IT Is About Technology, Not About Gender
Most see this as a good thing, but I find the whole “we need more women speakers” speech very irritating. Too many PHP conferences are doing it. I don’t like that. I have your attention, but you may have already come up with some questions for me. Are you against diversity? Are you sexist? Do you think that women should stay at home and cook? The simple fact of my disagreeing on the topic almost inevitably lead to such assumptions. I will explain my position through personal stories.
How did I become a speaker? Credit goes partially to Chris Shiflett. He didn’t realize what he has done when he casually asked me why I didn’t submit to a conference yet. That was in 2006 or 2007, I can’t recall. I gave the typical response, that I didn’t feel that I was good enough. He told me not to worry and that I’ll do just fine. And you know what? I went and submitted to a few conferences, got rejected, swallowed my pride and tried again. I eventually spoke in France, Canada, USA and Germany. What I have learned from this experience is that speaking never came to my mind until someone suggested it. So go ahead, suggest it. Tell them that it’s not so hard. Tell them to try at a user group or even at lunch in their company. Some people may not like public speaking and you shouldn’t pressure them or make them feel guilty for not speaking.
The second story is about my growing up. I have always loved technology and science. My parents never agreed with me on anything. Not on my choice of toys (lego and remote controlled cars), not on my choice of friends (boys who climb trees and roofs), not on my activities (video games and sci-fi series) and not on my choice of career (programming). I didn’t care what they wanted for me. I decided on my career all by myself at the age of 11. The fact that it was an unconventional career for a woman didn’t even cross my mind. I was passionate. That’s all that should ever matter. Passion. Not gender.
At work, I was a token. This is the main reason why the “we need more women speakers” speech triggers such a response. Every time that a client visited the company or a new employee was hired, management would stop at my desk and point out that I was a woman. It sometimes felt like being a freak in a circus. It was unpleasant to be seen as something other than a skilled programmer. I once turned down a job offer because they really wanted to have a woman among their 40 male developers. I immediately thought of other candidates who will be turned down merely because they were male. The decision process seemed unfair. My sense of justice could not allow that, so I removed myself from the equation and gave all these men a fair chance.
And so every time that a conference asks for more women to submit, I am reminded of that job interview. Since having more women is a clear objective, then all decisions have to be weighed against it. Sure, we all want to think that we are not biased, but we are. As soon as we make something our mission, it inevitably affects our decisions. For me, conferences have nothing to do with gender. Gender is irrelevant. We’re here to talk about technology. When presented with two proposals on the same topic, I hope that a woman would not automatically win because someone wants to see a pie chart with equal slices. That is not what equal opportunity means. I am a woman, and I don’t want unfair advantages.
Do we really need to turn gender distribution into a problem? How exactly will the world be a better place with more women speakers? It’s just a number in a spreadsheet that some choose to find annoying. I’ll tell you what’s really annoying: people not automating tests, people withholding information about threats to projects, people not indexing their database tables or over-indexing them, people not using any cache, people skipping software analysis and design, etc. These are the beast that we need to slay. The rest is just a distraction, ready to suck all our time and deviate us from the path to knowledge and collaboration. When you review my application, please consider my skills, my character and the relevance of the topic for your audience. Don’t worry about my gender.
You’ve summed-up very nicely my own thoughts on the matter, but being a fella I’m sure I’d be accused of sexism if I’d said the same thing, or at least of not understanding the issue because I’m not a woman. We techies often move in open source circles so we should be very familiar with the concept of a meritocracy. We should choose people, for talks, jobs, whatever, on merit not quotas.
There’s a simple fact you’re overlooking here: there aren’t many woman in the industry, and, for a job that can be done equally well by both sexes, that is a little weird.
So many people just like things to be even, or close to. Have you ever thought some of these people might be saying it because they see a roughly 50/50 population and wonder why they’re in a group that is more 90/10 and just want it to be “tidy” (considering this is a job that is doable by both sexes equally without any extra work by a sex to fulfill the requirements)?
Yes, there are the people who insist on equality to the point it actually becomes racist/sexist etc (our overly P.C. culture I feel is actually more racist/sexist now as people are forced to use words that aren’t natural in language). But many simply like things to be tidy.
J Turner Indeed, a quota is biased by design. It’s sad that men do not seem to have the right to speak their mind on gender.
It’s simple. Society treats boys and girls differently. Imagine my mother’s face when I took a barbie, held her by arms and legs like a machine gun, ran around and yelled “ta ta ta”. Such behavior in a girl is frowned upon. In my second story, I explain how my parents disliked my not so feminine choices. While programming, my mother told me to get off the computer and wash the dishes or clean the house. Had I not been so stubborn, I may have been molded into a housekeeper like my mother.
Let me tell you another story. I had near perfect grades in math, physics and computer classes. My teachers suggested the following professions to me: nurse, teacher and accountant. How did we get from strong analytical skills to changing bandages? Why not mechanic, electrician, architect? It is at that stage that society creates an unnatural distribution of genders in professions.
We must attack the problem at these early stages. You can’t force a girl to enjoy lego, video games or programming, but you can certainly allow them if they show interest.
It’s a multifaceted problem, and there’s no easy answers. I’ve run a conference, and I’ve used gender as a minor criteria in making selections – at some point, the idea of “just choose the best topic!” is a non-useful criteria, because they’re both/all equally good/useful/engaging/etc.
Simply put, I’ve had attendees tell me they like seeing more female speakers – for men, they’ve told me they get to see speakers they might not have seen at other conferences. And for women, some have told me they feel more comfortable in attending when they see more women as presenters. People have asked for it, and I’ve done my best to accommodate. No one gets a free pass based on gender, but it is sometimes a factor in the decision process.
