[EuroPython] Lack of diversity within selected talks

[Daniel Kraft]

Nelle,

> 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.

same with me and I even don't care about minorities if they don't add diversity or value to the concrete case. But women, old people and eco-activists (not exclusively) actually ADD diversity AND value to joung and possibly male listeners at a tech conference as far as I had the privilege to learn for myself. And the value of what they say is often not probably described in the papers or valued by the reviewers. For an example of this value, just view some TED talks, which are eye-opening and from really different people.

SO,
how many women were among the reviewers? Men an women tend to prefer different words (male and female words) and so would possibly vote for different talks, just because their vocabulary is more familiar. So there might be quite "some" imbalance on the anonymous reviews.

Optimisically I think quotas are unnecessary. But it turns out that the majority often (even if not willingly) surpresses the minorities - not just women. And this is bad for all of us for different reasons, and I think we're at a point where we all know this. We're simply often unable as individuals to work around this issue.

Now we have two options (correct me please!):
1. We accept this imbalance for EP2014 which would disappoint me really and which would hurt the conference experience
2. We do something about it

I have no concrete idea about "2", partly because I don't have all CFP and reviewer voting data. But two talks from women is just WAY too less.

And btw: stop ranting and make proposals for "2"

My proposal (which invalidates the "no concrete idea"):
Repeat 1 week of reviews for all reviewers but add women so they reach their representative amount of ~47% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio).

Daniel