My take is do what other women are doing. Form your own support group and organizations. Self interested groups are better equipped to understand the issues, priorities, etc. which affect a given community.
While big cos. might have programs to address women's issues, that's not stopping women from forming more effective support groups and organizations.
Let's look at an effective lobbying group, the NRA, how are they so effective? They are tenacious and they organize nd support each other --so while they do appeal to greater society and parties, that by itself isn't what's driven their success. It's the forming of community and having one focused issue.
Also as with other groups, tap names in other industries, entertainment, sports, politics, etc. those who are interested in advancing your issues. Tap companies with black founders or ones directly serving the community.
Agreed with this comment. We have the technology where creating an organization should be fairly trivial. From Facebook to LinkedIn to MeetUp to Twitter, there are endless places where one could find other similar-minded folks. Gaining exposure might not be easy, but it shouldn't be difficult enough to make it impossible. There is endless information and postmortems for similar organizations that should help figure out the best way to approach these issues.
I can't remember exactly if it was the GNOME Women Outreach program that was shut down recently, but I remember there being a lengthy author about the president of the organization's decision to step down and close the program (because no one else would step up to the chair, among other problems). The post went into some detail about where it succeeded and where it failed. Stuff like that could be very helpful if a new self-interest group decides to form.
> I can't remember exactly if it was the GNOME Women Outreach program that was shut down recently, but I remember there being a lengthy author about the president of the organization's decision to step down and close the program (because no one else would step up to the chair, among other problems).
Outreachy is alive and well, and has grown to encompass many more projects beyond GNOME, including the Linux kernel, OpenStack, and others. The Software Freedom Conservancy runs it now.
I rarely ever comment, but posts similar to this one have been popping out more and more as of late. I am a minority. I grew up in a different country, and most of my close friends are minorities, too, both female and male; half of them being in the tech industry. (If my username didn't give it away, I'm hispanic and so are most of my acquaintances.)
With that out of the way, I do not understand anything about this article. This bolded line, for example:
>Rarely, though, will you ever hear a white person lamenting about working conditions that their black/brown child/spouse/sibling might have to endure, because they rarely have those relationships, so aren’t forced to develop empathy for brown/black people.
What working conditions? Care giving any examples? What are some pointers you could give to white people to help them understand your deplorable working conditions? Is it simply that there are no black speakers at conferences, or holding positions in these tech organizations?
Personal experiences, as well as experiences from my hispanic friends, point to no such implied "bad working conditions." Some of my friends are brown-skinned and have noticeable accents. Most still use Spanish as their primary language, both on and offline. Yet there has been not one single incident involving either myself or any of my hispanic friends where we suffered any sort of discrimination, or experienced unwelcoming working conditions.
Maybe the author and I have different goals when we attend such conferences. Maybe there are more hispanics than blacks or native Americans in tech. Yet I don't understand why that would matter when attending a conference.
>Yet for the 2015 conference, they could not manage to find one black woman to be a “headline” speaker. Two white men are included in the set of headline speakers at a conference celebrating women in technology, but not a single black woman.
It infuriates me to see this obsession with ethnic or racial background. This obsession with the color of the speaker's skin. In my eyes, that the keynote speakers are white males does not invalidate their opinions in any way. There is no implied message that they speak on behalf of women, or minorities. It's an invitation. It does not mean that they're not qualified on the subject - if anything, these "old white men" are the ones running these big companies and are there not just to speak, but to also listen to the other speakers and the attendants.
I opened the videos linked in the article and I'll try to skip through them and I'll report back, hopefully. It just boggles my mind that in this day and age there is still this obsession with the speaker's racial background. And there is no solution proposed, either, besides "they should find more people of color to speak at these events." Isn't that the one of the points of these conferences? And is there any progress being made, considering that last year's was the first one Google organized? Did the author gather any information about this year's? Does the author have any proposals or people she would like to see at these events?
I go to tech conferences to learn. My political and ethnic background is never, ever something that makes me biased against or for an event. It is also never a problem. My slightly noticeable accent, my hispanic facial features, my shirts with Spanish sentences, they do not have any effect on how people treat me.
It might all come down to what your goals are when attending any event.
you're speaking from your experience which is fine and YMMV, but it's useful to listen to hers about how she feels. Discounting others' experiences doesn't help. She's talking about feeling excluded from tech as a woman of color because tech has made a priority to include more women speakers, but has completely ignored that there are women of color who are ignored. The industry thinking that they're"solving" diversity by increasing women, but ignoring women of color are only solving part of the problem. The main point I'm making is inclusion matters, in the workforce and at conferences. And the benefit of having people of color speaking is being exposed to experiences and P.O.V.s from people of color. There are studies that show that people of color or from various backgrounds are better problem solvers because of adversity they've had.
Also, using anecdotal evidence from your circle of friends who have had positive experiences is dismissive of others who haven't.
You know, I find it strange how I can't remember a single person complaining about lack of diversity who wasn't complaining only about their specific type of diversity.
Case in point: the author is, by her own admission, a black woman and complains about the part of her identity that is not well represented: her (black) skin.
There's something almost funny in asking people to care for one's situation when the speaker isn't even speaking at large: why isn't she also complaining about asian, native american, indian and how many others not being represented?
Because in America, your opinions are only valid as far as your credentials. For example, if you have dark skin, your opinions on black Americans are valid, if you're autistic, your opinions on mentally ill Americans are valid, if you're a computer, your opinions on American computers are valid, etc. It may be a flawed system, but it's better than slavery and feudalism, and it somewhat works to keep people's minds off the real issues, so it's all good.
Not sure if sarcasm or not, but it's REALLY hard to understand wha ankther races experiences without listening and people who listen without being dismissive/judgemental are exceptionally rare.
[Same poster as ohhimark, had forgotten my password]
Maybe so, but what I mean is that I (and presumably the people she is writing this for) are not black women. They're not indians, asians and many other things too of course (which is my point).
As an opinion piece (which I suppose it is), it's something interesting to think about. Yet, doesn't it say something about everyone of us if even minorities advocating for equal rights don't see the bigger picture and advocate for more than their specific situation?
It's a self-defeating argument in a way: the author is arguing that people are caring mostly for only one type of inequality… by decrying only their specific situation while making no mention of all the other types.
I guess what I am saying is that I wish the author would have framed her case as an example tying in to the general case.
When one gets to this point in their reasoning, perhaps they'd realize that we are resource-constrained and no matter what we do, we'll be "excluding" some categories.
And yet what I just wrote is too dismissive. I don't know what the best way to go about all this is, but it sure is very upsetting to be blamed, as part of the "dominant group", for not doing enough when the very people pointing the fingers seem to have similar biases towards minority groups they are not part of.
Then again, perhaps in this case they could have just called the event "inclusion for women" since that's what it's currently focused on.
Well yeah, she's obviously speaking from her position about something she sees and feels. Like most people, you're most aware of obstacles you face and less of others. She's fighting her fight. And obviously anyone reading that can apply that to other races/groups.
no it isn't. she isn't competing with one person. she's bringing to attention that intersectionality exists and the tech industry isn't paying mind to it.
quote from that link: "Oppression Olympics also tends to ignore Intersectionality"
That applies too, but she's bringing attention to black women and directly speaking about how the tech industry is trying to fix the problem of women in tech and at the same time ignoring women of color. "solving" the problem of not a lot of women in tech by hiring white women, and completely ignoring black women doesn't solve the problem. Same thing applies to men - hiring asian men (the "model minority"), and ignoring black men doesn't solve the diversity problem.
The "diversity problem" is never going to be fixed, because the goalpost is always something more.
The population of non-hispanic black people in California is of 6.4%, if half of them are women (3.2%) it means that if a tech company has 100 employees the perfect amount of diversity would be 3 black women and 97 non-black-women, they may not even get to know about each other in a company of that size.
But I'm pretty sure in her mind the number should be a lot higher than that, otherwise white supremacy culture is to be to blame.
Well that's one of the issues, because people like yourself have a quota/percentage mentality, instead of a inclusion/diversification/look at how much we can learn from eachother mentality. And like another person said, tech companies dont only hire from california. Isn't it a bit silly that 20% of twitter's audience is black and probably the most active group, and their number of black employees is low, black executives is 0?
It's kind of ridiculous to not want to make the effort because the goalposts are always something more. And it's ignorant of the tech industry to "fix" diversity by only putting white women in roles or only asian men in roles to hit quotas.
Surely that depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
If what you're trying to solve with a diversity programme is opening up the potential talent pool, it's entirely conceivable that focusing on white women and Asian men could be sufficient.
If what you're trying to solve is a greater diversity of opinions and experiences to foster ideas, say, it's entirely conceivable that hiring white women and Asian men could be sufficient.
If what you're trying to do is increase the representation of black developers then this approach is likely to fail.
