I have learned to be suspicious of organisations which make a noise about encouraging more girls to study IT, something outside their immediate influence for which they cannot be held responsible. They do a lot of hand-wringing about the small number of female applicants, but keep quiet about what proportion of their female intake they hang on to, and what is being done to support them.

It has been a smashing success in Toronto. It has now expanded to Vancouver and other places.

One more thing, if you say something on either side of an argument, don’t be afraid to put your real name behind it.

There are at least a few of reasons why I think they’re (still) a good place to prod (and when appropriate, praise):

– They’re publicly visible

Much of the industry happens behind closed doors. Recruitment in particular is opaque with some people explicitly looking for ‘people like us’. Conferences are much more visible. ‘Recruitment’ of speakers is something which can be seen and debated (as can the conference equivalent of ‘office behaviour’). If conferences simply reflect our offices and the public forum allows discussion, then that’s good in itself (though perhaps not tremendously fair to the conference organisers).

– They are run by ‘leaders’

Like it or not, if you’re putting on a conference, you’re asserting a leadership role in the industry. Leaders lead. Getting leaders talking, thinking and doing things about diversity seems like a good idea. They’ll likely take that back into other parts of life (the office, or their ‘real life’ community)

– They are sponsored by big names

Getting sponsors to think about diversity again should be a positive influence. Getting the people in companies to think about why they’re sending someone, and perhaps not always sending the person who’ll ‘fit’ best, or the most confident person, or the most experienced can be a good thing. That kind of thinking can be good for a conference, and good internally in an organisation sharing the opportunities around.

– Presenting can have a positive impact on careers

Or so I hear. One of the ways of having a more diverse senior population in the industry is to have a more diverse set of speakers/panelists at conferences. And once you have a more diverse leadership…

We are a community. Geeks, developers, techies… however you think of us. We learn from each other; we ask each other for help; we rally the entire community when we see our world threatened; we think not just about “What can I build or accomplish?” but “What can we ALL create?”

(At least, I do. And it’s phenomenal what we all can create. Worldwide communication. Repositories of all knowledge. Mind-bogglingly-vast stores of data. And isn’t this just the beginning?)

That social layer can be a big factor in how we work. We’re stronger as a group, and we’re global. Round-the-clock. Being in tech isn’t usually a 9-to-5 endeavour, it can be part of how we think and who we choose to spend our time with.

Like all social groups, we run the risk of having “in” people – and outsiders or wannabes, those who are excluded, those who decide (or are told) that we’re not the right group for them. Those who leave and take their contributions to the bigger picture with them.

We may be an unusual community, since we don’t see each other face-to-face very often. We largely interact on Twitter, on blogs, on IRC. So when we do get together (as at conferences, for example), we’re all getting new information about who we are, what we look like, how we sound… what it means to be “us”. As we’ve seen in this discussion, this info can bring us closer together or pull us apart.

If we casually drive away a lot of the “us”es, by implying that they’re not able/welcome to contribute (because they’re women, disabled, ethnic minorities, or anything else that makes them different)… What a loss. A smaller workforce, a smaller set of skills, a smaller range of viewpoints from which to attack the problems that matter. We have less of a chance to make the world better.

Sadly, this does happen. These recent discussions seem to highlight it happening, and some of us women (in this case) have felt it happen to us. But ideally, shouldn’t we care more about the quality of someone’s code or the originality of their problem-solving than about their physiology?

So that’s why I think this is all worth discussing, and why I’m with Frances’s conclusions here. Thus far, I’m seeing two main areas we can affect:

1. Increase the numbers of those who want to contribute, who have the skills and the creativity to help. This is an education issue, a childhood learning issue, a don’t-say-”Tech-is-not-for-girls” issue.

2. Find a way to be welcoming to everyone who wants to (and can) help. At conferences, online… I think we’ll accomplish more by valuing new views and backgrounds, rather than shunning them.

If we’re going to make the world a better place, I think we need all the help we can get.

After all the developments regarding women in tech of the last few years, “it just happens” isn’t good enough. I believe the Edge organisers in that they harbour no misogynistic feelings, but there is not the problem: a selection process that produces a roster of all-white male 20 and 30-somethings is broken. (I have no doubt whatsoever that most of the organisers, in 25 years of time, will find this obvious, but we work with what we work right now, unfortunately.)

I’ve been myself to small and large conferences, tech and science, in the UK and in the US, and it’s a banality to say that I’m sensitive to the way women are welcomed in the conferences and represented in the panels and talks. As someone with a slightly unusual path (but don’t most of us have our very own paths?), I’ve often worried about whether I really have a place somewhere. A culture that proudly struts how it’s dominated by white, young, affluent guys is a turn-off.

But beyond anecdata, which ultimately count nothing, before simply shifting the entire problem on the education system, it would only be honest to read what’s available. Greg Wilson posted a ling to “Unlocking the Clubhouse”. Google will find a lot of very very recent posts from the 2012 diversity spats about selection processes (including at least one I am aware of with blind selection… but much sophisticated ways to invite talks) that have radically increased women numbers at conferences. And for the links at the bottom of the Three Chords blog alone (http://www.threechords.org/blog/diversity-in-tech-still-an-issue-2013/) I’m grateful I’ve found this post — anyone who wants to play down the problem at least should make the effort of making a honest attempt to understand the pro-diversity side.

https://gist.github.com/4106776#comment-605425

Given: 9% women, 22 speakers:

P(0 women) = 12.5
P(1 woman) = 27.3
P(2 women) = 28.3
P(3 women) = 18.7
P(4 women) = 8.7
P(5 women) = 3.1

That can be misleading because although we expect 2 women, we also reason this:

P(>0 women) = 87.5
P(>1 woman) = 60.2
P(>2 women) = 31.9
P(>3 women) = 13.2
P(>4 women) = 4.5

It is also very likely to have more than 1 woman. Actually the probability of having more than 2 women is higher than having exactly 1. The lineup given by this conference is significantly opposed to the likely outcome, even using your pessimistic 9%. Since Taubee shows 20% of CS degrees go to women, and this statistic has no bias, but the web survey does have a bias, let’s reason that 15% is a better number:

P(0 women) = 2.8
P(1 woman) = 10.8
P(2 women) = 20.1
P(3 women) = 23.7
P(4 women) = 19.8
P(5 women) = 12.6

And

P(>0 women) = 97.2
P(>1 woman) = 86.4
P(>2 women) = 66.3
P(>3 women) = 42.6
P(>4 women) = 22.8
P(>5 women) = 10.2

It is still about as likely to have greater than 5 women (over represent) than to have only 1 out of 22.

Here is some code to help understand the result and why it is valid:

https://gist.github.com/4114968