Today there has been some discussion on Twitter about diversity in tech conferences. I’m not going to link to the discussion directly, because this isn’t about the specific conference that spurred the conversation. I’m not here to name and shame anyone.

I volunteered for 3 years as program manager for PASS Summit, so I will be speaking from experience. I have written before that diversity is important, and I think the bar for that is raising for tech conferences. So where should that bar be?

What is your target goal?

First, I think every single tech conference needs some kind of target goal for diversity. It doesn’t have to be a a hard numerical goal and it doesn’t have to be a quota, but diversity should be somewhere in the thought process, every step along the way. If you are not intentional about this, you will trend towards the default, which is a very homogenous speaker pool.

So what kinds of goals are there? In my mind I see 4 easily defined ones:

1. No goal. No consideration given to diversity. This is unacceptable in 2021.
2. Attendee demographics. Aiming for parity with the diversity of your audience
3. Speaker demographics. Aiming for parity with your speaker pool
4. Regional/Global demographics. Aiming for parity with the general population.

I personally believe the bar today should be set at #2 & #3, whichever is more difficult. In my experience, there are concrete steps you can do to improve the diversity of your speaker pool, such as encouraging folks to submit, or setting aside a certain number of invitation slots. If the your selected speakers aren’t at least as representative as your submitted speakers, then you aren’t trying hard enough.

When I was working on PASS Summit, diversity was a secondary concern, but it was a consistent one, and we took steps when there were issues. We didn’t have any hard targets, but if we felt there was an imbalance, we would go out of our way to juggle the schedule or intentionally invite speakers. There was plenty of room for improvement, however, especially with decisions outside of the selection process.

Where does diversity matter most?

It is not enough to say that your total pool of selected speakers has diversity. Diversity is most important where there is an implied endorsement or there is money involved. You don’t get to shine a spotlight and then ignore your responsibility.

If a conference is placing emphasis on a subset of speakers, the bar for diversity is even higher there for two reasons. First, there is where a conference has the most discretion. It is much easier to get it right with a dozen speakers than a hundred. And if they are promoting a specific set of speakers, they have much more control over who they are promoting and why.

The other reason is any time you elevate a subset of speakers, you are making a statement, even if it’s an unintentional one. Let’s say that hypothetically your conference had 25% females speakers, but not a single female precon speaker. That would send strong implied message, because precons are lucrative, highly coveted, and a strong endorsement of the speaker. These kinds of implied messages can be immensely discouraging.

For us at PASS, this applied to two areas main areas. First was the televised sessions, because these sessions had a broader reach and there was an implied endorsement of quality. It also applied to precon trainings. If folks saw the same old faces for precons, we would get roasted, and rightfully so. Lastly, it was also an issue in some of the marketing of the early invited speakers, and sometimes that presented a tension between marketing process and the selection process.

One other area where it matters are panels. In the year 2021, there is no reason to ever have an all male panel, ever, ever, ever. On a panel of 4-5 speakers, it does not take that much work to for you to find at least one female speaker. If you can’t, you should cancel the panel and look into the deeper issues with your selection process. Even if it is completely accidental, a “manel” comes across as lazy at best.

What can conference organizers do?

Generally speaking, conference organizers have a wide variety of tools to improve diversity if they are willing to get creative and especially if they have a budget to work with. PASS was notoriously stingy, which forced us to depend on the former.

Ideally, it should start during the call for speakers. If the speaker pool seems lopsided, the conference organizers should be taking steps to encourage new and diverse speakers. Any conference integrated into the community is likely going to have connections that can amplify those messages. Even better, if a conference is willing to pay speakers, that opens up a much broader pool instead of the most privileged folks. In some cases, conferences can also set aside a certain number of slots for invited speakers and use those to improve diversity.

During the selection process, a lot of it comes down to mindfulness. A conference should be spot checking things all along the way, even better if they can get folks from outside the team to help. Again, having a certain number of reserved slots and being willing to invite and pay people can go a long way here.