Or to put it another way, diversity isn't one thing, it's a bunch of things. If one believes that there should be a higher representation of black people in tech (which seems reasonable to me) then one should look to resolve that problem. It seems completely orthogonal to the question of encouraging women to tech.
To your last paragraph, that completely ignores intersectionalism in thag there isnt just 1 type of woman. There are many types of women and diversity efforts should be approached with that in mind.
And sure if you want to hit diversity quotas, then hiring asian men and white women does that. BUT, it limits the advantages of diverse companies and hurts society overall which is kind of the whole point of diversity. For diversity of opinions, no asian men and white women wont be sufficient. I suggest you read about intersectionality.
I'm not talking about quotas. They're a political tool usually.
I'm talking about the well researched and well documented advantages of diversity for an organisation.
You appear to be assuming, somewhat ironically, that there is only one point of a diversity programme and that that is to have some kind of impact on society as a whole. A worthy goal, sure, but not the only one.
My point is that an organisation may have a diversity programme, the main aim of which is to improve the financial position of the organisation, say. My contention is that does not necessarily require them to go beyond gross corrections in their diversity profile. The fact that they may have to for legal reasons or may wish to for societal reasons is a separate matter.
Now clearly you don't hold that taking such a position meets society's needs and you may well be right. You may also feel that all organisations should use diversity programmes for societal ends and that's not an uncommon view. It just happens to not be the only reason for having a diversity programme.
Oh, and thank you for the advice regarding intersectionality. You appear to have mistaken my not considering it important for my point for ignorance of it. Easy mistake to make.
> People who participate in Oppression Olympics tend to ignore the fact that it's possible for multiple groups to be oppressed, and necessary to address all those problems, without choosing a single group to get all the anti-oppression activism. Oppression Olympics also tends to ignore Intersectionality, except where the existence of multiple degrees of oppression can help an individual participant "win".
It seems pretty clear that the original article is doing the exact opposite of this. The author's "intersectionality" of a woman of color pervades the entire essay.
Am I the only one who think it's perfectly logical that the speaker ratio is the same as the ratio of the tech population? Of course we should try hard to find minority speakers just to be proactive since we do have a diversty problem. However, when you go to a conference you want to see the best speakers and then it's only logical that a minority is less represented since, you know, there are less good speakers to choose from.
Nordic.js is doing a great job with their "50% women speakers" policy but if we forcibly try to overrepresent every minority where do we end up? "50% black trans women speakers"? I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too high.
Because only a small % of all people in tech are good speakers. Having a smaller population to choose from would mean a higher risk of putting a bad speaker on the lineup.
You're assuming that a) good-speakerness is a fixed quality, and b) that the speaker selection process is something like pulling bingo numbers. Neither is true.
> but if we forcibly try to overrepresent every minority where do we end up? "50% black trans women speakers"? I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too hig\
You end up with hiring quotas in companies, where a less-than-competent candidate can be hired instead of a competent one because he/she belongs to a minority. Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run? That is a question for the ages. :)
That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring practises among some companies can be discriminatory. There are hiring managers out there who won't hire a female developer because they're just outright sexist. Quotas get introduced because there are brilliant minority developers who get passed over because they're in the minority.
All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas. It's only a theoretic possibility that could be true if the available candidates only included one incompetent person from the minority group, but I don't think that's ever going to be the case in practise. The choice always comes down to two or three competent people, and the quota system then pushes the decision on one direction. White male programmers don't like it because it's not in their favour, but the reality is that they could be passed over even if there wasn't a quota system. While people continue to discriminate quotas will be necessary.
the hiring process is completely opaque, so this can never be proven or disproven.
ideally, we'd have a system where we have a balance sheet that gets tallied up- but interviewing is an important part in gauging competence and culture fit (yes, this is a real thing, I know some developers who don't wash and I would not call them culturally fitting), so it's not something that can be solved easily.
We all, inherently have a bias- we can't divorce ourselves from that bias, so how do we hire? by tribunal?
I certainly believe quotas to be a shitty solution.
that doesn't change the fact that quotas are a shitty solution, perhaps having people vote publicly on topics that are on an agenda, while witholding the author's name?
content is what is important. technical content and content of character.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day
live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin, but by the content of their
character."
How about running conferences on a completely blind process where the identity about the potential speakers are obscured by hashing, and people instead choose which speakers will present based on abstracts of the topic they will present on and some indication that they are qualified/knowledgeable to speak on the topic.
The best solution for inclusion is by eliminating the privilege through a blind process.
>Quotas get introduced because there are brilliant minority developers who get passed over because they're in the minority.
Any evidence (other than anecdotal) for this claim? The only reason I have ever seen for quotas is that the overall distribution is skewed, and therefore it must be discrimination.
Companies primarily hire out of networks/referrals. If your company is full of white guys, and their friends are very likely to be white guys, you end up hiring white guys.
Common sense would tell you it does happen. It only takes one guy who'd rather hire a man than a woman and one qualified woman applying for that job.
I don't think it's a meaningfully large part of the explanation for the skewed distribution. I think there are deeper systemic issues for that. However, I don't think I've seen more than a handful of people say that quotas are in place because of discrimination either. From my experiences, I think my view here is by far the dominant one -- there is overt discrimination, but the bigger factor is more subtle. It's primary and secondary education, culture, socioeconomics, marketing and advertising to kids, in short, a bunch of stuff that serve to skew the pool of people even getting to the point of wanting tech jobs. Quotas aren't aimed at getting Klansmen to have to grit their teeth and hire a black guy. Quotas are an attempt to bootstrap the system -- maybe if we just dump a larger than normal population of minorities into our little world, it'll self-propagate through more minorities seeing this as a viable option, with the hope that a generation or two from now, you'll have the distribution you want naturally.
That's a good list, but I think you have left out subtle discrimination. Things like the IAT show that there's a great deal of implicit racial bias in the US. [1]
I also have never heard of a company actually having quotas. What I have heard is people gathering statistics and saying, "Hey, this looks pretty bad. What are we doing that might cause this? What can we do to fix our [generally unconscious and unnoticed] biases in our hiring processes?"
You're right, I haven't heard of actual quotas either. I just got a bit loose with using the parent commenter's terminology.
I agree on the subtle and implicit bias issue as well. I wasn't trying to be exhaustive, but that's a big enough issue that it ought to be specifically mentioned.
It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.
In particular, I think the "switch the names" sort of study under realistic conditions makes it clear that bias is an issue. And it certainly matches widespread anecdotal opinions of nondominant groups in STEM fields.
Most of this criticism doesn't stand up to even a cursory reading. For example: "not only are there less women in STEM fields [..]" No shit, Sherlock, I don't think anybody disputed that.
Or the study that shows a disadvantage for mothers vs. fathers. The very same study shows a hiring/renumeration disadvantage for childless men vs. childless women. So yes, there's a dynamic here, but it's not male/female.
Also, the original comment I replied to was that outstanding developers are overlooked. None of the studies I've seen that show gender/racial bias (there are a few), deal with outstanding candidates (the Wiliams/Ceci did, IIRC). And incidentally not sure why you refer to "studies", your two links refer to the same single study.
There was another study (I think it was a different one) touted as showing hiring biases in STEM, except it turns out the study was performed in psychology departments.
Etc. etc.
There's some great information out there on the web in case you are interested, for example the Pinker / Spelke debate. Here's a quote:
"PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it's the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women. This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it's physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success."
There are hiring managers out there who won't hire a female developer because they're just outright sexist.
Do these people actually really exist in 2015, and are there organisations that would allow them to behave like that? I've known quite a few hiring managers, and some of them have definitely made stupid comments about "how nice it'd be to have a hot girl on the team" (though equally they might also make stupid comments about hiring graduates - of either gender - to make cups of tea), but none of them, to my knowledge, would ever have not picked a female candidate who was technically up to the task purely because she was a woman.
Have I just led a sheltered existence?
(I guess I'm talking here about SMEs and larger companies; I suppose if you're a tiny company run by a couple of sexist pigs, then any kind of behaviour is allowed to stand.)
It wouldnt be tolerated if it was spoken outright. Unfortunately its pretty easy for a hiring manager to dismiss someone officially because of something on her resume or in the interview officially, while being sexist or racist, or just having embedded biases in their head. Ive heard it often enough.
Anecdotally, yes I've met people who won't hire a woman. Reasons vary from an assumption that they won't be as capable because they have interests outside of coding, a belief that other developers won't be as productive if there's a woman on the team because they'll be distracted, or that they won't want to be a part of the company long term because they'll want to leave to have a family.
> That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring practises among some companies can be discriminatory.
Yes, I know they are. My question ("Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run?") was genuine; I really wish I knew if positive discrimination to counteract the existing discrimination will improve the situation.
> All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas.
