Diversity has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s a vague phrase (like “sustainability” or “governance” or “best practices”) — but it’s one that I keep finding myself chatting about with our grantees, fellow conference attendees, and other Moore Foundation personnel. I won’t attempt to cover the gamut of diversity-related topics in this post, however I want to get a few of my more recent thoughts out; this blog post will focus on (primarily gender) diversity at conferences.
When I say “diversity”, I mean a “variety of characteristics” (h/t Moore legal team). That is, wanting to “increase diversity at conferences we fund” means we want to see more variability in the types of speakers and the people that show up — whether that variability is in their ethnicity, disciplinary background, gender identity, life experience, academic institution, approach to science, etc. Achieving a diverse group of attendees and speakers at a conference rarely happens without intentional effort, and this is especially true for tech-oriented conferences (just ask Google). It requires a lot of thought, planning, energy, and an organizing committee who is supportive and committed, and that’s just to think about getting a diversity of speakers.
Perhaps counterintuitively, one way folks have managed to increase the diversity of speakers at conferences is by anonymizing talk review. !!Con organizers put out a couple of great blog posts about their efforts to make the conference inclusive, and Julia Evans’ blog post on the benefits of anonymous talk review mentions three big pluses they experienced:
- a diverse range of talks…
- by good mix of experienced and new speakers…
- which were very well presented.
Julia says that “several people told us that they liked the anonymous review because they were confident they’d be judged fairly on the merits of their proposal. One of our accepted speakers told us ‘Thank you so much for [anonymizing everything]! It’s a relief to know that I wasn’t picked for gender, race, age, or anything like that.’ ”
Anonymizing submissions isn’t a cure-all, however. I was recently at SciPy, one of the conferences that DDD supports, and heard several comments about the lack of diversity among attendees and presenters. SciPy does have anonymous submission systems in place, but did not experience the same benefits that !!Con organizers experienced. Read more about this in a thoughtful blog post by thoughtful blog post by Camille Scott. This is especially interesting given the successful recent increase in diversity at other Python conferences (e.g., PyCon sports a 46% female : 54% male ratio for attendees). I take this as more evidence that diversity doesn’t just happen — it takes work.
So what should we do? I don’t have a lot of answers, but I’m always looking for ideas. I’m hoping Karthik Ram will share his experiences with the useR Conference, which took a proactive approach to diversity that impressed DDD Program Director Chris Mentzel (see his blog post, useR 2016, A Love Story). PyCon 2015 in Montreal had some great tips on increasing diversity embedded in their diversity statement (note that they actually had a diversity statement!). Some of my other favorite resources: Geek Feminism Wiki has a page devoted to women speakers and another on “finding women”. For the ecology and evolutionary biology community, there’s DiversifyEEB — which highlights women and/or underrepresented minorities in the field. The site’s blogroll points to other similar sites that provide a resource for those looking for speakers in various fields. My fav find was their link to a Pintrest page, “Binders Full of Women in Science”.
If you’re wondering why all of this matters (other than “because it’s 2015”), that’s for a future blog post. I plan to summarize the research on why diversity benefits companies, projects, and communities. I’m also thinking about a post devoted to the value and utility of codes of conduct. A more proactive idea is for us to support personnel to assist conferences that we fund in increasing diversity, rather than expecting conference organizers (who are volunteers with limited time) to figure it out… we are looking into this. Stay tuned.
Read more
Tech diversity FAQ v0.1 This is a great resource for the naysayers you might encounter. It might be better titled “Myth Busters: Tech Diversity Edition”.
Make Gender Diversity in Data Science a Priority Right from the Start, a piece in PLOS Biology by Fran Berman and Phil Bourne.
Not “Pulling up the Ladder”: Women Who Organize Conference Symposia Provide Greater Opportunities for Women to Speak at Conservation Conferences, published last week in PLOS ONE by Stephanie Sardelis and Josh Drew.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.