How/when will you know when it's "fixed"? When there is a 50/50 split of speakers? When there are "booth dudes" instead of booth babes?
How, exactly?
As San Francisco gets ready for its annual RSA gabfest Conference, taking place next week, organisers appear to have got the message over inclusivity following last year's fiasco. When the 2018 event was initially announced, many in the infosec industry were shocked that, despite the wealth of talent across all genders in the …
- Can you go to a show, and see someone on stage that kinda sorta looks and acts like you.
and
- Can you wander around the show floor without getting inappropriate comments or harassed.
Seems a reasonable baseline to start from; let's get solidly to that point, then build on from there - Having attendees feel comfortable at your show, and a range of different viewpoints being heard seems like a good thing™
"Can you go to a show, and see someone on stage that kinda sorta looks and acts like you."
That's prejudice. If people don't kinda act like you and look like you should they be removed if you attend? Maybe that's another problem to add to the pile
If I went anywhere and dudes kept popping up that looked and acted like me, I'd straight get the fuck out and hope... PRAY... that the Cortexiphan dosage was low... I couldn't sleep in that world. It's beyond me to actually prefer things that way.
P.s., decades ago I saw someone that looked identical to me... I mean identical. Decades have passed, but I'll always remember the spookiness like it was yesterday.
"That's prejudice. If people don't kinda act like you and look like you should they be removed if you attend? Maybe that's another problem to add to the pile"
All you Reg Vultures out there please feel free to correct me, but I'm not sure that was the intended meaning...
I read it as "someone with whom I can identify" rather than "someone who is my doppelgänger".
This is outright sexism aganst men. Men are by far the majority in IT and not for any discriminatory reason.
More men are interested than women. In every profession where men are the majority there are efforts to encourage women to enter, go to the institute of physics, the IET or any other similar web site and you will see efforts to encourage women, Then go to a website for a profession dominated by women and go to their website - nursing, teaching, vets and you will see efforts to encourage women and nothing for men. Personally I think we should accept that on the average men and women prefer different professions but if we don't then we should be even handed in trying to even things out. Education is perhaps the worst area with quite overt discrimination and support in favour or women at all levels.
The idea that there is rampant harassment of women in the tech area is crazy in nearly forty years I have only seen sexual harassment/bullying once and that was by a large group of women encouraged by their supervisor/manager against a young man/boy. They thought it very funny. There is no way the equivalent jokes, suggestions and gestures would have been made by a group of men to a young women inside a factory in front of supervisors and managers.
The speakers shoudl be good speakers selected from those avaialble. They should not be selected on artifical sexist grounds but the reality is that they probably will be.
Bollocks. When I started being paid to write software in 1980, my boss was a woman and *her* boss was a woman (and there were two other women programmers and perhaps eight men). This was in the days when girls hadn't been taught that computers were for boys. Since then things have gone a long way backwards.
I remember in mid 80s having graduate job interview at one of the then mainframe manufacturers for a software role ... there were about 7 or 8 of us at the interview day and in an unusually brutal move they announced at the end of the morning who they would be making offers to (and could thereforw stay for lunch to have more of a chat with people - I got lunch! but eventually declined the job offer) and who would need to find their own lunch. They had a quick chance for everyone to ask any questions and one of the unsuccessful applicants asked for any feedback on what they could have done to get an offer and one of the managers replied "well, if any of you had been female you would have almost certainly had an offer as we employ virtually no women at the moment" ... and then more facetiously he added "and if anyone had said they played the tuba then you'd ahve been in as my brass band needs a new tuba player!"
Not at all Bollocks.
There did used to be more women writing software I also date back to the eighties and I have worked with female managers and developers. The reason why there are (proportionally) less nowadays is nothing to do with girls being taught that computers are for boys. The decline has been despite a massive effort and preferential support for girls. The explanation is that we have become richer and girls more career options and generally do not choose computers. I suggest you google " the gender equality paradox". This is the observaton that the more gender equal and supportive to women a country is the greater the disparity and polarisation in career choices and in paticular the fewer women in 'STEM' fields.