Evidence? Maybe not. But believe me, there are quotas with perfidious results in large companies. I've seen it happen somewhat like this: department X has 5 vacancies to fill; due to department "demographics", company mandates that 3 of the 5 vacancies are for female candidates; due to candidates "demographics", department X ends with a pool of N candidates for 3 vacancies and another pool of 10N for the other 2.
But, as you said, it's theoretical. If the candidates had a quantifiable "skill", the "no subpools" approach would yield better results - a bigger "skill" quantity for the total of vacancies. However, in practice, you can't quantify skill, and much less the impact a candidate will have in the department. The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" approach might get the 5 vacancies with "more than enough" skill; The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" might even yield better results due to e.g. diversity. That's why I said that this is a question for the ages - only cohort-like analysis of hiring practices will give us something close to a answer which isn't merely speculative.
The choice can't possibly be "always between two or three competent". Less competent exist, and they have to pop up somewhere. With quotas, once most competent from the lesser set get taken, only less competent will remain available. It's a trivial mental exercise, not something that requires gathering evidence to figure it out.
That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring
practises among some companies can be discriminatory.
Totally agree that current hiring practices have implicit biases that can be discriminatory. What I don't get is how people can consider alternative hiring practices that are explicitly discriminatory okay, because they are discriminatory in the opposite direction.
It would be nice if people applied some heuristic like the "5 whys" and tried to actually perform a root cause analysis and try to resolve the base causes instead of plastering over the problem with practices that are at best no worse than current practices.
Explicit reverse discrimination is still discrimination. Quotas result in a situation where brilliant majority developers get passed over because they are in the majority. How about we try and come up with a solution where equally brilliant developers regardless of their minority or majority status don't get overlooked?
The fear of not having the best people speaking at a conference might have some merit if the people speaking at most conferences today were actually the best people. They are usually not. The best people speak at very few conferences because they are busy working.
In other words, women are overrepresented in conferences compared to their presence on the field, and it's going to be the same with ethnicities. In my business experience, women are already overrepresented in management positions compared to developer positions. Who wants to remain a developer anyway?
> if we forcibly try to overrepresent every minority where do we end up?
I am so tired of this sort of fantasy catastrophe based on a fantasy exaggeration of of a reasonable point.
If your question is, "What would happen if we reversed the polarity on the diversity-suppression machine and suddenly conferences were as diverse as they had been previously vanilla?" then the answer is: the conference would be about the same, but with a different set of speakers.
Heck, let's try it. The industry has been unusually straight white male for, what, 30 years? [1] Let's try 30 years of conferences that are exactly as biased but in the opposite direction. In fact, let's just try 3 years and see how it goes. My guess: lots of good conferences and a much more diverse set of people joining the field and not quitting the field because they're tired of dealing with bias.
> I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too high.
You understand, don't you, that your implicit assumption here is that there just aren't enough competent non-straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference list?
In my experience, the conferences that work really hard on diversity are better. Why? Because to get a diverse speaker base, you have to work really hard on outreach. You're going out beyond the usual suspects. You're finding people who wanted to speak but had never got a shot. You're finding the people who never even thought about speaking but would be great.
You understand, don't you, that your implicit assumption
here is that there just aren't enough competent non-
straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference
list?
I think you're deliberately misrepresenting the OP. The way I read the OP, they are making the assumption that for every single identity group in tech, that the prevalence of great speakers to bad speakers is approximately equal. For shits and giggles, let's say that assumption is 2% of white guys, 2% of white women, 2% of black women, 2% of black men, 2% of asian women, 2% of asian men, 2% of trans people, etc. etc. etc. are no only competent by talented speakers you'd want to see at a conference.
The moment you intentionally ignore base rates of the availability of each group, you're no longer getting the 2% of the engineering population that are the best speakers regardless of their identity. You're instead optimizing for diversity over technical excellence. Nothing wrong with that, just be clear that you can't optimize for both unless the base rates for all groups are approximately equal or unless one identity group actually have a greater percentage of technically excellent speakers than another identity group.
That said, I don't really care about conferences either way, just statistical truths. I rarely go to conferences any more, since I prefer reading code, papers and technical writings that are shared based on the quality of content instead of the identity of the author.
In my experience, the conferences that work really hard on
diversity are better.
I'm really curious to know your definition of "better" because I would venture that both you and the OP are completely correct in your viewpoints and arguments, because you two don't share the same definition of "better". Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.
FWIW, I'm a non-straight "white" dude (half anglo, half latino (by way of iberian and mediterranean descent) (more specifically a anarchoamorous, pansexual, agender male with a cisgender visual appearance because I don't see the value of wearing my identity on my sleeve)
> you're no longer getting the 2% of the engineering population that are the best speakers regardless of their identity.
That's not what you're getting now, either.
And note that you've shifted the goalposts. He was not claiming that the talks would no longer be the world's best possible speakers. His concern was that the "probability of bad talks would be too high".
> Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.
All sorts of things could be true. Unless you're claiming that they actually are and that this difference is material, it seems irrelevant.
Completely agree. The point I was making is that a quota system not only isn't better, but is worse if those quotas are not proportional to base rates of the population you are drawing from (software engineers in this case).
The only way to select speakers based on quality of content is to select speakers by content alone and hide all other criteria and characteristics of the speakers when selecting. Pretty much any other system introduces implicit and explicit biases, especially a quota system.
FWIW, yes, I'm claiming that your definition of better is different than that of the OP and that this difference is material. I may be wrong about this but based on your arguments in this thread and their arguments, if feels to me like you're both optimizing for different things. You're optimizing for diversity and the OP is optimizing for quality of content. The only way you get both is if the population from which you're drawing speakers at random has already been optimized for diversity.
There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue, 90 are green. Approximately 10% of fibbwobblers are great conference speakers (evenly distributed among all fibbwobblers regardless of color).
You want to hold a fibbwobbler conference with 10 speakers. To get only good speakers, you'd need to draw the 1 out of 10 blue fibbwobblers that are great speakers and the 9 that are green. If you have no quota system and end up with 10 green fibbwobblers speaking, approximately 1 of them is likely going to be bad speakers. If you decide to have a quota system where fibbwobblers of both colors are equally represented, 50/50, then you'll likely end up with the one great fibbwobbler speaking that is blue, and 4 blue ones that are not great speakers and 5 green ones that are great speakers. Under no quota, you get 1 bad speaker out of 10, under and equal representation quota system you get 4 bad speakers out of 10. Keep in mind that this is all based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that all fibbwobblers are equally capable of being a great speakers, regardless of their blueness or greenness.
Your worst case scenario in terms of quality of speakers gets comparatively worse as the spread between % of population that has identity X and the % of speakers that must be of identity X widens.
This is root of exception the OP was pointing out.
> quota system [...] You're optimizing for diversity and the OP is optimizing for quality of content.
I have never advocated for a quota system and I am not optimizing for diversity. Perhaps you should go argue with someone who holds those views, as I find this irritating and tiresome.
> There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue [...] 10 speakers [...]
And here you construct a ridiculous scenario to generate false intuitions. In particular, you are trying to generate the exact false intuition I pointed out with my first post: the notion that "there just aren't enough competent non-straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference list". It's horseshit. Peddle it elsewhere.
Bingo, this seems the natural end (or just the beginning of absurdity, really) of emphasizing equal representation of intersectionality, and it doesn't seem productive, dignified, or fair. Can anyone show that this is distorting the article's point? I don't see why transexuality should be minimized more than race or gender, and why it's not a component of intersectionality. Or defend why it's actually a good idea to turn people into a tuple of (gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, sex, sex at time of birth, religion, caste, language) and select uniformly (or oppression-intersectionally)? How are you even going to find all those things out? (In some cases, asking would be a legal liability, and doesn't seem the most appropriate thing to ask.)
I'd rather wear down barriers where I see them and let diversity organically grow, than to constantly be categorizing people and fudging the numbers into something artificially diverse.
Just my opinion, but the idea of "50% women speakers" isn't out of some sort of over-representative fairness to a "minority", but a reflection of real world demographics.
In any case I can think of, roughly 50% of people in a given conference's catchment area are women, and since tech is an industry in which anyone could excel, having "50% women speakers" is promoting and encouraging a desired ideal to both the industry and potential participants in that industry. (I must note that "failing" at having 50% women speakers at a conference is by no means a fatal flaw, but having the ideal there and the principles in mind can still effect long term change.)
The idea of having 50% "trans" people at an event would be a very different one given less than 1% of people are trans, allegedly (although given the stigma still attached, I think being trans needs to become more acceptable in society as a whole before we'll know the true number. They're probably a lot higher than we'd suspect, as we saw with homosexuality through the 20th century).
tldr; Diversity and Equality are not the main starting points nor goal of Women-in-Tech. Increasing women's role in tech helps improve diversity/equality, but is not the real mission of Women-in-Tech. Diversity/Equality is a (side) effect, and not the cause, of the Women-in-Tech movement.
