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Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship
Under the heading, "Diversity Matters!" the website for the PHP Central Europe developer conference (PHP.CE) says, "PHP Central Europe Conference is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible."
Over the weekend, organizers of the conference, which had been scheduled for October 4-6 in Dresden, Germany, ended the event evermore after two scheduled speakers issued public statements that they would not be attending this year, citing concerns about the lack of diversity.
PHP.CE on Saturday posted a note on its website, stating "The conference has been cancelled and won't be continued*. Sorry for the inconvenience."
The asterisk points to three online posts as the reason for the decision. The first, a July 17 Tweet from Karl Hughes, CTO of educational consultancy The Graide Network, chastises the conference for a speaker list made up entirely of white men.
You can see how it was in 2018, including the list of speakers, presentation schedule, and a 9m41s "after-movie".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @03:56AM (2 children)
Now I am looking forward for C++ Comittee disbanding itself for that reason. Or, at least replacing the word compiler in language standard with a compilatrix. Remember, in ancient times, a library user was always called she throughout software documentations.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday August 28 2019, @04:30AM
I'm not saying that it isn't true in your experience, but I've never seen either 'he' or 'she' used in preference to the other in any software documentation. Both were used and, although I never did a word count, it never seemed that there was a bias to one or the other. I suppose it depends how far back you mean by 'ancient times' - I can only go back as far as Algol and Fortran in the late 60s and early 70s, although I didn't write much original software as it was mainly bug squashing. Personally, I encountered C for the first time in the 80s.
Perhaps it was more prevalent in a specific company's documentation but I do not recall it like that in the UK. Maybe I wasn't very observant.
But if all of the significant work is being done by one section of the programming community, including other profiles for no better reason than 'diversity' is just as bad as ignoring people who are prominent contributors based solely on race, religion, sex or whatever.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:33PM
In Classic Macintosh days (80s and 90s) I had seen some documentation that used "she" as the pronoun for the end user. Especially as the documentation would describe how the user would reason and react to different user interface design choices.
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