Tags: equality

There are plenty of non-men in tech to speak at your conference - Stephanie Stimac’s Blog

I’m going to share this with the organisers of that conference I pulled out of recently.

When I was looking back at 2024, I mentioned that I didn’t give a single conference talk (though I did host three conferences—Patterns Day, CSS Day, and UX London).

I almost spoke at a conference though. I was all set to speak at an event in the Netherlands. But then the line-up was announced and I was kind of shocked at the lack of representation. The schedule was dominated by white dudes like me. There were just four women in a line-up of 30 speakers.

When I raised my concerns, I was told:

We did receive a lot of talks, but almost no women because there are almost no women in this kind of jobs.

Yikes! I withdrew my participation.

I wish I could say that it was one-off occurrence, but it just happened again.

I was looking forward to speaking at DevDays Europe. I’ve never been to Vilnius but I’ve heard it’s lovely.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think the line-up is finalised, but it’s not looking good.

Once again, I raised my concerns. I was told:

Unfortunately, we do not get a lot of applications from women and have to work with what we have.

Even though I knew I was just proving Brandolini’s law, I tried to point out the problems with that attitude (while also explaining that I’ve curated many confernce line-ups myself):

It’s not really conference curation if you rely purely on whoever happens to submit a proposal. Surely you must accept some responsibility for ensuring a good diverse line-up?

The response began with:

I agree that it’s important to address the lack of diversity.

…but then went on:

I just wanted to share that the developer field as a whole tends to be male-dominated, not just among speakers but also attendees.

At this point, I’m face-palming. I tried pointing out that there might just be a connection between the make-up of the attendees and the make-up of the speaker line-up. Heck, if I feel uncomfortable attending such a homogeneous conference, imagine what a woman developer would think!

Then they dropped the real clanger:

While we always aim for a diverse line-up, our main focus has been on ensuring high-quality presentations and providing the best experience for our audience.

Double-yikes! I tried to remain calm in my response. I asked them to stop and think about what they were implying. They’re literally setting up a dichotomy between having a diverse line-up and having a good line-up. Like it’s inconceivable you could have both. As though one must come at the expense of the other. Just think about the deeply embedded bias that would enable that kind of worldview.

Needless to say, I won’t be speaking at that event.

This is depressing. It feels like we’re backsliding to what conferences were like 15 years ago.

I can’t help but spot the commonalaties between the offending events. Both of them have multiple tracks. Both of them have a policy of not paying their speakers. Both of them seem to think that opening up a form for people to submit proposals counts as curation. It doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. Having a call for proposals is great …as long as it’s part of an overall curation strategy that actually values diversity.

You can submit a proposal to speak at FFconf, for example. But Remy doesn’t limit his options to what people submit. He puts a lot of work into creating a superb line-up that is always diverse, and always excellent.

By the way, you can also submit a proposal for UX London. I’ve had lots of submissions so far, but again, I’m not going to limit my pool of potential speakers to just the people who know about that application form. That would be a classic example of the streetlight effect:

The streetlight effect, or the drunkard’s search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.

It’s quite depressing to see this kind of minimal-viable conference curation result in such heavily skewed line-ups. Withdrawing from speaking at those events is literally the least I can do.

I’m with Karolina:

What I’m looking for: at least 40% of speakers have to be women speaking on the subject of their expertise instead of being invited to present for the sake of adjusting the conference quotas. I want to see people of colour too. In an ideal scenario, I’d like to see as many gender identities, ethnical backgrounds, ages and races as possible.

Smoke screen | A Working Library

The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished.

Equality vs. Equity :: Aaron Gustafson

Though I didn’t make the connection until much later, the philosophy of progressive enhancement in web design, which I’ve been advocating for nearly two decades now, is very much the embodiment of equity. It’s concerned with building interfaces that adapt to a wide range of circumstances, both tied to an individual user’s capabilities as well as those of the devices, networks, and environment in which they are accessing our creations.