Finally, there are indirect steps the conference can take. First, what are you doing to encourage new or low-profile speakers? Things like feedback on abstracts or speaker mentoring can increase the breadth of speakers available to you. As a new speaker in 2017, I felt discouraged about submitting to big conferences and I’m sure under-represented folks feel the same way.

Additionally you can take steps like having a clear code of conduct, having sessions on diversity, and providing support for underrepresented groups. Signs that a conference is safe and fair to underrepresented groups will encourage more of those folks to submit.

Summary

Improving diversity in a conference is hard work, and the average call for speakers is often an unbalanced starting point. However, conference organizers have a number of tools available to them, especially for large paid conferences.

In 2021, there is never an excuse for an all male panel, and any elevated subset of speakers, such as paid precon speakers, should come under heightened scrutiny. Every tech conference should at least be aiming to match the demographics of their submitted speakers and their attendees. To me these all feel like a reasonable starting point.

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, we are to write about a time we changed our minds on something. For me, something  I think about often is that 12 years ago I didn’t value diversity. Today I do value diversity, and if we want to persuade others, we have to figure out what changed.

Where was I 12 years ago?

Twelve years ago, I was going to college and I experienced a bit of a culture shock. The county I’ve lived my entire life in, Beaver County, is 92.5% white and 6% black. The local college I went to, Penn State Beaver, was decidedly more diverse from a racial standpoint.

I remember quite clearly thinking at that point that there had only been 3 times in my life when I had seen that contrast: college, travel stations, and visiting Washington D.C. The rest of my life was in this monoculture.

And when I say that I didn’t value diversity at the time, it wasn’t that I was against it or had negative feelings. It was just that I didn’t see a lack of diversity as a problem. I had a vague awareness that my IT classes were heavily white and heavily male, but that didn’t register as an issue.

Looking back, I think I figured that if different people had different natural talents or natural interests, then what was the harm in that? Part of the reason I was in IT was the things I was bad at. I was bad at people and interacting with them.

Bound up in the previous paragraph were a whole host of assumptions and naïve ideas. The idea that life was a meritocracy. The idea that people freely chose their profession, without discrimination.

What is your ethical structure?

On subjects like this, we often talk past each other. Sometimes in bad faith, but often because we are starting from different ethical precepts. In college I took an Ethics in Computer Science course and learned of two big terms: Utilitarian Ethics and Deontological Ethics.

Essentially, are things right or wrong because of the consequences or because of something inherent to the action? I think one example was “Is it wrong to clean your toilet with the American flag?”. Many people would say yes, but they would have trouble pointing to how anyone was visibly harmed by the act.

I mention this because I think a number of people that are supporting diversity do so from a strongly deontological perspective. So if less than 50% of CEOs are women, then that is in its very nature unjust or unfair. Regardless of the specific consequences.

I think this is a valid and reasonable viewpoint. But I also don’t think that this alone would have changed my mind. Generally I was more swayed by empathy for individuals and seeing concrete negative consequences.

What changed my mind?

I think there were a number of things that all changed my mind in little bits and pieces.

Monoculture leads to failure

Something that planted the seeds early on for me were stories of how having a monoculture of life experiences lead to failure. How HP webcams couldn’t follow black people. How Apple stores had glass staircases. How websites often don’t support names with umlauts or other markings because of assumptions about how names work.

I also learned about groupthink and the often exaggerated Asch conformity experiments. So often these failures occurred either because everyone thought the same or had the same background. Or people were afraid to speak up and stand out.

Life is not a meritocracy

For all of my schooling, I did fairly well. And there was a fairly stable correlation between how good I was at a given task and the grades I got. It seemed to me like school was a meritocracy and I expected work to be the same. I was woefully wrong.

I got a job at Bayer Material Science after college and after 8 months I was fired. I deserved to be fired and wasn’t particularly good at my job. Still, as someone used to getting A’s this was pretty shocking to me.