I think there's a tendency for Women-in-Tech PR to equate Diversity/Equality with Women-in-Tech, when in fact, Women-in-Tech is supposed to advance, well, Women in the tech sector, and not Equality/Diversity in general. The 2 are Not the same thing, although they are often claimed to be basically the same for PR reasons.
It's getting so severe that even the author is "shocked" that Women-in-Tech events are less than diverse. She shouldn't be surprised--the fact that she was surprised, indicates she's bought into the whole "Women-in-Tech's mission is for workplace Equality" idea, which is false.
To be clear, I think Women-in-Tech is a noble cause, and I am all for supporting it. But please stop claiming that Women-in-Tech "is for diversity"--it is for advancing women's role in tech. To be clear, I think in and of itself this is great because I'd love to see more women in the tech industry. But we should stop claiming that the mission of the movement is for "diversity", because "diversity" is not what drives the women-in-tech movement, and is not it's main goal. The main goal is to increase women's role, and not "diversity/equality" in general. If the movement's main goal was purely "diversity/equality", then it wouldn't be called "Women-in-Tech"--there are other misrepresented groups that are much more in urgent need of equal representation, that the movement would have focused on first if Diversity and Equality were the main motivators.
I also agree with the author's photo of an all-white panel as being pretty funny :) It reminds me of the cast of Friends. Saying that the cast of Friends is "Diverse" or "Equal" would be kind of ridiculous.
Wait a minute! Where's the Romanian History Month? Where are the menu changes for Romanians? Where's the Romanian Googlers Network? Is it because those of you privileged enough to be born outside Romania are actively oppressing us?
"I can’t support a conference that doesn’t seem to understand the value and importance of intersectionality and representation."
Doesn't this just promote the idea that people of different ethnicities really are that different? Why on earth is skin colour "representation" an important factor anywhere? I mean don't discriminate but how is this an argument?
This just promotes the wrong idea that people of different ethnicities bring drastically different things to the table in one breath, and argues that race or gender do not affect technical ability with the next.
How this insane person has people listening to them or why a completely backwards article on the right site gets linked here is beyond me.
> Doesn't this just promote the idea that people of different ethnicities really are that different?
This is pretty much the "but we're a meritocracy" argument, and it's unfortunately wrong.
Having worked extensively with the behavioural science behind things like hiring processes, performance reviews, etc. I can conclusively tell you that we do not live in a meritocracy.
People get discriminated against, constantly. That's the reality they live in. They don't need a conference to tell them that.
I'll go further. Believing that you yourself are unbiased and meritocratic is shown to be correlated with an increase in unconscious bias in your actions through effects such as moral licencing. (See the work by Daniel Effron)
(Edit: you can downvote me if you don't like what I'm saying, but you're downvoting science, not opinion)
I don't think this is really related to the comment you're replying to. Whether or not discrimination exists is not the same as whether or not "the value and importance of intersectionality and representation" (article quote) is something we should consciously pursue. How does that not carry a bias towards reverse discrimination? I agree with the OP, I'm scratching my head about how the article simultaneously argues that we need to treat everyone equally, but also need to tally their intersectionality combo bonus points and force an equal "representation." You can either argue for ignoring all labels or for special label-based treatments, not both.
To take it into a perhaps more productive but related area, how would you say we should overcome bias? It seems to me if you try too hard, you will just introduce another form of bias.
Those could be contradictory. If you're consciously categorizing people in order to "be inclusive", you are discriminating ("make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people or things"), and probably instituting your own mental quotas to monitor the balance.
If you just mean don't throw "Latoya's" job application in the trash just because she sounds Black and you don't want any of those, few here are going to disagree, and few here would do that either, so it's not very helpful.
seems like you're jumping through mental gymnastics to discount being more inclusive. none of that applies when you're actively going out of your way to be more inclusive of POC.
I am in no way arguing against the actual idea of including every human being, regardless of whether I think they have historically been oppressed. I'm arguing against the idea of choosing one slice of humanity that I need to "be more inclusive" to today, and the idea that that alone is practical, effective, fair advice.
"Be more inclusive" sounds like a platitude that's not very actionable. How do I know if I'm failing? Is it when I don't meet some arbitrary quota or percentage? But I thought quotas were bad. And who gets to decide what the numbers are? Do I know I'm failing when people write articles like this? By that standard I'll never succeed.
> none of that applies when you're actively going out of your way to be more inclusive of POC.
So, should I not go out of my way to "be more inclusive" of Jews or gays? In other comments, you talk about how Asians are successfully assimilated or whatever, so I guess you would prefer I "be more inclusive" more to Black people than to Asian people? Does that mean Asians are excluded from being POC? Or just that "who I need to go out of my way for" is constantly changing and entirely subjective? I feel like a racist for even googling POC to make sure I know the definition, let alone the idea of evaluating what I think someone's racial heritage is, to decide what race-based treatment they should get. ("Does she just pass as white, or is she really white? Hmm, I'd better consult Wikipedia on racial nose shapes and eye colors." This is a deliberately absurd response, but my point is that being "inclusive to POC" means being able to reliably identify POC, which is difficult and pretty much racist.)
I may have gotten a little carried away here. A simpler, less-likely-to-offend way of saying it: Making any given person feel completely at ease and welcome, is a gift that not everyone has. Telling someone without that gift to just "be more inclusive" won't magically give them that gift.
It's possible that collectively stregthening our capacities for empathy will make that gift occur more often. But again, I don't think dividing and sub-dividing each other into classes that effectively merit more or less empathy relative to each other is the way to do it.
So, one of the issues I have here is that a lot of interviewing is done without structure, and judgements are so often made based off woolly ideas like 'culture fit' which often just mean rapport.
It's actually often the interviewer who feels nervous interviewing a woman, or a person of colour... and that prevents them from forming a rapport.
With the best will in the world, if you tell someone to be meritocratic and sit them down with someone with whom they have little in common and may never meet socially they'll be less at ease and may not make a human connection and that indirectly penalises the candidate.
One thing that helps here is to have very structured interviews, as having a clear and uniform structure can help interviewers feel more at ease. There are other benefits too.
Yeah, I think you're right. I should read more slowly :)
> You can either argue for ignoring all labels or for special label-based treatments, not both.
So, your question is how to square the value-add of diversity against the idea that race/gender doesn't affect technical ability?
If that's the case then I'd call out what I think is an incorrect assumption; that technical ability is perfectly correlated with either productivity (as an employee) or interestingness (as a speaker).
Nor does the performance of the individual equate to performance of teams or large organisations.
While it's not conclusive, there are studies that show that diversity in the workplace correlates with increased performance, and diversity as a nation correlates with increased GDP.
> If that's the case then I'd call out what I think is an incorrect assumption; that technical ability is perfectly correlated with either productivity (as an employee) or interestingness (as a speaker).
OK, that's interesting and a good point.
> While it's not conclusive, there are studies that show that diversity in the workplace correlates with increased performance
But how should that affect a hiring manager? Should they round-robin through categories of people for each hire? Isn't that just reverse-discrimination? (Or "regular discrimination" if it's the WASP straight male's turn to get hired.) Doing one's best to look past those labels seems to make sense, but the article seems to say we need to consciously label and balance the representation.
Reverse/positive discrimination is a choice that you can make if you want to. I don't know what evidence there is to support or refute its effectiveness, but there's both appeal and risk there.
Personally I'd make that call based on the circumstances... a senior recruiter (who has built out some of the best teams in the UK) once told me on team diversity; "as soon as it turns into a sausage-fest you're finished". If an environment was 100% white/male then it'd be much less hospitable to other groups, so personally I would use positive discrimination in that case. If an environment was 51/49 male/female then I feel positive discrimination would be inappropriate.
> Doing one's best to look past those labels seems to make sense
As long as you can look past those labels. Which you can't. Check out the research on moral licencing... it shows that the more you believe that you're being meritocratic, the more your subconscious generates excuses for biased behaviour. The only way I know to 'look past' those labels is to (a) use quotas, which often doesn't make sense or (b) use a blinded assessment process & structured interviewing.
Option (b) is an area I'm working on at the moment.
> but the article seems to say we need to consciously label and balance the representation.
Given that tech is already a sausage-fest, and that it's not a natural state of affairs (the gender split having worsened since the 70s), I personally think it's acceptable to try to actively rebalance the way tech is presented both within the industry and to broader society. It needs to be okay to be a woman in tech. There need to be role models. And this seems like a pretty harmless way to build towards that outcome... it's just speakers at a conference. Nobody is being refused a job because of this, and the speakers will be just as good.
Maybe you should try to get the answers to your questions and understand where the author is coming from before discounting them as insane - even if you still end up disagreeing with their position.
