> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.
That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about.
You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post).
What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended.
> Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference
Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.
> diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is)
Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1].
As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people.
[1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.
The reason is that many of us believe, backed up by various studies (unfortunately I am on a bus now, but I can go and find them when I get home if you like, but look up job advertisements with changed names, and women applying for orchestras), that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good.
I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby. Because things are so heavily biased at the moment, some help to begin moving things towards balanced can be greatly beneficial, to help people trying to move into the field.
I was recently in the unusual position of being the only man at a computing conference, and was surprised to find it an exhausting experience, even though almost everybody there made me feel very welcome.
> but I can go and find them when I get home if you like
Yes please!
> that people who associate with small groups of people like them can end up subconsciously keeping other people out, because they automatically believe they are not as good.
If the problem is that you're associating with small groups of people, the solution should not be to make sure that this particular group of people gets artificially more diverse to satisfy a lacking in your experience. You should just get out of the house and meet more types of people.
> I believe diversity should be the natural state of most fields, including Ruby.
Why? Do you believe that the Ruby community should have people who are good at programming and bad at programming? Racists and non-racists? Pacifists and militarists? Pro-choice and pro-life people? People who like gruyere cheese and those who don't? Why do we stick to race and gender in particular as an axis of diversity? Specifically, why aren't we arguing the corner of racist, cheese-eating pacifists?
> to help people trying to move into the field
As I've said in other comments, I find this attitude to be quite condescending. I do not need your help to move into any field. In Western civilisation at least, my own efforts will be good enough.
One thing I personally like about these surveys is that they appear to tell us people do these things subconsiously.
You don't want my help or to be condescended to. I (and other white males) don't want to be called out as racist and sexist.
There always will be people who "beat the odds". It sounds like you have. I am from a poor background, yet I went to Cambridge University. My wife is one of the top AI researchers in the UK, if not the world.
My wife also brings in another perspective to me. Having helped run a couple of conferences, we didn't have to lower our standards to be more diverse. We just had to look more widely than we might have done if we were lazy, and just asked our close friends.
I agree with everything you've said, but this still doesn't address why you think that diversity is good in and itself apart from blind faith. As I've alluded to in other comments, I have a feeling it's more to do with alleviating some sort of cultural guilt about racism. If it's not about that, then why aren't we complaining about the other ways in which the ruby community is not diverse?
With numbers as they are, it's just as likely that the organizers could pick a random sample of people qualified to give talks and still come up with an all white male audience. If you were to pick an entirely white-male sample out of a bag, would you resample because the results weren't sufficiently diverse? If so, I'm trying to find out why.
If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers. The runners of the conference seem to have made no attempt to say that is what has happened, but it is hard to see what has gone wrong.
Personally, it is not an issue of cultural guilt. Personally, I knew people as a young child who were poor, and I believe would have made excellent computer scientists if they had had better opportunity. My wife knows females who gave up on computer science because they could not fight through the male-dominated area (there is a whole other long discussion to have about the issues they faced, this is perhaps not the place).
In general, given my experiences with women and the poorer members of society, I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society. I think computing is great, and people should not be held back from it for real or imagined reasons (or course, some people might not like computing. That's fine to). If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.
If computing was already (for example) 50% women, then I would feel much less need to push particular conferences or events.
> If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers.
I think then that it's fair to say that diversity in and of itself is not the goal here, i.e. you don't have an underlying reason for pursuing diversity for the sake of it.
I would note that I believe that rooting out and debugging your own cognitive biases[1] is a worthy goal, and can only commend efforts like selecting conference talks blind.
My only beef is with the intentions behind it, primarily because we need to debug this whole diversity thing before we can deal with actual racists, rather than you guys who appear to be just trying to rule yourselves out of the witch-hunt.
> I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society.
Very well then, but this leads to some interesting questions:
* Roughly 90% of the UK population is classed as "White" or "White (Other)". Therefore, 9/10 attendants to a ruby conference in the UK should be white (they won't be). If you're totally focused on making the demographics match the general population, doesn't that mean you should be stopping non-whites at the door to make sure you have a high enough quotient of white people so that they're not just going along with the status quo? Is it conceivable that BritRuby would have been cancelled for not having enough white people?
* The largest age group in the UK is between 40 and 55, therefore the majority of attendees to a ruby conference in the UK should be in this range (they won't be, they're outnumbered by the 20-something year old programmer). Doesn't that mean you should be trying to balance the numbers out by stopping younger programmers from coming to conferences?
(These suggestions are of course absurd).
> If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.
This is not 'all well and good'. In the UK, where state education is compulsory (and legally enforced for crying out loud!) it's condescending paternalism at best. The results kind of speak for themselves here, us minorities are doing a pretty spectacular job in the UK without your help, in all sorts of fields, way out of proportion of what we should be for our numbers. If you need convincing of this, turn on your TV to any news channel or take a ride on any tube line that runs through the City. Have a walk around the campus at UCL or Imperial College and tell me with a straight face that 9/10 people you see there are "White" or "White (Other)". When the BNP worry that foreigners are taking all the good jobs, they kind of have a point (we are).
Save that paternalism for people in countries like Pakistan where there is no social mobility at all at the lowest rungs of society. Living in the UK is Star Trek levels of utopian in comparison. Some of my relatives who come over for the first time literally cry when they realize (in their own words) that "This is a country where we treat each other like human beings!". When you/we go over there with your big ideas about democracy, equality, freedom of speech etc, you're right, they're wrong, and you/we are totally correct to be paternalistic and condescending about it.
What I think you allude to and what I believe would make a hell of a lot more sense here is to encourage people from difference economic demographics to participate in technology in general, regardless of race or gender. The benefits of this to both individuals and society are easy to intuit. You'd do this through outreach at schools and other community centres etc and I believe there is already a movement underway in the UK promoting programming in schools[2]. Randomly selecting talks at a technical conference in order to account for the cognitive biases of the organisers is a noble goal, but totally inconsequential in comparison.
That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about.
You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post).
What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended.
> Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference
Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.