Fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because quotas are a wrong solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process".
One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.
What's interesting is when people do the opposite. When they A/B test the name. Same content. Half the people have male names, half female. Now, if gender doesn't matter, and people are judged purely on their achievements, and we are in a real meritocracy, then there should be no difference, right? If there a statistically significant difference in how people treat the male vs. female applicant, then there's some bias going on.
Not if there is a difference in outcome, based on gender; if based on the same background, people from gender A publish on average four papers and people from gender B publish on average three papers during their degree, which gender does it make sense to pick? Or if you add a person from gender C to a group that was composed solely of gender D, does it increase or decrease the lab's total output because of different social dynamics? Or, if there are grants that are only accessible to gender E due to positive discrimination, does it make sense to lower their pay, since they can compensate through that grant?
The paper assumes independence between the gender of the applicant and the gender of the students of the professor, which isn't the case unless you hide the applicant in a room away from the current grad students.
Furthermore, the paper mentions that they used both Student's t-test and an ANOVA, both of which assume that the underlying data is normally distributed; there was no mention of a normality test anywhere in the paper. If the data is not normally distributed, which could be the case, then it's violating the normality assumption of both tests, which could potentially make them invalid.
Finally, are there other confounding factors in the study? For example, if the applications were sent in different batches, the time at which they arrived does have an influence. For example, a recent paper evaluated the decision of judges for parole and found out that judges were more lenient right after lunch and were much more strict right before[1].
Maybe something is wrong, but I wouldn't blindly assume it's discrimination (especially since the results are the same if women do the hiring).
I wish somebody woyuld at least look into possible reasons. Personally I suspect the elephant in the room is motherhood. If there is an x% chance for the recipient of your grant to quit the profession after a couple of years, it lowers the value of your investment quite a bit.
Which means we should allow/push men to take paternity leaves in equal proportion to women taking maternity leaves. It's ridiculous that a) maternity leave is essentially not required in the US, and b) that women are expected to bear additional work-burdens, and men are often not allowed to bear the same child-rearing responsibilities due to lack of paternity leave.
I'll take "problems affecting women that feminism has consistently failed to tackle" for $2,000 ;-) (Seriously, it got a brief mention as such in one of bell hooks' books and everything. The solution, alas, is probably not a simple one.)
especially since the results are the same if women do the hiring
You think women can't be sexist against women? Of course they can be! A member of the marginalised group can easily continue that marginalisation. I watched a recent current affairs programme about same sex marriage, and they'd found a gay man to speak out against gay marriage.
Do you think a name blinded review process would yield a different result? I've never run a tech conference but it would not surprise me if ~95% of submitted technical talks were from men.
If you name-blind the review process you would still expect to get 95% men unless there is a higher % of women submitting talks and being rejected because they are women.
The quoted article suggests doing the opposite of name-blinding and actively looking for female talks in the pile.
Blinding combined with active outreach to get more people to submit to a CFP has helped several conferences improve their numbers. GoGaRuCo is the one that immediately comes to mind.
I have sat on organizational committees and name-blinding would not work for some of us for one key reason: We use speaker's name/identity as a criteria for talk selection. Two main examples are whether they have presented before and how "strong" of a speaker they are.
We DO use names to discriminate but that often allows us to have "fresh" speakers and keep the lineup somewhat varied. It also allows us to filter for all the other spam-talks; i.e. marketers.
It is an issue of priorities but I would easily place quality of presentations over guaranteed blinding to prevent gender-bias selection.
Name-blinded reviews doesn't seem like a good solution for a conference, where a significant part of the appeal of a potential speaker can be their existing fame. They are a business, and name-blinded reviews could cost ticket sales.
A mixed solution seems more equitable - if there is a "rockstar programmer" invite them as a "Keynote" or some other more select engagement. Have only a small number of these speakers, and hopefully their credentials speak for themselves.
I only wish it was possible for smaller organizations to take advantage of blind review processes for speakers.
Read the article carefully, and quote me the part where she agrees there is a problem.
The balance of evidence is that she is dismissive of the problem. She says she disagrees with Debra Mastaler, she uses scare-quotes around the word "bias", all but one of her "solutions" are aimed at female speakers individually, of the "do more to get noticed" variety. (The one standout is her accusation against Forbes Woman.)
Nowhere does she acknowledge that a) a number conferences have managed to get much, much closer to parity, without resorting to quotas, and b) a conference that still ends up with 95% males therefore very much has a problem.
A tech conference that ends up with 95% male speakers is Doing Something Wrong. They have no right to be "happy with their process".
One of the "correct" solutions has already been discussed in many places - use a name-blinded review process, and make sure your CFP outreach activities include women-intensive groups.