers at conferences.
How do you make the speaker list at conferences more diverse? We don't want to set up a quota because that would decrease the perceived (and probably actual) average quality of speaking. So let's go one level of abstraction closer to the root cause. (We don't want to fix the root cause right now- that's out of scope and probably a 13-point card that should be split)*
How do we get more women into the conference pipeline? For specific suggestions, I sat down with some smart technical ladies (many of them have posted on this blog already) and got...
- Not zero to zoom: first I would want to give a version of my talk in a smaller venue with a more trusted / smaller group of people (like a Continuous Education presentation or a Home Office Day presentation or a lightning talk or a local meetup, etc). This would result in feedback which I could use to improve. Repeat until comfortable.
- Have something (that I think is) new and interesting to say. Usually when I think about a presentation topic that I could use, I end up thinking "everyone knows about this already". I don't want to give repetitious or low-quality presentations, even just for practice or in an attempt to further my career.
To avoid quotas, attack at the pipeline. If your pipeline of qualified applicants is half and half, and talk abstracts are reviewed on merit (i.e. without names attached) then the outcome will be equal (unless women actually submit worse abstracts- which is a fact that I do not currently believe).
In response to the original question:
1. When I see misogyny on the internet, I feel mad. Also resigned. The world is full of trolls, and a lot of them work in my industry. I'm lucky to be at a company where conscious attention is paid to not being jerks.
2. Usually silence, lest the trolls turn on me personally. But I'm trying to become braver.
* This is a dev joke. See http://www.richardlawrence.info/2009/10/28/patterns-for-splitting-user-stories/
Amanda Snyder
I don't think it's fair within an panel, conference, or job position to mandate diversity. You're making too many assumptions when you create this mandate. First, you're assuming equally qualified women applied to the position, and were rejected simply because they are women. The mandate just creates a pressure on the company or conference to add in one women, who may not have an equal skill set, just to fill a quota. This is unacceptable, and in the end this really won't be helping others perception of women if we lower the bar for their acceptance. However, this isn't to say that there isn't a problem with having only men in a work area or conference, where women are clearly present in the field.
We need to create a mandate where it can put the responsibility on the conference organizers to draw more women in. When a business is looking for more women to hire, the responsibility should fall to the recruiters to add more women to the applicant pool. This is where it all really begins. The recruiters have to go out and advertise the company to more women organizations, and find creative ways to get more women to apply. That way, there is no responsibility from the interviewers to hire the one percent of women who applied just to get numbers up. This same idea should be applied to conferences. There should be a mandate that speaker applicants must be an equal percentage of women. Now the responsibility is on the conference to appeal to various women in the industry to get them to apply, and not the job of the selection committee to be picking the one or two women.
Sarah Hutchins
Seeing offensive things just makes me think this contributes to the problem. Women already require a lot of work to get to speak up, regardless of whether it is true, there is a feeling they just will not be as welcome as men.
Seeing all male speakers or being in the minority contributes to feelings of having to represent or that there is little representation because there was no one qualified. Women feel a lot of pressure not to go to tech conferences and the high male ratio, unconscious male-targeting marketing, the idea that conferences just don’t have much to offer them, and horror stories from other conferences all contribute. There are even other women urging them not to go since they felt it was a waste of time or because they feel like other women so frequently tend to “contribute to the problem”.
It is hard to put together a public response to this, because of the feeling it will be dismissed. I am a woman and there is already a feeling of being little more than a token at this sort of thing. The frequency you hear something like “More women should apply because there aren’t enough women” or “You should apply so there is are more women candidates” contribute to the feeling that even if we start getting women on panels, they will be there as tokens, not as qualified speakers in their own right.
As a result, I have to come to what will be an unpopular decision. While the website which prompted this article missed the point made (no women on panels sends a bad sign) it brings up a good point. Diversity of gender for diversity’s sake is meaningless. Forcing your speakers to fit into ratios will not result in better conferences and instead will tend to dilute the quality as the focus shifts from interesting and well designed presentations to gender.
Perhaps we should focus on the fact there tends to be few women candidates. Studies and experiences of organizers show that so long as they get a pool of qualified candidates with significant representation, the speakers chosen (even when chosen blind to the gender of the candidate) will tend to match the representation in the pool.
So instead of a public outcry at one person missing the point, perhaps this should be a public call to answer this question: Why is it so hard to get women and minorities to apply as speakers?
Rose Fan
Last week I attended a session by a fellow ThoughtWorker on the topic of effective communication. He asked us the question “When somebody, anybody is communicating, whether in speech or writing or any other way - do they ever think they are in the wrong? Are they ever saying something that they believe is the wrong thing to say and that has no justification in their mind?” We pondered that for a little bit and agreed that the answer was “No. Nobody ever intentionally does that - we’re all acting in our best interests, whatever those may be.”
