My real thoughts on quotas

I hope people realised that yesterday’s blog post criticising gender quotas was intended to be light-hearted. Now it’s time to be serious.

I’ve read a lot of good, thoughtful blog posts recently about the diversity of speaking panels, at tech conferences and elsewhere. Rebecca Rosen suggests that male speakers pledge not to participate in all-male line-ups; Matt Andrews suggests that conference organisers should keep re-evaluating their selection methods; Aral Balkan gets understandably cross at straw-man arguments.

This approach has attracted strong pushback on the internet, as you can see if you read the comments on these or any similar pieces. The general theme of the pushback goes a little something like this:

I don’t care about people’s gender, or the colour of their skin. I care about whether they know their subject, whether they’re the best possible speaker we can get. If you impose quotas, you’re selecting people purely because they tick demographic boxes that should be irrelevant to the quality of their work.

It’s a plausible-sounding argument, until you take it to its logical conclusion. If conference organisers really are selecting purely on merit, then you’d expect conference panels to broadly reflect the demographic make-up of the relevant industry. There are plenty of demographic variables well worth looking at, including race and age and disability, but today I’m focusing on gender in honour of International Women’s Day.

A speaker panel reflecting the tech industry’s gender balance would be roughly 20% women. If I was a conference organiser genuinely aiming at picking the best, that kind of 80/20 male/female split is what I’d expect to get. And if I ended up with 100% men I’d be concerned, because it would be a red flag that my selection process wasn’t as meritocratic or as gender-blind as I hoped. Rather than defending my process, I’d be asking what went wrong. Although I wouldn’t claim I could get it completely right.

The thing is, organising conferences is bloody hard. Organising almost any kind of event is bloody hard. High-quality potential speakers rarely just throw themselves at you. You have to ask, and sometimes cajole, and jiggle dates around, as well as doing all the venue-sorting and tech-wrangling and publicity. In that kind of environment, it’s almost impossible to do a dispassionate sifting of potential speakers.

I know that some HR processes involve stripping out personal details when evaluating candidates for a job, to avoid discrimination. That’s a great idea, but how do you do that when a speaker’s personality and reputation is a huge part of their attractiveness as a speaker? How do you do that when it’s a brand new conference, or a one-off event, and you’re struggling to pin down any willing speakers at all?

Lots of people have already made the point that men “put themselves forward” more and are more willing speakers. Others have made the point that male organisers tend to have networks of qualified male friends and contacts. These are good explanations for why it’s hard to get diverse speaker panels. They’re also good arguments for setting concrete goals about representation at your events: if these perfectly understandable factors are acting as barriers to diversity, then diversity won’t “just happen eventually” without something to drive the process forward.

People who say they “don’t care about gender” or that “It makes NO difference if [speakers] are black-white-male-female-young-old or pink with puce polka-dots” are part of the problem. Because picking people “purely on merit”, without thinking about these factors, is what’s led to overrepresentation of men (and white people, and straight people) at so many conferences. For diversity to happen, you need to think about it and work towards it. Not by tacking it on at the end of your selection process, or by getting defensive and arguing that you really did select on merit and you just happened to end up with 100% white men on your panel. But by thinking about it, and talking about it, and trying to do better.

You start moving towards fairer representation when you announce your intention to do so, when you say things like: “Our list of people interested in the job contains no women’s names at all […] I’m really, really not OK with this.”

Even announcing that intention will probably earn you some unpleasant pushback, sadly. But that’s how you know you’ve made a start.