None of us actually enjoy having to call out tech conferences for still in our year 2024 having zero speakers who aren’t white men. Getting lots of comment abuse, legal threats, guilt trips, and being known for that instead of our jobs isn’t like great or fun, actually.
Once again if this is happening to your con, mathematically you are fucking up. 3/4 of cybersecurity practitioners are not cis white men - statistically. So even if you have a blind CFP, it means that you are posting or selecting your talks in an exclusionary way, or there’s something deeply wrong in how potential submissions view your conference.
@Ooze look carefully at why that is. Are you advertising in the wrong venues? Do you offer no compensation for travel? Is it at an impossible time for a working mom? Bad culture? The statistics don’t hold up there so you have a problem.
@Ooze that really is what you should do immediately. Reopen the CFP for a couple more weeks and reevaluate. If you can’t you’ll have to make proactive measures to bring in qualified diverse speakers, like payment or other compensation and direct outreach.
@Ooze I would definitely bring in a third party to look and see what you missed, because you’re definitely missing something major and you may have a serious blind spot for one minority in tech or another (even age or whatever). I watch a ton of US conferences’ submission metrics and none of their diverse speaker submissions are even <10% anymore.
@Ooze I can’t speak to the demographics outside the US and Canada, so talking to a diversity professional, even a student in your country is definitely your next easy move.
@hacks4pancakes reading the titles, I noticed a strong bias towards executive titles & their own company. Might I suggest that if your leadership team or company looks like this, you also have a problem?
And diversity in tech speakers (gender, ethnicity, background, nationality, race, income, age, etc) is really important. It’s how we don’t engineer another Juicero, or use ML to make more racist assumptions with facial recognition. It’s how we realize we need better safety controls for kids and senior citizens. Its how we protect our users who are seeking legally threatened health care. It’s how we make diverse newcomers feel welcome. It’s how we have concepts taught in new ways from new perspectives. It benefits all of us in both visible and invisible ways.
@cy@hacks4pancakes I interpret "better safety controls for kids" as ways for any user to protect themselves from unwanted contact, targeting, disclosure of sensitive information, etc. that's particularly important to kids using the system. Not "dystopian measures to identify who is a kid and apply targeted restrictions to them".
@hacks4pancakes Including diversity of income makes me want to parse it out to the end.
Tech tends to pay well, especially on the technical side. I assume that most people who qualify as tech speakers are high earners. What does that say about those who aren't?
is it a hobby for them rather than a full-time job?
are they unable to work in a high-paying role (they're also a caretaker, they faced discrimination due to ethnicity/gender/sexuality/age, etc.)?
1/3
@hacks4pancakes - are they from lower CoL areas than typical tech hubs?
continuing the above, are they from a country in which tech is not a prestigious field?
do they have a different professional role that isn't compensated as well?
I can see how starting with differences in income (easily measured) can lead to an awareness of inequality, but I feel like the income difference is the result of other clear inequalities, rather than an initial issue.
@Montag@hacks4pancakes when I started speaking, I was still a student. I’d catch a lift to whatever conference with someone who was driving from (or through) my city and get help from the organizers finding someone to share a hotel room with (or sometimes someone older and more established would let me crash in their room for free).
@maco@hacks4pancakes thanks for the perspective. I've never actually been to a conference. I assumed the speakers are usually established figures with strong reputations.
@SpecterOps, this is unacceptable and embarrassing (for you). As a white male, I promise you won’t catch me at any of your conferences or sponsored events. Do better.
@bitterseeds@hacks4pancakes I know you're trolling, but I'm going to answer your questions anyway.
Yes, including Asian men is better than only including white men, because it's less exclusionary. It's even better if Black, brown, and Indigenous people, as well as people who aren't men, are also included.
There's no way to know they're all cis. But we know when they all at least present as such, either they're all cis or none of them feel safe admitting they're not. Both are bad.
@hacks4pancakes two steps forward, one step back. And sometimes two or three steps back :(
Thanks for everything you do and all the heat you take. We need to do better, much better.
Counterpoint: a show I'm going to in February has 22 male and 30 female speakers on the first two days, by my count (identified by pronoun as given on the schedule). Two keynote speakers, one of each variety. This is a technology show ... for corporate learning & development. The culture is presumably different, even though all of us are considered technology professionals.
Maybe I used the wrong word. An example of an event that doesn't have that apparent bias. The point I was trying to make (if any) was that some subcultures of tech have a very defined bias that not all of them do. Not very profound, but that's what came into my head.
@nitpicking it’s definitely 💯 great when there are some events that do better - but there are still a lot that don’t. Enough that we have to stop doing our jobs to bring it up routinely. It’s a little NotAllMen-y.
Wasn't meant to be. I sincerely intended it as an amplification of your original point about the shows that do a poor job of this. Pointing out a good example, not intended to diminish bad ones. If it did, I regret it.
Further, the lack of diverse conference speakers continues to perpetuate the problem - when you don't see folks that look like you in positions of knowledge, it's so much easier to just give up because you don't belong here. Or just not prioritize writing that CFP, or asking for that promotion/new role, or applying to that really cool job.
Edit / add - thank you so so much for saying this! :heart_cyber:
@hacks4pancakes it's baffling that they haven't gotten the message after years of this stuff being said over and over and over to so many different conferences.
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