In this case it’s easy to sneer at Andy Rutledge’s parody website. It’s easy to point fingers at him and use unsavory words to describe his character. It’s easy to make fun of how much time he must’ve spent lining up his divs and thinking of mean acronyms to troll this subject. It’s easy to blame him - a face, a man, a name - and unite against him as a public enemy. We are those who advocate for diversity on panels, conferences, etc! Andy is not! Burn him at the stake. Am I right or am I right?
But that’s focusing on the person, not the problem. And in Andy’s case he does bring up some valid points despite them being presented in an immature, sarcastic and hurtful way. It’s those points I’d like to examine and counter - those best interests that he has for doing what he has done.
I read Andy’s follow-up post entitled “Much-needed explanation”. There I found a much more reasonable argument that he sums up as: “I’ll say again: the cult of diversity is blind to individuals and recognizes only categories and demographics...People are not categories, but sovereign individuals.” I chose to take this as the core message that he built his site upon. It doesn’t excuse the site, but again the site isn’t worthy of discussion - the core message is.
At face value it’s not a disagreeable proposition. Yet I do not support it 100%. Despite the ideal of people being treated as sovereign individuals, we can’t hide the fact that categories of people have been discriminated against in the past or have faced barriers to entry in technological fields that other categories have not faced. I’m not talking about just tech conferences here - I’m going back as early as grade school education. Over time as they are funneled through narrower and narrower paths that routinely disfavor or marginalize these groups - degrees, programs, jobs, promotions - these categories are what end up underrepresented in tech panels and conferences.
Echoing Amanda, I think widening the pool of qualified speakers who are women and minorities by actively recruiting them is the way to go here. Proactively seeking those candidates and encouraging them to apply is what we can do for them - but once they are in the pool, admit them on their merits and force no pressure to meet any diversity quota. If there is enough diversity in the pool of those who are putting themselves out there for tech panels, the increased presence of women and minorities in these areas should unfold naturally.
Some including Andy argue that such women do not have a presence because they simply don’t exist; as such, the pool of qualified speakers always results in men not out of discrimination but rather out of lack of well, anyone else. But I disagree. The women are out there. The minorities are out there. They’re hidden because they are more cautious. Less likely to raise their hands when they are unsure. More aware of how they may be scrutinized and more afraid of uttering a mistake that would negatively reflect on their entire gender or race than on themselves as idyllic “sovereign individuals.”
If we recognize this difference, then as an industry we should seek out those women and encourage them to put themselves out there to apply. After the application, all is fair game and admission truly may be gender and race-blind.
Linda Goldstein
To me, the issue that the original topic was trying to address was that the percentage of speakers at technical conferences who are women is much lower than the percentage of women in the industry at large, and that since it is unlikely that this is due to a skill differential, possibly some kind of social bias or intimidation factor is at work. The post then goes on to describe one person's overreaction to a suggestion on how to increase the percentage of women speakers at conferences.
How do you make the speaker list at conferences more diverse? We don't want to set up a quota because that would decrease the perceived (and probably actual) average quality of speaking. So let's go one level of abstraction closer to the root cause. (We don't want to fix the root cause right now- that's out of scope and probably a 13-point card that should be split)*
How do we get more women into the conference pipeline? For specific suggestions, I sat down with some smart technical ladies (many of them have posted on this blog already) and got...
- Not zero to zoom: first I would want to give a version of my talk in a smaller venue with a more trusted / smaller group of people (like a Continuous Education presentation or a Home Office Day presentation or a lightning talk or a local meetup, etc). This would result in feedback which I could use to improve. Repeat until comfortable.
- Have something (that I think is) new and interesting to say. Usually when I think about a presentation topic that I could use, I end up thinking "everyone knows about this already". I don't want to give repetitious or low-quality presentations, even just for practice or in an attempt to further my career.
To avoid quotas, attack at the pipeline. If your pipeline of qualified applicants is half and half, and talk abstracts are reviewed on merit (i.e. without names attached) then the outcome will be equal (unless women actually submit worse abstracts- which is a fact that I do not currently believe).
In response to the original question:
1. When I see misogyny on the internet, I feel mad. Also resigned. The world is full of trolls, and a lot of them work in my industry. I'm lucky to be at a company where conscious attention is paid to not being jerks.
2. Usually silence, lest the trolls turn on me personally. But I'm trying to become braver.
* This is a dev joke. See http://www.richardlawrence.info/2009/10/28/patterns-for-splitting-user-stories/
No comments:
Post a Comment