[EuroPython] Lack of diversity within selected talks

[Armin Rigo]

Hi all, hi Nelle,

On 15 April 2014 22:23, Nelle Varoquaux <nelle.varoquaux at gmail.com> wrote:
> As a member of a "minority ", I feel very uncomfortable with such quotas,
> and if you ask women in computer science around Europe, they tend to feel
> the same way (this may be very different in North America, as we have two
> very different cultures when coming to these subject). I want my proposal to
> be accepted for my work and not because I'm a woman, and I don't think I'll
> ever submit to a conference where such rules are applied.
>
> I also think it gives a very negative image of women in science, specially
> when the abstracts are just not good (an abstract accepted at pycon us
> contained an error in the name of a python module *in the title* - it is
> hard to take the talk seriously, and this is a disservice to do to the
> speaker).

I'll take the risk of projecting a misogynistic image of myself, just
to give you a thumb-up.  Adding rules to promote a member of a
minority group looks to me, at best, artificial.  In this case, woman
participation is going slowly up year after year.  I certainly think
(and hope!) that it's not just because of favorable discrimination;
instead, it is most probably just a slow process of natural regulation
that occurs inside a historically strongly biased subculture.  This
process can be encouraged, e.g. I'm fine if some grants are reserved
to women; but I think that judging technical merits on a different
scale is not a good way to do that.


A bientôt,

Armin.