Excellent points. I want to write a post called “Women in Tech: 3rd Wave Feminism Isn’t Helping” because of issues like these.
I agree that early education and the wider culture is the main reason we see such a lopsided tech field, but I do thing that 3rd wave feminism has a good point: even though it’s not as effective as convincing all the teachers to guide apt students toward STEM jobs whatever their gender, changing the culture at this level is also something worth trying. That being said, it’s hard to do, and you risk causing people to feel like tokens or men to feel like they’re being counter-discriminated to “make things fair.”
That being said, there are benefits to a more inclusive conference/workplace/tech community. The more women participate, the less likely they are to be seen as tokens and be paraded around as you were. Also, the more likely women are to imagine themselves giving talks or going into STEM careers if they see more women doing these things. I’m not saying it’s a conscious decision by weak-minded women not to do it because they don’t see women doing it, but it’s actually been rigorously demonstrated that people who join a group where they are a minority in an obvious way feel out of place and are less likely to participate. Not consciously, but unconsciously, because it’s part of our evolutionary heritage to be cautious in a foreign group.
The answer to me is to do things more on a 1 on 1 basis: make women feel welcome but not singled out (a hard balance to strike). Encourage competent women to get more involved in the community, submit talks, etc. And yes, when hiring, I may consider being female a plus if a team is too similar and thus more liable to suffer from group think (another benefit of a more diverse workforce–some of the best teams I’ve been on have had people from many different backgrounds and even countries). I can only ask you to be assured that I don’t let it make up for competence or lack thereof. No two people are ever exactly equal, so I’m weighing lots of pros and cons about any two or more people I’m considering hiring anyway (or considering for a speaker position).
By the same token, I don’t mind that a conference encourages women to submit. I do mind if they start requiring some gender distribution (the movement to only be on panels with at least one woman seems asinine to me, and sounds like the idea of someone who’s never hired or curated talk submissions before). The best way to get better diversity is widen the pool you can choose from and then use the standard criteria to judge applicants. Because as much as you may fear there’s an unconscious bias toward women when that is the goal, there’s often an unconscious bias against women for all the cultural reasons you mention plus people have an “idea” of what a programmer looks like, and that is white or South Asian or East Asian, male, and in their 20s. So you can without meaning to rationalize why someone fitting that stereotype is probably a better fit than a black female.
You’re never completely free of bias, because our brains work that way. So I try to counteract my biases, including biases in the other direction. It’s not especially fun, but ultimately I think it’s worth doing. But by that token (heh, pun unintended), if I’m doing something that comes across as biased in the other direction, I hope people let me know they see it that way. Ultimately I may not agree, but I’d rather do what I’m doing having considered whether I’m biased in one direction or the other than not.
Thank you for sharing your experience in regards to gender and technology. I published a blog post the other day in which I indicated that the Northeast PHP Conference (of which I am an organizer) wants more women speakers. Please know that my goal was to be inclusive, not to irritate anyone or to make a token out of anyone.
First, let me be very clear that the Northeast PHP Conference will not use any sort of quota system when selecting talks. Each talk will be selected based on its merits. My post was simply part of an effort to get more women to submit talks. You’ll also note that my invitation was extended to everyone, not just women. More competition for the available speaking slots will make for a better overall program, which is our primary goal.
In looking at the proposals we had received so far, it struck me that so few of these proposals were from women (I’m making an assumption based on names here). Why is this? I know that there are plenty of women who have great presentations to give. There is absolutely no reason why, roughly speaking, we shouldn’t be receiving just as many talk proposals from women as from men.
In reading Courtney Stanton’s blog post on the topic, and from other sources I’ve heard, it seems that women are less likely to submit talk proposals to conferences than men are. I don’t know why this is, but my hunch is that it has to do with cultural expectations that we place on men vs. women. So, following Courtney’s suggestion, I put out an offer to help anyone who is interested in submitting a talk proposal. Again, my motivation was simply to be as inclusive as possible.
Wow, thanks for all the great comments. As a veteran conference organizer, I can say this. We brought our conference to a level where 14% of speakers are women. The diversity doesn’t stop there. We have a wide age span, various ethnicities, physical abilities, sexual orientations, etc. How did we achieve this? We didn’t do anything special. We organized the friendliest and coolest conference in our power. My only bias is in favor of speakers who are nice, friendly and who don’t mock other technologies.
The more diverse the submissions, the more diverse the speaker lineup. Cast a wider net and promote in new networks. For example, ask your local Girl Geek group to promote the call for papers. To tell people that they are all welcome, I put the following mention on the call for papers page:
“We do not discriminate candidates based on age, gender, ethnicity, handicap or appearance. Please feel welcome to submit.”
What you say here resonates so very strongly with my persional experience…
Dolls were interesting for 2 seconds, LEGO’s, constuctors and my favorite toy truck forever. I still got dolls, not contructors for birthdays and more than once got told to go clean or cook instead of trying to see/help at car repairs and I could only dream of reciving any isntructio or encourragement in learning to handle powertools. Computers were for some reason accepted as womaly activity more than mechanics…
I was stubborn and pressistent and curious enough to learn on my own… And come internet, it became very hard to guess at the asker’s gender specialy when the nickname was genderless.
I too belive, that gender quotas help none, what helps is more individualism – most girls probaly dont enjoy technology, and that is OK, but those that do should not have such an uphill battle as our generation did…
So I guess… the people that can help most are the parents and teachers of this generation… If they could be perhaps more open to girls interests that do not follow the societies expectation then in a decade or two, we could have more girls in tech too…
Death I’m glad that you were stubborn. I sure hope that more parents could be encouraging and not perpetuate the gender clichés. It’s a good thing that my father allowed me to do “boy” stuff, like chipping wood with an axe at build a dog house at the age of 6. These were awesome experiences.