"@BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female?"
This seems to contradict itself - if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people. Which is wrong for both the token speakers and those who missed out.
JSConf EU handled this very well and managed to get 25% female speakers - pick the best talk, but pick them blind. This stops both implicit bias towards 'people like me' AND token selections of 'people not like me'.
This seems to contradict itself - if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people. Which is wrong for both the token speakers and those who missed out.
The intent is to take diversity into account - which involves effort and having it as a goal.
Yes - select your speakers on merit.
But unless you had diversity as one of your goals in where you put your CFPs and how you reach out to possible speakers, etc. then you won't have a diverse pool of great speakers to pick the best sessions from.
Wearing my conference organising hat. If all the sessions I have available to pick my programme from are are white guys in their 20s then I've failed already.
You're conflating the need for diversity with throwing a few token minority people at the end of a lineup. This was addressed in the post:
> But note that Josh didn’t say “I contacted all the female developers I knew”. Instead, Josh reached out to the existing community networks that RailsBridge and DevChix had created. You don’t have to have a complete mental Rolodex of the Ruby community to make diversity happen. You just have to get the ball rolling, and lean on the community.
Obviously BritRuby didn't reach out to these types of groups, because as the OP found out, most of them didn't even know it existed.
if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people.
But women should not be among them, surely? According to the Office for National Statistics (see http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estima...), in 2011 the population of England and Wales was 50.8% female and only 49.2% male. So the bizarre statistical anomaly would be a BritRuby panel of fifteen speakers with no women, or even one woman.
What's the percentage of male programmer to female programmer?
In the extreme example, if 0% of female in England were programmer then it wouldn't matter if 99% of the population were female, you were still not going to expect 99 speaker out of 100 to be female. Now adjust the example back to reality, 50.8% female population doesn't tell you anything about how much female programmer should be expected.
"@BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female?"
This seems to contradict itself - if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people. Which is wrong for both the token speakers and those who missed out.
JSConf EU handled this very well and managed to get 25% female speakers - pick the best talk, but pick them blind. This stops both implicit bias towards 'people like me' AND token selections of 'people not like me'.