> This just promotes the wrong idea that people of different ethnicities bring drastically different things to the table in one breath, and argues that race or gender do not affect technical ability with the next.
> How this insane person has people listening to them or why a completely backwards article on the right site gets linked here is beyond me.
These two are exactly what bugs me, too. This actually reminds me of how Feminism turned from an equality movement to this modern-wave bullshit where it's a woman-supremacy movement and it's got nothing with equality.
It seems like 2015 is the year where people started being offended by everything, and they constantly look for opportunities to be discriminated. "Black women in IT."
Fucking Hell, by the time it's 2020 we'll reach a "homosexual Black Christian women wearing polka dot clothing in tech indistry" that are being discriminated.
Mostly meh on that. I haven't heard of major discrimination against Indians in hiring practices (modulo visa, of course, I'm talking about Indian origin people with citizenship or equivalent). There's always casual racism (insensitive jokes, etc), but those are small potatoes compared to systemic issues which almost every woman/PoC in tech is aware of and has had tussles with personally.
I've also seen tons of Indians giving talks at confs.
I think the word "model minority" applies here.
YMMV though. There might be lots of discrimination going on that my circle of acquaintances hasn't come across.
(Indian origin, born & spent most of my life in the States, currently living in India)
Cripes, that this has to be a thing at all. It's bad enough that my skin color and sex might have had influence on my educational opportunities, but beyond that they have nothing to do with how good or bad I might be at my job.
Take any and all measures to remove the influence of bias from your hiring process (e.g., pass résumés without photos or names to decision makers). That's something we all can do right now.
The conversation between Kara Swisher and Parker Harris, quoted, is rather amazing in terms of the verbal gymnastics they resort to: "I have employees, that are, you know, other types of diversity coming to me..."
I wanted to preface this with a "as a minority", but no.
As a human, I feel we are driving wedges where we should be finding common ground. And the biggest culprits seem to be the ones who have the most to win if they didn't do so.
If you come from a different background, that's great. It means you may have different ideas to solve a problem, to create something, to make art, music, life.
But that should be part of who we are. Our culture.
"I am a person from this country. I grew up playing these instruments, reading these stories, eating this food" says what you have done in your life, what you know, but it doesn't dictate what you are, or put a box around you that can segregate others.
When we put labels on ourselves, or say, "you can't possibly understand where I've come from" we're saying that others aren't "privileged" enough to have had their own experiences that allow them to relate; that you're life is more interesting and important than theirs, as you feel you're at a different level, or they're too ignorant to understand. The irony is amazing.
I wish this woman didn't speak as if she is a voice for women, or black people, or "people of color" (another odd phrase, as even my white friends can be darker than me), because it seems she only speaks for herself.
Women get a celebration, she shits on it.
What if Indians got a celebration? She mentions brown, but talks about being black.
Unless she was born in India, she wouldn't understand life coming from anywhere in India. How does having "black" skin make her relate to Indians? What about other brown people. Did she live her childhood in Bolivia?
To end with, I must say I hate this kind of thing. It makes "minorities" look bad. I don't want to be seen as something that needs help. I want to be seen as somebody who is exciting, who makes fun things and is intelligent. If you want to eat delicious food for my home, learn about the culture or history, then just ask. But that is part of who I am. It's not what I am. What I am is me.
You know that brown people went through this years ago as did asians? We had to fight to be apart of society. Now we have the privelege of being "model minorities" while others don't.
She talks about being black because she is black and shes talking about her feelings and perspective. It's ignorant to dismiss that.
Unfortunately for many people of color. They dont have the same opportunities that a white or asian person would have so you cant understand their persoective so it's best to listen because there are thousands of examples out there. The more you listen to them the more youll learn.
And she's shitting on the industry for ignoring races while being inclusive to white women. It's obviously great that women are getting an opportunity but it's ignorant to ignore women of color.
Theyre speaking not because they have the most to win. Theyre speaking because they want to be equal, which they arent in the tech world and outside of it. they want to go from below equality to at equality, not above it.
Frankly, i'm embarassed when minorities speak from their privilege ignoring the fact that indians/asians have been through it until white america said "no no guys, these asians are cool". That hasnt happened with black people yet.
Let me preface with what I'm about to say with this: I am very pro-equality in all aspects. Also, I am not a supporter of this new-wave Feminism which is full of misandry, anti-patriachy and other similar bullshit. Men of all skin colours get discriminated every day by women, too. Yes, women are not magical all do-good creatures; they can be horrible, regardless of skin colour. With that being said...
However, I am afraid we'll soon have this trend where a black woman[1] with lesser qualifications will be hired in favour of a white man with better qualifications, simply because she is a woman and black. Same applies for speakership (or whatever you call it).
Who is this author? This Erica Joy? Is she real? While the story told by the author sounds plausible and real. I can't verify if Erica Joy is the true author nor if Erica Joy is a real authentic person.
Before you dismiss me, I ask these questions because who's to say that some sexist white men realizing that women were organizing to stop sexism didn't come up with a propaganda ploy to cause division and diversion among women. How can I verify that this story and article is not controlled by someone employing a provocateur?
How did the extremely wealthy capitalists maintain more control and slow down the rise of the labor force? They pitted the workers against each other...
How can I verify Erica Joy (without spending vast amounts of time)?
EDIT: I see she has a twitter account. And her posts and info appear real. But think about it how easy it would be for some sexist white men to setup a web of fake information to infiltrate these media outlets in order to start a fake fight between white and black women in an attempt to keep women divided (and looking bad for fighting)?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadWhile big cos. might have programs to address women's issues, that's not stopping women from forming more effective support groups and organizations.
Let's look at an effective lobbying group, the NRA, how are they so effective? They are tenacious and they organize nd support each other --so while they do appeal to greater society and parties, that by itself isn't what's driven their success. It's the forming of community and having one focused issue.
Also as with other groups, tap names in other industries, entertainment, sports, politics, etc. those who are interested in advancing your issues. Tap companies with black founders or ones directly serving the community.
I can't remember exactly if it was the GNOME Women Outreach program that was shut down recently, but I remember there being a lengthy author about the president of the organization's decision to step down and close the program (because no one else would step up to the chair, among other problems). The post went into some detail about where it succeeded and where it failed. Stuff like that could be very helpful if a new self-interest group decides to form.
That was the Ada Initiative; see http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2015/08/05/the-ada-initiative-... .
Outreachy is alive and well, and has grown to encompass many more projects beyond GNOME, including the Linux kernel, OpenStack, and others. The Software Freedom Conservancy runs it now.
With that out of the way, I do not understand anything about this article. This bolded line, for example:
>Rarely, though, will you ever hear a white person lamenting about working conditions that their black/brown child/spouse/sibling might have to endure, because they rarely have those relationships, so aren’t forced to develop empathy for brown/black people.
What working conditions? Care giving any examples? What are some pointers you could give to white people to help them understand your deplorable working conditions? Is it simply that there are no black speakers at conferences, or holding positions in these tech organizations?
Personal experiences, as well as experiences from my hispanic friends, point to no such implied "bad working conditions." Some of my friends are brown-skinned and have noticeable accents. Most still use Spanish as their primary language, both on and offline. Yet there has been not one single incident involving either myself or any of my hispanic friends where we suffered any sort of discrimination, or experienced unwelcoming working conditions.
Maybe the author and I have different goals when we attend such conferences. Maybe there are more hispanics than blacks or native Americans in tech. Yet I don't understand why that would matter when attending a conference.
>Yet for the 2015 conference, they could not manage to find one black woman to be a “headline” speaker. Two white men are included in the set of headline speakers at a conference celebrating women in technology, but not a single black woman.
It infuriates me to see this obsession with ethnic or racial background. This obsession with the color of the speaker's skin. In my eyes, that the keynote speakers are white males does not invalidate their opinions in any way. There is no implied message that they speak on behalf of women, or minorities. It's an invitation. It does not mean that they're not qualified on the subject - if anything, these "old white men" are the ones running these big companies and are there not just to speak, but to also listen to the other speakers and the attendants.
I opened the videos linked in the article and I'll try to skip through them and I'll report back, hopefully. It just boggles my mind that in this day and age there is still this obsession with the speaker's racial background. And there is no solution proposed, either, besides "they should find more people of color to speak at these events." Isn't that the one of the points of these conferences? And is there any progress being made, considering that last year's was the first one Google organized? Did the author gather any information about this year's? Does the author have any proposals or people she would like to see at these events?
I go to tech conferences to learn. My political and ethnic background is never, ever something that makes me biased against or for an event. It is also never a problem. My slightly noticeable accent, my hispanic facial features, my shirts with Spanish sentences, they do not have any effect on how people treat me.
It might all come down to what your goals are when attending any event.