I learned a number of things during that process. I learned that how well we excel in certain areas can depend on a number of secondary factors, like our ability to work with others, to communicate, etc.

I learned that my skills at being a student didn’t necessarily translate into being a good worker, and I could infer the reverse must be true. There were undoubtedly people who flunked out of school but where crushing it in the workplace.

Violence, discrimination and bias are common

As far as I’m aware, I’ve never been racially or sexually discriminated against. If I have then the person did a terrible job of it, because I didn’t notice. Every police ticket I’ve gotten has been valid. I rarely have to worry about my safety when walking alone at night.

Again, in college I had some vague awareness of this. I understood the idea that my female friends might appreciate someone walking them to their car when it is dark. But I didn’t appreciate just how constant it was for some people. Heck, if I’m being honest, the #MeToo movement was shocking for me to see how many people close to me had been sexually assaulted.

It was helpful too to realize that bias can be invisible, implicit or even well-intentioned. I remember reading about implicit bias in a book and being frustrated about the implicit bias I had in regards to African Americans. I kept failing the test.

I remember meeting an internal salesperson at my last job and saying “Oh so you work in staffing?”, because I had this idea that all sales people were pushy and that women had better people skills, so clearly this person must be a staffing salesperson, not hardware or IT Services. That was 5 years ago and I still feel like an ass to this day.

Representation matters

So I’m going to talk about a type of diversity that may sound strange, but is very meaningful to me. I’m a Type 1 diabetic. And when I was diagnosed, in many ways I felt like my life was over. There were so many things I wasn’t going to be able to do. For the entirety of my last job, I told very few people because I feared I would get fired.

But one of the best things I did was subscribe to Diabetes Forecast magazine. Because in every issue they had a story of someone with diabetes doing something badass. Like racing, or mountain climbing or even winning a beauty pageant. These people weren’t letting diabetes stop them from living their lives.

For this same reason, Scott Hanselman is a hero of mine. He is very openly a diabetic and will present to hundreds of people without letting his diabetes stop him. If he has to check his blood sugar on stage or drink some orange juice, then so be it.

I say all of this to say that representation matters. My life was impacted because I saw myself in successful people. I saw myself in others.

It doesn’t take a colossal leap of empathy to imagine how I might feel if roles were reversed, if all the speakers at a tech conference were female or non-white. If that happened enough, I would quickly internalize the idea that I would never succeed, that I would never make it, that I would never get up on that stage.

If you optimize for individuals, you optimize for assholes

When I see a backlash against people trying to re-balance the scales, a lot of that backlash makes perfect sense under a certain set of assumptions or axioms.

If you believe that 1) the world is or should be a meritocracy and 2) we have an objective way to measure “skill” and 3) we should focus solely on the merits of the individual, then it’s reasonable to conclude that picking anyone but the “best” for a job is an injustice.

And while I think I believed all of those things in college, given my experiences since then, I no longer believe those things.

I’ve learned that often people fail for reasons completely outside of their control. I’ve learned that technical prowess is a minimal part of my job, and there are a plethora of other factors that make me good at my job. I’ve learned that when you narrowly look only at the individual, there are negative consequences both inside the team and outside of the team.

When you optimize for individuals, you optimize for assholes. We’ve all heard the story of person X who delivers results but is inherently toxic and drives others away. Throwing other people under the bus can be a great way to get results in the short term. We have to look beyond the individual.

I think any person in a place of power such as a manager or conference organizer, needs to look not just at the talent or popularity of the individuals, but the mix as a whole and the benefits diversity brings. We can disagree on to what degree, but it needs to be done.

Summary

I won’t pretend I have all the answers here. I still haven’t figured out when being pro-diversity swerves into being pro-tokenism, for example. I haven’t figured out that line where in trying to promote a group you accidently reduce them to a name, an identifier, a statistic.

But I can say that these are the things that have helped me value and appreciate diversity. And I hope we can all promote it, even if in small ways.