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2021 - Infrequently Noted

Developers, particularly in Silicon Valley firms, are definitionally wealthy and enfranchised by world-historical standards. Like upper classes of yore, comfort (“DX”) comes with courtiers happy to declare how important comfort must surely be. It’s bunk, or at least most of it is.

As frontenders, our task is to make services that work well for all, not just the wealthy. If improvements in our tools or our comfort actually deliver improvements in that direction, so much the better. But we must never forget that measurable improvement for users is the yardstick.

Kokorobot — leanerweb

The problem is that most websites will adapt to the ever faster connections, which makes them gradually inaccessible for people with slower connections. Today, most websites are impossible to download with a dial-up connection, because they have become too corpulent.

This speaks to me:

Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.

Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas.

There’s a list of links at the end of this piece to help you reach this goal:

It is vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example. Bloat makes the web inaccessible.

When should you be using Web Workers? — DasSur.ma

Although this piece is ostensibly about why we should be using web workers more, there’s a much, much bigger point about the growing power gap between the devices we developers use and the typical device used by the rest of the planet.

While we are getting faster flagship phones every cycle, the vast majority of people can’t afford these. The more affordable phones are stuck in the past and have highly fluctuating performance metrics. These low-end phones will mostly likely be used by the massive number of people coming online in the next couple of years. The gap between the fastest and the slowest phone is getting wider, and the median is going down.

The timelessness of The Ballad of Halo Jones, the girl who got out | FactorDaily

The Ballad Of Halo Jones is 35 years old this year.

Where did she go? Out.

What did she do? Everything.

Why Data Is Never Raw - The New Atlantis

Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.

Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine

The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).

Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:

I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.

Google Walkout Organizers Explain Their Demands

This instance of collective action from inside a tech company is important, not just for the specifics of Google, but in acting as an example to workers in other companies.

And of all the demands, this is the one that could have the biggest effect in the US tech world:

An end to Forced Arbitration.

How To Kill Your Tech Industry

I’m currently making my way through Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks. In that book and in this article, she describes how Britain squandered its lead in the field of computing through indemic sexism. There’s also the remarkable story of Dame Stephanie Shirley.

CSS dismissal is about exclusion, not technology

As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.

This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.

Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.

Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.

(Don’t read the comments.)

Book - Broad Band — Claire L. Evans

Coming to a bookshelf near you in March 2018: the untold story of the women who made the internet.

Designed lines. — Ethan Marcotte

We’re building on a web littered with too-heavy sites, on an internet that’s unevenly, unequally distributed. That’s why designing a lightweight, inexpensive digital experience is a form of kindness. And while that kindness might seem like a small thing these days, it’s a critical one.

Less Bro-gramming: Net Natives host and sponsor Codebar | Net Natives

An excellent potted history from Cassie on women in computing.

NASA’s “Keypunch girls” would work in cramped rows translating programming instructions onto paper pads, whilst the machine operators would sit in comfort, feeding the code decks through card readers and enjoying the esteem of the end result (I imagine it a bit like Mad Men, but with more sexism and astronauts).

Yesterday Ireland held a referendum to amend its constitution in order to provide equal rights to gay couples who want to get married. Today it’s clear that the “yes” vote is going to carry the day.

This is amazing.

I left Ireland in the early ’90s. When I told people abroad about the medieval legal situation in Ireland on contraception, divorce, and homosexuality …well, people just wouldn’t believe me. Combined with the nationalistic political situation, I got used to a sort of permanent miasma of embarrassment towards the country I came from.

But today I feel a swell of pride.

The Nor » Low Latency

Like an Enid Blyton adventure for the 21st century, James goes out into the country and explores the networks of microwave transmitters enabling high-frequency trading.

If you think that London’s skyscraper boom is impressive – the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin – go to Slough. It is not height that matters, but bandwidth.

A Woman’s Place — Everything Old is New Again — Medium

In a piece for Medium commissioned by Matter, Jon Norris describes a little-known aspect of the UK’s information technology history:

Gender equality is still a major issue in the technology industry, but 50 years ago one British company was blazing trails.

Salon.com News | Apocalypse now

Mike Davis makes some conservative predictions about the near future.