Also, using anecdotal evidence from your circle of friends who have had positive experiences is dismissive of others who haven't.
Case in point: the author is, by her own admission, a black woman and complains about the part of her identity that is not well represented: her (black) skin.
There's something almost funny in asking people to care for one's situation when the speaker isn't even speaking at large: why isn't she also complaining about asian, native american, indian and how many others not being represented?
Maybe so, but what I mean is that I (and presumably the people she is writing this for) are not black women. They're not indians, asians and many other things too of course (which is my point).
As an opinion piece (which I suppose it is), it's something interesting to think about. Yet, doesn't it say something about everyone of us if even minorities advocating for equal rights don't see the bigger picture and advocate for more than their specific situation?
It's a self-defeating argument in a way: the author is arguing that people are caring mostly for only one type of inequality… by decrying only their specific situation while making no mention of all the other types.
I guess what I am saying is that I wish the author would have framed her case as an example tying in to the general case.
When one gets to this point in their reasoning, perhaps they'd realize that we are resource-constrained and no matter what we do, we'll be "excluding" some categories.
And yet what I just wrote is too dismissive. I don't know what the best way to go about all this is, but it sure is very upsetting to be blamed, as part of the "dominant group", for not doing enough when the very people pointing the fingers seem to have similar biases towards minority groups they are not part of.
Then again, perhaps in this case they could have just called the event "inclusion for women" since that's what it's currently focused on.
quote from that link: "Oppression Olympics also tends to ignore Intersectionality"
The population of non-hispanic black people in California is of 6.4%, if half of them are women (3.2%) it means that if a tech company has 100 employees the perfect amount of diversity would be 3 black women and 97 non-black-women, they may not even get to know about each other in a company of that size.
But I'm pretty sure in her mind the number should be a lot higher than that, otherwise white supremacy culture is to be to blame.
But perhaps we should stop kidding ourselves and admit that being a technologist is a calling, not a career, and this shapes the talent pool somewhat.
It's kind of ridiculous to not want to make the effort because the goalposts are always something more. And it's ignorant of the tech industry to "fix" diversity by only putting white women in roles or only asian men in roles to hit quotas.
If what you're trying to solve with a diversity programme is opening up the potential talent pool, it's entirely conceivable that focusing on white women and Asian men could be sufficient.
If what you're trying to solve is a greater diversity of opinions and experiences to foster ideas, say, it's entirely conceivable that hiring white women and Asian men could be sufficient.
If what you're trying to do is increase the representation of black developers then this approach is likely to fail.
Or to put it another way, diversity isn't one thing, it's a bunch of things. If one believes that there should be a higher representation of black people in tech (which seems reasonable to me) then one should look to resolve that problem. It seems completely orthogonal to the question of encouraging women to tech.
And sure if you want to hit diversity quotas, then hiring asian men and white women does that. BUT, it limits the advantages of diverse companies and hurts society overall which is kind of the whole point of diversity. For diversity of opinions, no asian men and white women wont be sufficient. I suggest you read about intersectionality.
I'm talking about the well researched and well documented advantages of diversity for an organisation.
You appear to be assuming, somewhat ironically, that there is only one point of a diversity programme and that that is to have some kind of impact on society as a whole. A worthy goal, sure, but not the only one.
My point is that an organisation may have a diversity programme, the main aim of which is to improve the financial position of the organisation, say. My contention is that does not necessarily require them to go beyond gross corrections in their diversity profile. The fact that they may have to for legal reasons or may wish to for societal reasons is a separate matter.
Now clearly you don't hold that taking such a position meets society's needs and you may well be right. You may also feel that all organisations should use diversity programmes for societal ends and that's not an uncommon view. It just happens to not be the only reason for having a diversity programme.
Oh, and thank you for the advice regarding intersectionality. You appear to have mistaken my not considering it important for my point for ignorance of it. Easy mistake to make.
> ...except where the existence of multiple degrees of oppression can help an individual participant "win"
> People who participate in Oppression Olympics tend to ignore the fact that it's possible for multiple groups to be oppressed, and necessary to address all those problems, without choosing a single group to get all the anti-oppression activism. Oppression Olympics also tends to ignore Intersectionality, except where the existence of multiple degrees of oppression can help an individual participant "win".
It seems pretty clear that the original article is doing the exact opposite of this. The author's "intersectionality" of a woman of color pervades the entire essay.
Nordic.js is doing a great job with their "50% women speakers" policy but if we forcibly try to overrepresent every minority where do we end up? "50% black trans women speakers"? I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too high.
Why?
You end up with hiring quotas in companies, where a less-than-competent candidate can be hired instead of a competent one because he/she belongs to a minority. Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run? That is a question for the ages. :)
All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas. It's only a theoretic possibility that could be true if the available candidates only included one incompetent person from the minority group, but I don't think that's ever going to be the case in practise. The choice always comes down to two or three competent people, and the quota system then pushes the decision on one direction. White male programmers don't like it because it's not in their favour, but the reality is that they could be passed over even if there wasn't a quota system. While people continue to discriminate quotas will be necessary.
ideally, we'd have a system where we have a balance sheet that gets tallied up- but interviewing is an important part in gauging competence and culture fit (yes, this is a real thing, I know some developers who don't wash and I would not call them culturally fitting), so it's not something that can be solved easily.
We all, inherently have a bias- we can't divorce ourselves from that bias, so how do we hire? by tribunal?
I certainly believe quotas to be a shitty solution.
The best solution for inclusion is by eliminating the privilege through a blind process.
Any evidence (other than anecdotal) for this claim? The only reason I have ever seen for quotas is that the overall distribution is skewed, and therefore it must be discrimination.
I don't think it's a meaningfully large part of the explanation for the skewed distribution. I think there are deeper systemic issues for that. However, I don't think I've seen more than a handful of people say that quotas are in place because of discrimination either. From my experiences, I think my view here is by far the dominant one -- there is overt discrimination, but the bigger factor is more subtle. It's primary and secondary education, culture, socioeconomics, marketing and advertising to kids, in short, a bunch of stuff that serve to skew the pool of people even getting to the point of wanting tech jobs. Quotas aren't aimed at getting Klansmen to have to grit their teeth and hire a black guy. Quotas are an attempt to bootstrap the system -- maybe if we just dump a larger than normal population of minorities into our little world, it'll self-propagate through more minorities seeing this as a viable option, with the hope that a generation or two from now, you'll have the distribution you want naturally.
I also have never heard of a company actually having quotas. What I have heard is people gathering statistics and saying, "Hey, this looks pretty bad. What are we doing that might cause this? What can we do to fix our [generally unconscious and unnoticed] biases in our hiring processes?"
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/08/ac...
I agree on the subtle and implicit bias issue as well. I wasn't trying to be exhaustive, but that's a big enough issue that it ought to be specifically mentioned.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract
http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...
http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...
And there are other studies I find more persuasive. E.g.:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/stu...
In particular, I think the "switch the names" sort of study under realistic conditions makes it clear that bias is an issue. And it certainly matches widespread anecdotal opinions of nondominant groups in STEM fields.
Most of this criticism doesn't stand up to even a cursory reading. For example: "not only are there less women in STEM fields [..]" No shit, Sherlock, I don't think anybody disputed that.
Or the study that shows a disadvantage for mothers vs. fathers. The very same study shows a hiring/renumeration disadvantage for childless men vs. childless women. So yes, there's a dynamic here, but it's not male/female.
Also, the original comment I replied to was that outstanding developers are overlooked. None of the studies I've seen that show gender/racial bias (there are a few), deal with outstanding candidates (the Wiliams/Ceci did, IIRC). And incidentally not sure why you refer to "studies", your two links refer to the same single study.
There was another study (I think it was a different one) touted as showing hiring biases in STEM, except it turns out the study was performed in psychology departments.
Etc. etc.
There's some great information out there on the web in case you are interested, for example the Pinker / Spelke debate. Here's a quote:
"PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it's the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women. This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it's physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success."
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
Do these people actually really exist in 2015, and are there organisations that would allow them to behave like that? I've known quite a few hiring managers, and some of them have definitely made stupid comments about "how nice it'd be to have a hot girl on the team" (though equally they might also make stupid comments about hiring graduates - of either gender - to make cups of tea), but none of them, to my knowledge, would ever have not picked a female candidate who was technically up to the task purely because she was a woman.
Have I just led a sheltered existence?
(I guess I'm talking here about SMEs and larger companies; I suppose if you're a tiny company run by a couple of sexist pigs, then any kind of behaviour is allowed to stand.)
Yes, I know they are. My question ("Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run?") was genuine; I really wish I knew if positive discrimination to counteract the existing discrimination will improve the situation.
> All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas.
