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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the diverse-views dept.

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".


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @12:57PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @12:57PM (#886755)

    ...but reality suggests that if you have say 74% men and 26% women in coding but closer to reality would be you would see 1 female presenter to every 3 men.

    But isn't all this brouhaha precisely because the OBSERVABLE reality once again suggested otherwise? Just like it does, well, always?
    Your faith contradicts experimental evidence. Misapplied imagination is no fix for that.

    For all we know, women simply are too smart to want to waste a chunk of their time on this useless event. Posturing is the pastime of the males of the species.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:23PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:23PM (#886919)

    First of all, a "rationalization," among it's many other meanings, is a psychological defense. Just as denial, repression, displacement, sublimation, regression, splitting, and a whole bunch of other ones you may or may not have heard of. In psychology it is the justification of behaviors, and justifications which avoid a more true explanation or defend's a person mind against an unpleasant truth.

    "All I care about is skill!", as expressed by the GP, is a rationalization in this case. Even if that is true in the GP's individual case, and it may well be, it denies the reality that women are systematically discriminated against as well as harassed and abused in the industry in significant enough numbers to make it more than individual bad apples acting. That this occurs really isn't an opinion, though those who are threatened by the reality want it to be so. GP is trying to state that he doesn't understand the situation because he is "good" and so why is there any problem? It denies that there might be any possible systemic problem because devs are "good", and "good" devs don't discriminate, and maybe we shouldn't have any gender references then if anyone things discrimination exists or that there are in fact barriers.

    Then he goes direct to insult, questioning whether people concerned with this [using the euphemism of women] are, "precious little flowers, that they need all sorts of shade and extra water, or they will wither?" And then he slams down on his straw man that he doesn't know any. And I'm sure all his best friends are black, too.

    Then he concludes that if there are threrefore any problems, it is that person's fault. Blaming the victim.

    Anyway, so much for your title. Now to your points:

    So you're trying to say OBSERVABLE reality is showing something different from..... what one expects to see as representation? That this is ALWAYS what happens? However do you function in this world if your observable reality is always differing from what is expected? How do you function with others if you go through it never having any expectations? Oh, wait, you mean that no women ever present at any conferences? Never seen a female presenter at a conference? I certainly have. And that's before we go down the road as mentioned earlier that women certainly do have reasons to stay the hell away from conferences. Given that, it's amazing that any women do go to conferences or present at them, I guess.

    But what are you saying observable reality actually shows, then? Not really sure what you think my "faith" is... other than women do want to code, there are women who do want to present (though whether at this particular conference can be questioned), and that there are very real obstacles and barriers to their doing so. As all the defensive posturing here shows.

    But what I'm more concerned about is that diversity issues are immediately met with such a wall of psychological defense that it's pretty transparent that what is being threatened is the superiority of those who currently feel on top. Probably people fearful of making good anywhere else in life because technical skill is actually not terribly uncommon, once people are given proper education, practice, and reasons to want to try. Relational skill, however, is what keeps people from killing one another, something those with technical skill often have problems with.

    I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree about what reality is. But I'm seeing the defenses and the BS for what they are in the meantime. Not explanations. Rationalizations.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:36PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:36PM (#886926)

      it denies the reality that women are systematically discriminated against

      NO it does NOT. It is YOU who laboriously deny the reality that, discriminated or not, women DO have different priorities than men, and DO behave differently when in SAME position. Having worked for a number of years in a company led first by a man, and then, after he passed away, by a woman, I can definitely attest to that.

      Discrimination is bad. But idiocy is no better.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @09:01PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @09:01PM (#886971)

        No, not really. [nih.gov]
        One can often find reasons why there may be systematic selection going on, and it isn't the fault of women. [asm.org]
        You can find other professions where an increase in women in the profession lead to increased female speakers at conferences. [jamanetwork.com]
        You can find instances where pushback suddenly changed the tide at certain conferences. [sciencemag.org]
        You can find studies showing gender of the organizers makes a difference. [plos.org]
        I'm not arguing that women aren't different, and may have different priorities. Some of the articles above confirm that, in fact. The last one in particular notes that women may prefer posters to presentations. Another above analyzed that women generally speak for less time than men.
        But none of them suggest that women don't present at conferences. There is little variation that I've seen between number of male and female presenters and number of persons employed in a given industry. In women-dominated professions the majority of the presenters are women, big surprise! But that doesn't mean there are not male presenters in those places.
        And again, it is a little surprising that a conference which mouths that it is inclusive and committed to diversity (did you miss that part of the story) would reject the one and only woman who submitted present at it because the material had been presented elsewhere.
        However, when presented with reasonably clear evidence that there is bias, all kinds of excuses suddenly get made about what women are, and weirdly none of them are supported by any kind of peer reviewed data. Only that "everybody knows" or "I experienced" something.
        Now, do you want to give me your peer-reviewed study data, or just continue on with analogy?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @11:49PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @11:49PM (#887051)

          Please produce data on FOSS projects that women started. The excuse for this preachfest was a programming event, was it not?
          I expect no patriarchy can serve as an excuse not to write code on your own machine in your own free time, nor to not upload it to a public hosting.

          The point is, in a conference on programming, you need to have something interesting to say on programming matters. "On my job I do what my boss says from 9 to 5, and then I go home and forget all about it till the next workday" would get quite old quite fast.
          Programming differs from academics in that you are not paid to indulge your curiosity; you have to sacrifice some of your remaining free time to do that. And women are much less prone than men, to make their work their whole life.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @11:57PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @11:57PM (#887056)

            If you say so, bud. Maybe I'll do some legwork on it..... If you can justify any of that beyond, "Yep, this is my opinion, so it's right, see????"