A few reflections on a plan to help phase out all-male panels at science and tech conferences
I'm sure it was *incredibly* difficult to find not one but two qualified women to speak on this panel. And, who knows, maybe they weren't qualified at all and the panel was an absolute bore, which is something all-male panels never, ever are. (Reuters)
On Friday, in response to some chatter about a big tech conference with one sole female speaker, I tossed out an idea that I thought could help discourage this kind of homogeneity in the future: What if men who were invited to speak on panels were to pledge to ask whether the panel included women, and if the answer was no, condition their participation on the panel's organizers finding a woman (or a few!) who could join? Since then, that pledge has spread pretty far and wide, and I wanted to here elaborate on it, both because my original post was pretty light on explanation (I assumed -- I think correctly -- that most people would get the idea without much help) and because some of the reactions, both positive and negative, have helped me to think more carefully about the suggestion.
So here are a few thoughts:
The first thought, which I wish I had made more clear in the proposal right from the start, is that the whole idea of the pledge is premised on the fact that it's not just women who are unhappy about the current state of affairs. Many men -- men who benefit from or have benefited from playing life on a lower difficulty setting, as John Scalzi put it -- want to see more gender diversity in the workplace too. And this is awesome. The pledge comes out of a place of respect for the many men in my life who are advocates for, not adversaries to, the advancement of women. Implicit in the pledge is a recognition that greater equality is not something women will achieve by forcing it on men, but something both men and women want, believe in, and can work on together.