Evidence? Maybe not. But believe me, there are quotas with perfidious results in large companies. I've seen it happen somewhat like this: department X has 5 vacancies to fill; due to department "demographics", company mandates that 3 of the 5 vacancies are for female candidates; due to candidates "demographics", department X ends with a pool of N candidates for 3 vacancies and another pool of 10N for the other 2.
But, as you said, it's theoretical. If the candidates had a quantifiable "skill", the "no subpools" approach would yield better results - a bigger "skill" quantity for the total of vacancies. However, in practice, you can't quantify skill, and much less the impact a candidate will have in the department. The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" approach might get the 5 vacancies with "more than enough" skill; The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" might even yield better results due to e.g. diversity. That's why I said that this is a question for the ages - only cohort-like analysis of hiring practices will give us something close to a answer which isn't merely speculative.
It would be nice if people applied some heuristic like the "5 whys" and tried to actually perform a root cause analysis and try to resolve the base causes instead of plastering over the problem with practices that are at best no worse than current practices.
Explicit reverse discrimination is still discrimination. Quotas result in a situation where brilliant majority developers get passed over because they are in the majority. How about we try and come up with a solution where equally brilliant developers regardless of their minority or majority status don't get overlooked?
I do.
I am so tired of this sort of fantasy catastrophe based on a fantasy exaggeration of of a reasonable point.
If your question is, "What would happen if we reversed the polarity on the diversity-suppression machine and suddenly conferences were as diverse as they had been previously vanilla?" then the answer is: the conference would be about the same, but with a different set of speakers.
Heck, let's try it. The industry has been unusually straight white male for, what, 30 years? [1] Let's try 30 years of conferences that are exactly as biased but in the opposite direction. In fact, let's just try 3 years and see how it goes. My guess: lots of good conferences and a much more diverse set of people joining the field and not quitting the field because they're tired of dealing with bias.
> I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too high.
You understand, don't you, that your implicit assumption here is that there just aren't enough competent non-straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference list?
In my experience, the conferences that work really hard on diversity are better. Why? Because to get a diverse speaker base, you have to work really hard on outreach. You're going out beyond the usual suspects. You're finding people who wanted to speak but had never got a shot. You're finding the people who never even thought about speaking but would be great.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
The moment you intentionally ignore base rates of the availability of each group, you're no longer getting the 2% of the engineering population that are the best speakers regardless of their identity. You're instead optimizing for diversity over technical excellence. Nothing wrong with that, just be clear that you can't optimize for both unless the base rates for all groups are approximately equal or unless one identity group actually have a greater percentage of technically excellent speakers than another identity group.
That said, I don't really care about conferences either way, just statistical truths. I rarely go to conferences any more, since I prefer reading code, papers and technical writings that are shared based on the quality of content instead of the identity of the author.
I'm really curious to know your definition of "better" because I would venture that both you and the OP are completely correct in your viewpoints and arguments, because you two don't share the same definition of "better". Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.FWIW, I'm a non-straight "white" dude (half anglo, half latino (by way of iberian and mediterranean descent) (more specifically a anarchoamorous, pansexual, agender male with a cisgender visual appearance because I don't see the value of wearing my identity on my sleeve)
That's not what you're getting now, either.
And note that you've shifted the goalposts. He was not claiming that the talks would no longer be the world's best possible speakers. His concern was that the "probability of bad talks would be too high".
> Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.
All sorts of things could be true. Unless you're claiming that they actually are and that this difference is material, it seems irrelevant.
The only way to select speakers based on quality of content is to select speakers by content alone and hide all other criteria and characteristics of the speakers when selecting. Pretty much any other system introduces implicit and explicit biases, especially a quota system.
FWIW, yes, I'm claiming that your definition of better is different than that of the OP and that this difference is material. I may be wrong about this but based on your arguments in this thread and their arguments, if feels to me like you're both optimizing for different things. You're optimizing for diversity and the OP is optimizing for quality of content. The only way you get both is if the population from which you're drawing speakers at random has already been optimized for diversity.
There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue, 90 are green. Approximately 10% of fibbwobblers are great conference speakers (evenly distributed among all fibbwobblers regardless of color).
You want to hold a fibbwobbler conference with 10 speakers. To get only good speakers, you'd need to draw the 1 out of 10 blue fibbwobblers that are great speakers and the 9 that are green. If you have no quota system and end up with 10 green fibbwobblers speaking, approximately 1 of them is likely going to be bad speakers. If you decide to have a quota system where fibbwobblers of both colors are equally represented, 50/50, then you'll likely end up with the one great fibbwobbler speaking that is blue, and 4 blue ones that are not great speakers and 5 green ones that are great speakers. Under no quota, you get 1 bad speaker out of 10, under and equal representation quota system you get 4 bad speakers out of 10. Keep in mind that this is all based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that all fibbwobblers are equally capable of being a great speakers, regardless of their blueness or greenness.
Your worst case scenario in terms of quality of speakers gets comparatively worse as the spread between % of population that has identity X and the % of speakers that must be of identity X widens.
This is root of exception the OP was pointing out.
I have never advocated for a quota system and I am not optimizing for diversity. Perhaps you should go argue with someone who holds those views, as I find this irritating and tiresome.
> There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue [...] 10 speakers [...]
And here you construct a ridiculous scenario to generate false intuitions. In particular, you are trying to generate the exact false intuition I pointed out with my first post: the notion that "there just aren't enough competent non-straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference list". It's horseshit. Peddle it elsewhere.
Bingo, this seems the natural end (or just the beginning of absurdity, really) of emphasizing equal representation of intersectionality, and it doesn't seem productive, dignified, or fair. Can anyone show that this is distorting the article's point? I don't see why transexuality should be minimized more than race or gender, and why it's not a component of intersectionality. Or defend why it's actually a good idea to turn people into a tuple of (gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, sex, sex at time of birth, religion, caste, language) and select uniformly (or oppression-intersectionally)? How are you even going to find all those things out? (In some cases, asking would be a legal liability, and doesn't seem the most appropriate thing to ask.)
I'd rather wear down barriers where I see them and let diversity organically grow, than to constantly be categorizing people and fudging the numbers into something artificially diverse.
In any case I can think of, roughly 50% of people in a given conference's catchment area are women, and since tech is an industry in which anyone could excel, having "50% women speakers" is promoting and encouraging a desired ideal to both the industry and potential participants in that industry. (I must note that "failing" at having 50% women speakers at a conference is by no means a fatal flaw, but having the ideal there and the principles in mind can still effect long term change.)
The idea of having 50% "trans" people at an event would be a very different one given less than 1% of people are trans, allegedly (although given the stigma still attached, I think being trans needs to become more acceptable in society as a whole before we'll know the true number. They're probably a lot higher than we'd suspect, as we saw with homosexuality through the 20th century).
I think there's a tendency for Women-in-Tech PR to equate Diversity/Equality with Women-in-Tech, when in fact, Women-in-Tech is supposed to advance, well, Women in the tech sector, and not Equality/Diversity in general. The 2 are Not the same thing, although they are often claimed to be basically the same for PR reasons.
It's getting so severe that even the author is "shocked" that Women-in-Tech events are less than diverse. She shouldn't be surprised--the fact that she was surprised, indicates she's bought into the whole "Women-in-Tech's mission is for workplace Equality" idea, which is false.
To be clear, I think Women-in-Tech is a noble cause, and I am all for supporting it. But please stop claiming that Women-in-Tech "is for diversity"--it is for advancing women's role in tech. To be clear, I think in and of itself this is great because I'd love to see more women in the tech industry. But we should stop claiming that the mission of the movement is for "diversity", because "diversity" is not what drives the women-in-tech movement, and is not it's main goal. The main goal is to increase women's role, and not "diversity/equality" in general. If the movement's main goal was purely "diversity/equality", then it wouldn't be called "Women-in-Tech"--there are other misrepresented groups that are much more in urgent need of equal representation, that the movement would have focused on first if Diversity and Equality were the main motivators.
I also agree with the author's photo of an all-white panel as being pretty funny :) It reminds me of the cast of Friends. Saying that the cast of Friends is "Diverse" or "Equal" would be kind of ridiculous.
/s
Doesn't this just promote the idea that people of different ethnicities really are that different? Why on earth is skin colour "representation" an important factor anywhere? I mean don't discriminate but how is this an argument?
This just promotes the wrong idea that people of different ethnicities bring drastically different things to the table in one breath, and argues that race or gender do not affect technical ability with the next.
How this insane person has people listening to them or why a completely backwards article on the right site gets linked here is beyond me.
This is pretty much the "but we're a meritocracy" argument, and it's unfortunately wrong.
Having worked extensively with the behavioural science behind things like hiring processes, performance reviews, etc. I can conclusively tell you that we do not live in a meritocracy.
People get discriminated against, constantly. That's the reality they live in. They don't need a conference to tell them that.