No one has come up with an explanation for the gender equality paradox except that as societal pressures are relaxed girls and boys natural differences in character and interests manifest themselves in career differences. It is noticeable that this observation aligns with medical, biological and psychological observations and effectively disproves the assertion that womens career choices are hampered or stunted by societal pressures. It is interesting it is called a paradox as it is only paradoxical if you believe that the differences between men and women are entirely derived from society rather than being innate which always struck me as a bizarre and rather fantastic idea.
To coin a phrase "bollocks" to the idea that girls are taught that compuetrs are for boys.
Um....it IS a male dominated industry. Even more so than most of the IT field. The only way you can possibly get gender parity among the speakers anywhere near 50/50 is by making that a higher priority than having the best speakers, which absolutely should not be done. Get the best speakers right now regardless of their genders and you're going to have an 80/20 or 90/10 split, and that is fine as long as you're truly getting the best speakers. This idea that we need to have gender parity everywhere is stupid bordering on insane. The field is mostly male and the dominance of men in the field goes up drastically when you start looking at experience in the field. In 10 or 20 years when all those women who are getting IT degrees now (finally, and welcome additions to the field as far as I'm concerned) have some experience in the field we'll achieve better gender parity, but for now you'd have to force it and that never turns out well.
Now as for the sexual harassment of female attendees, that's not fine. That crap needs to stop. Men, act like men, not like horny teenage boys. That'll solve that problem.
re: "Now as for the sexual harassment of female attendees, that's not fine. That crap needs to stop. Men, act like men, not like horny teenage boys. That'll solve that problem."
That bewilders me. I've seen/heard/encountered sexual advances once ever in all the tech conferences I've been to. I didn't take offence, I merely gently turned her down and moved on.
Where the fuck are all these people coming from?
Then you've led a sheltered life. When I used to work in a real office with several male engineers, mechanical and otherwise, the excitement was palpable whenever the prospect of a conference was imminent. From their comments you'd think they were off to a strip show. They couldn't wait to get their eyeballs on the women, and anything else they were able to. This wasn't just asking if they'd like to go to bed; It was constant pestering and touching. Some of them also displayed similarly poor attitudes about things such as their wives working - "NO!"
This was admittedly a while ago but old habits die hard. It will obviously take a while longer yet.
"When I used to work in a real office with several male engineers, mechanical and otherwise, the excitement was palpable whenever the prospect of a conference was imminent. From their comments you'd think they were off to a strip show. They couldn't wait to get their eyeballs on the women, and anything else they were able to. This wasn't just asking if they'd like to go to bed; It was constant pestering and touching"
It is difficult to argue that somebody's stated experience but this is totally add odds with my own experience over many decades and internally inconsistent - How does he know that it was constant pestering and touching at shows unless he followed them around, and if he witnessed it why did he not do anything? It has always been a social norm to support a woman in a situation like this. The idea it happened in a public forum is crazy. I could just about stretch to immature engineers mouthing of about what they would or had done which was all complete fantasy but real touching and harassment in a public forum? - No way.
I suspect complete b******t.
I work at a relatively small firm mostly comprised of engineers that was for several years 100% male, meaning zero need to be politically correct, or particularly mature around the office (not counting the getting the work done). Then, quite suddenly, we hired a small group of people who (by pure chance) were all female. Guess what? They are all competent and hard working and we are all kind of... normal and borderline civilized and didn't need a workplace etiquette training course to know not to tell every joke or remark that we previously would have (at least not as loudly as before, just like they too can sometimes be heard whispering god knows what and giggling in the next office), so we make a pretty good team that, I believe, we all feel good to be a part of. :)
Really? You've witnessed every interaction ever made between men and women?
Maybe I've been extraordinarily lucky, but I've never had a 'bad' interaction with women. I've been turned down a few times (and have even turned down a couple) but it's always been respectful from both sides. Speaking purely from my own experience, I would have said that men and women get along just fine thankyouverymuch, with no harassment either way, and no need for forced diversity, inclusion, quota setting or positive discrimination.
