I agree that it’s important to have the best speakers, but the best speakers aren’t all men. Now that you’ve clarified your point to mean “gender blind”, I’m less shocked, but I guess part of me still can’t understand the results of the gender mix at your conferences.

There are many well-qualified, well-spoken female developers and designers out there. Their barriers to entry may be that they don’t publish enough, or participate enough in the fora that attract the A-listers, and thus they’re not known.

They also may not yet have the confidence to put themselves out there and write proposals or suggest themselves for things like writing, editing, or speaking. I have Tantek to thank for first pulling me up on stage, after all.

I wasn’t suggesting discrimination at the end of my post, I was suggesting an all or mostly female environment where women could more safely express themselves, and experiment with speaking on stage about their work and about standards. Such an environment (a conference, camp, G2G, etc.) may empower those that are teetering on the edge of participating of co-ed events, and get them to jump in.

I can’t get you in to Bryn Mawr to understand this effect, but I could get you into the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. I can tell you the stories of women who’ve attended that one, mostly-female conference, and how it changed their lives. (I know because I’m one of them.)

So gender-blind, good. Empowerment, good. A-list that’s still predominantly male, bad. And if you’re only looking at A-listers then you’ll get mostly men. Bad.

john

Quoting Kimmie’s analysis: “Tantek also asked why we accept having this conversation of diversity with specific criteria, like gender.”

The thing is, whatever race you are, whatever culture you come from, whatever country you were born and grew up in – you have men, and you have women. It’s the first primary division even before you think about other physical factors. That gender bias becomes the most prominent issue should not come as a surprise.

All through out history, there have been many examples where women are never given the same credit as men for having achieved the same thing. Little wonder it still happens today – the unconscious ideas that we have buried in our cultures still show the female of the species to be, on the whole, the “lesser” – the less intelligent, the less capable. To be blatant: the more sexually attractive you are, the less smart you must be :) It follows on that if women remain women (as in we don’t imitate men and make ourselves sexless), we mustn’t quite ever be on the same footing as men, therefore achieving the same kind of recognition or acknowledgment.

The issue is greater than whether there are enough women at tech conferences or not, whether there are enough women in tech or not.

I mean, we were once thought to be less intelligent because it was thought we had less teeth.