Geek Feminism

Agree 100% with that post... and I'd urge folk to follow the links and read some of the underlying tweets that started this whole thing off.

I'm gonna take the liberty of copy and pasting something I wrote on the other thread about this since I think it's relevant to what Avdi said:

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There's some text up on the main http://2013.britruby.com/ - among other things it says:

"We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? "

I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal?

In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the…

First, that things have "always been" one way does not mean they should remain so. And "people are people" is not excuse for bad behaviour. People can choose to be good or bad.

Second, there are a really big bunch of clear rules about how to talk and the things it is okay to say and think that are being worked out right now. It doesn't equate with talking "nice". I'll give some examples:

- Use the name and pronoun and non-binary person requests you use, [1]

- Don't ask a transgender person what their "real name" is. [2]

- Stop Using Diminutives [3]

- Do not say racism is over because we have a black president. [4]

- Don't say #AllLiveMatter, nor that you can where whatever you want, nor that black culture is disrespecting women [5]

- Don't think reverse racism is a thing [6]

- Don't say things that suggest physical contact or simulated physical contact [7]

- Do not say, “Hey baby,” or “Hi cutie.” [8]

- Acknowledge your privilege [9]

- Do not center yourself, tone police or victim blame [10]

For twitter examples of people policing ways of talking and thinking ( but bearing that burden without legislative support ), see: and [11], and [12] for some examples, and see [13] for it beginning to happen with the help of law enforcement at the intersection with civilian-enabled speech policing.

This is not fascism because this was created by the American and UK left, these are the same people who railed against Trump, drive changes in the civil rights and social justice…

"... I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women."

This suggestion is a bad one. It is blatant tokenism.

Try this instead: http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-my-tech-conference/

Key takeaway: "The easiest way I saw for getting more women on stage at the actual event was to get as many women to submit speaking proposals as possible. Selecting presentations was done without speaker information associated with the titles and pitches, so I wasn’t able to “reserve” spaces in the program for anyone based on aspects of their identity — and I wasn’t interested in that sort of reservation system for this event, anyway."

Telling people that an unintentionally all-male conference is "inexcusable" is an unproductive (and incorrect, in my opinion) way to address the problem. The industry has a diversity problem, but it's not wrong for someone to not take action to address it. It'd be nice if they did, though. When I try to get people to do things that would be nice, I never use that sort of tone. People who improve diversity issues in the tech industry are doing us a favor. Treat them that way.

Thank you for your honesty and self reflection. I really appreciate it.

> frankly, I don't know how I can help it.

Two things you can do are practice and self-education. Subscribe to http://geekfeminism.org and http://feministing.com. Reading those posts will give you the stories and information you need to understand the effects of your actions.

Then practice. You won't immediately be able to catch everything, so just focus on the things that make you hesitate. Those moments when I think "maybe I shouldn't say this", I almost always learn later that I was right. Use at hesitation to do a little analysis of what the effect of your words might be.

You can also practice in your head, or in conversation. When you're on the bus, think about things you said recently, and analyze them. Look for things that might've hurt people. When you're having conversations with people, think about what you would've said in that situation. Practice the analysis, and practice saying the right things.

You'll never be perfect, but you can TOTALLY get to the point where you're mostly not harming people. Which is an awesome place to get from the default for men, which is harming people over all day without having any clue.

I like this article because it points out women are also geeky and that it's OK to be geeky. Women just may tend to have a slightly different way of expressing that geekiness.

You want girls to feel comfortable because you want the girls who are good at CS to go into CS. This is independent of how many women go in total. But since we're at it, let's talk about the biology arguments:

http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/17/how-does-biology-explain-the-low-numbers-of-women-in-somputer-science-hint-it-doesnt/

http://www.mun.ca/cwse/Cannon,Elizabeth.pdf

according to the above study, undergraduate women in engineering showed comparatively a higher interest in math than men though slightly lower interest in engineering and yet lower interest in physics.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/

Through additional work CMU increased their percentage of women in CS from 8% to 1995 to 42% in 2000. One thing I recall is that women were not as experienced when they first got into CS and had to work harder. However they believed they had caught up by junior year.

> It feels like not too long ago a couple guys lost their job for making a joke about dongles and forking. I fail to see how that was worse than this.

That was Joe Schmoe male developer, who it is acceptable to fire for the slightest of reasons, including making an innocuous joke that wouldn't be out of place in a K-12 classroom. The men who are the customers of this startup are the rich guys in Silicon Valley who are awash in cash and cannot be fired.

The two are worlds apart, don't be under any impression that they mix in any sense whatsoever. Unfortunately, the first group (Joe Schmoe) is squeezed to the max by policing by interest groups like "Geek Feminism" and suchlike. Notably, Geek Feminism seems to have a neutral/positive approach to this Dating Ring thing (http://geekfeminism.org/2013/12/30/happy-new-linkspam-30-december-2013/) -- the company is referred to as "Y Combinator's first all-female company", and no negative comments.