I'll go further. Believing that you yourself are unbiased and meritocratic is shown to be correlated with an increase in unconscious bias in your actions through effects such as moral licencing. (See the work by Daniel Effron)
(Edit: you can downvote me if you don't like what I'm saying, but you're downvoting science, not opinion)
To take it into a perhaps more productive but related area, how would you say we should overcome bias? It seems to me if you try too hard, you will just introduce another form of bias.
If you just mean don't throw "Latoya's" job application in the trash just because she sounds Black and you don't want any of those, few here are going to disagree, and few here would do that either, so it's not very helpful.
"Be more inclusive" sounds like a platitude that's not very actionable. How do I know if I'm failing? Is it when I don't meet some arbitrary quota or percentage? But I thought quotas were bad. And who gets to decide what the numbers are? Do I know I'm failing when people write articles like this? By that standard I'll never succeed.
> none of that applies when you're actively going out of your way to be more inclusive of POC.
So, should I not go out of my way to "be more inclusive" of Jews or gays? In other comments, you talk about how Asians are successfully assimilated or whatever, so I guess you would prefer I "be more inclusive" more to Black people than to Asian people? Does that mean Asians are excluded from being POC? Or just that "who I need to go out of my way for" is constantly changing and entirely subjective? I feel like a racist for even googling POC to make sure I know the definition, let alone the idea of evaluating what I think someone's racial heritage is, to decide what race-based treatment they should get. ("Does she just pass as white, or is she really white? Hmm, I'd better consult Wikipedia on racial nose shapes and eye colors." This is a deliberately absurd response, but my point is that being "inclusive to POC" means being able to reliably identify POC, which is difficult and pretty much racist.)
It's possible that collectively stregthening our capacities for empathy will make that gift occur more often. But again, I don't think dividing and sub-dividing each other into classes that effectively merit more or less empathy relative to each other is the way to do it.
It's actually often the interviewer who feels nervous interviewing a woman, or a person of colour... and that prevents them from forming a rapport.
With the best will in the world, if you tell someone to be meritocratic and sit them down with someone with whom they have little in common and may never meet socially they'll be less at ease and may not make a human connection and that indirectly penalises the candidate.
One thing that helps here is to have very structured interviews, as having a clear and uniform structure can help interviewers feel more at ease. There are other benefits too.
> You can either argue for ignoring all labels or for special label-based treatments, not both.
So, your question is how to square the value-add of diversity against the idea that race/gender doesn't affect technical ability?
If that's the case then I'd call out what I think is an incorrect assumption; that technical ability is perfectly correlated with either productivity (as an employee) or interestingness (as a speaker).
Nor does the performance of the individual equate to performance of teams or large organisations.
While it's not conclusive, there are studies that show that diversity in the workplace correlates with increased performance, and diversity as a nation correlates with increased GDP.
OK, that's interesting and a good point.
> While it's not conclusive, there are studies that show that diversity in the workplace correlates with increased performance
But how should that affect a hiring manager? Should they round-robin through categories of people for each hire? Isn't that just reverse-discrimination? (Or "regular discrimination" if it's the WASP straight male's turn to get hired.) Doing one's best to look past those labels seems to make sense, but the article seems to say we need to consciously label and balance the representation.
Reverse/positive discrimination is a choice that you can make if you want to. I don't know what evidence there is to support or refute its effectiveness, but there's both appeal and risk there.
Personally I'd make that call based on the circumstances... a senior recruiter (who has built out some of the best teams in the UK) once told me on team diversity; "as soon as it turns into a sausage-fest you're finished". If an environment was 100% white/male then it'd be much less hospitable to other groups, so personally I would use positive discrimination in that case. If an environment was 51/49 male/female then I feel positive discrimination would be inappropriate.
> Doing one's best to look past those labels seems to make sense
As long as you can look past those labels. Which you can't. Check out the research on moral licencing... it shows that the more you believe that you're being meritocratic, the more your subconscious generates excuses for biased behaviour. The only way I know to 'look past' those labels is to (a) use quotas, which often doesn't make sense or (b) use a blinded assessment process & structured interviewing.
Option (b) is an area I'm working on at the moment.
> but the article seems to say we need to consciously label and balance the representation.
Given that tech is already a sausage-fest, and that it's not a natural state of affairs (the gender split having worsened since the 70s), I personally think it's acceptable to try to actively rebalance the way tech is presented both within the industry and to broader society. It needs to be okay to be a woman in tech. There need to be role models. And this seems like a pretty harmless way to build towards that outcome... it's just speakers at a conference. Nobody is being refused a job because of this, and the speakers will be just as good.
Maybe you should try to get the answers to your questions and understand where the author is coming from before discounting them as insane - even if you still end up disagreeing with their position.
> How this insane person has people listening to them or why a completely backwards article on the right site gets linked here is beyond me.
These two are exactly what bugs me, too. This actually reminds me of how Feminism turned from an equality movement to this modern-wave bullshit where it's a woman-supremacy movement and it's got nothing with equality.
It seems like 2015 is the year where people started being offended by everything, and they constantly look for opportunities to be discriminated. "Black women in IT."
Fucking Hell, by the time it's 2020 we'll reach a "homosexual Black Christian women wearing polka dot clothing in tech indistry" that are being discriminated.
Whoa. You can't attack someone like that here. It's fine to disagree, but not to personally impugn someone you disagree with.
Any Indian heritage people here think there needs to be greater representation of indians in conferences? Thoughts?
I've also seen tons of Indians giving talks at confs.
I think the word "model minority" applies here.
YMMV though. There might be lots of discrimination going on that my circle of acquaintances hasn't come across.
(Indian origin, born & spent most of my life in the States, currently living in India)
Take any and all measures to remove the influence of bias from your hiring process (e.g., pass résumés without photos or names to decision makers). That's something we all can do right now.
As a human, I feel we are driving wedges where we should be finding common ground. And the biggest culprits seem to be the ones who have the most to win if they didn't do so.
If you come from a different background, that's great. It means you may have different ideas to solve a problem, to create something, to make art, music, life.
But that should be part of who we are. Our culture.
"I am a person from this country. I grew up playing these instruments, reading these stories, eating this food" says what you have done in your life, what you know, but it doesn't dictate what you are, or put a box around you that can segregate others.
When we put labels on ourselves, or say, "you can't possibly understand where I've come from" we're saying that others aren't "privileged" enough to have had their own experiences that allow them to relate; that you're life is more interesting and important than theirs, as you feel you're at a different level, or they're too ignorant to understand. The irony is amazing.
I wish this woman didn't speak as if she is a voice for women, or black people, or "people of color" (another odd phrase, as even my white friends can be darker than me), because it seems she only speaks for herself.
Women get a celebration, she shits on it. What if Indians got a celebration? She mentions brown, but talks about being black.
Unless she was born in India, she wouldn't understand life coming from anywhere in India. How does having "black" skin make her relate to Indians? What about other brown people. Did she live her childhood in Bolivia?
To end with, I must say I hate this kind of thing. It makes "minorities" look bad. I don't want to be seen as something that needs help. I want to be seen as somebody who is exciting, who makes fun things and is intelligent. If you want to eat delicious food for my home, learn about the culture or history, then just ask. But that is part of who I am. It's not what I am. What I am is me.
She talks about being black because she is black and shes talking about her feelings and perspective. It's ignorant to dismiss that.
Unfortunately for many people of color. They dont have the same opportunities that a white or asian person would have so you cant understand their persoective so it's best to listen because there are thousands of examples out there. The more you listen to them the more youll learn.
And she's shitting on the industry for ignoring races while being inclusive to white women. It's obviously great that women are getting an opportunity but it's ignorant to ignore women of color.
Theyre speaking not because they have the most to win. Theyre speaking because they want to be equal, which they arent in the tech world and outside of it. they want to go from below equality to at equality, not above it.
Frankly, i'm embarassed when minorities speak from their privilege ignoring the fact that indians/asians have been through it until white america said "no no guys, these asians are cool". That hasnt happened with black people yet.
However, I am afraid we'll soon have this trend where a black woman[1] with lesser qualifications will be hired in favour of a white man with better qualifications, simply because she is a woman and black. Same applies for speakership (or whatever you call it).
That's not equality.
Before you dismiss me, I ask these questions because who's to say that some sexist white men realizing that women were organizing to stop sexism didn't come up with a propaganda ploy to cause division and diversion among women. How can I verify that this story and article is not controlled by someone employing a provocateur?
How did the extremely wealthy capitalists maintain more control and slow down the rise of the labor force? They pitted the workers against each other...
How can I verify Erica Joy (without spending vast amounts of time)?
EDIT: I see she has a twitter account. And her posts and info appear real. But think about it how easy it would be for some sexist white men to setup a web of fake information to infiltrate these media outlets in order to start a fake fight between white and black women in an attempt to keep women divided (and looking bad for fighting)?