"Speaking purely from my own experience..."
as interesting as your own personal experience are as a man, i dont see how it can be extrapolated into the generalised experiences of women in the field. wasn't there a whole #metoo movement precisely around women sharing their experiences of this stuff? perhaps we can rely on that as a stronger dataset rather than relying on your personal experiences?
There you go again with assumptions. You have no idea how many men (or women) have approached me and you have no idea of my sexual orientation, and yet you make sweeping statements around how your experience is somehow more valid than mine. Hint: it’s not.
Your sample size is one. No more, no less. The fact that you have observed other interactions (as have I) doesn’t change that fact.
”I dont see how it can be extrapolated into the generalised experiences of women in the field...”
I didn’t say it should be. I was stating my own, personally held viewpoint. In marked contrast, might I add, to the post I was responding to; katrinab stated ”Doesn’t work like that when a woman turns a man down.” - an infinitely broad and generalistic statement tarring any and all men with the same brush.
If you two are representative of how women ‘in the field’ think of men, then YOU are the problem.
wasn't there a whole #metoo movement precisely around women sharing their experiences of this stuff? perhaps we can rely on that as a stronger dataset rather than relying on your personal experiences?
Given how many of those experiences have zero evidence to back them up and have been made by disgruntled exes, no, I don't think we can. It has become far too easy for a vindictive woman - and let's be fair, vindictive women are every bit as common as handsy men, possibly even more so thanks to the fact that one is socially acceptable and the other is not - to utterly destroy the life of a man she doesn't like simply by making an accusation, founded or not.
I'm not saying there isn't a problem with sexual harassment in our society (there is), but it is CERTAINLY not anywhere near the level that #MeToo would have us believe. Some of us still believe in innocent until proven guilty and what is happening to the victims of #MeToo accusations is nothing short of a travesty.
”Some of us still believe in innocent until proven guilty and what is happening to the victims of #MeToo accusations is nothing short of a travesty.”
Amen. This is why I firmly believe in one person, one viewpoint. And why I’m naturally distrustful when one person claims to speak for a large group based on hearsay, or says ‘It must be true because everybody is saying it’. The old lawyers’ adage “It doesn’t matter what you believe, it only matters what you can prove“ is very apt here, and appears to have been forgotten by a large proportion of #metoo’ers in the race to try and convict anybody and everybody they don’t like.
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The explanation is right there in the story: most keynote speaker slots are paid for. The vendor's marketing departments paying for the high-profile sales pitch don't care about conference diversity, only about the marketing message. There might be plenty of women in the industry, but if each company sees a slight advantage in a male keynote speaker, that's all you'll get.
Paying for keynote slots isn't new, but it has become the norm .
"Society as a whole needs to grow up."
Or maybe they've figured out a marketing message that works because it's what their audience actually wants, and the company that goes Social Justice Warrior first is the first to go out of business because nobody gives a sh*t about your politically correct, gender neutral and sexually inert advertising.
Read an article yesterday on how Google in attempt to have been seen to have "upped its inclusivity game" has recently performed a survey of employees salaries to remove discrepencies between people who were doing effectively the same job .... and it turned out that proportional to number of male vs female employees there were significantly more men who needed to receive pay adjustments than women.
About how they never get molested so it can't happen to women, obviously.
Thought this was supposed to be a technical/logical forum.
You have a conference floor with 100 men to each woman.
What do you think the chances are of one man encountering 100 women, as opposed to one woman encountering 100 men?
And what are the odds of at least one of those men being a sexist obnoxious shit?
Unless you have never ever met someone like that in your whole working life.
Hey, sugar tits, take me to your boss?
Don’t see much mansplaining here, do see a few men outlining their personal experience. Are you suggesting only women have a valid viewpoint and men should just smile sweetly and observe in silence? Because we have a word for that - begins with an S.
For the record, one person=one viewpoint. Man or woman, nobody has the right to delegitimise another’s personal experience; and the fact that somebody has had a different experience doesn’t make it any less valid. Trying to silence debate because a specific viewpoint doesn’t tally with the perceived ‘majority’ is how you end up with groupthink and mob rule.