(no clue what this conference is about/looking for in speakers, other than it’s in a coding field and they want a mixed panel)
If you assume misogyny exists, which obviously this conference is, then surely this is a predictable result of that? Women would face attrition before even entering the field, falling off during study and falling behind after becoming professional. Coding is not an innate natural skill; at least, it’s not a pure natural skill, where it all comes from within, and opportunities don’t matter. So those who get promoted would be men, thus men would get better more often; those who stick around more would be men, have more resources to pursue and direct projects would be men.
This isn’t like playing music, where you can do most of it in your own time. You can play and practice those fancy difficult pieces on your own. (You would see a class bias still, since free time and instruments are expensive.) You can’t really do that with big projects in coding, can you? You can’t work on AI without getting promotions, you can’t work on team projects without being above entry-level. You can’t get design experience and other stuff without big resources and connections. All of which come with moving up the ladder and being liked, which if we’re assuming misogyny, doesn’t happen as much for women.
I would only expect maybe pre-college level blind reviews to turn out an equal gender slate (other minority sections not addressed). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen data that says even then, it’s already skewed male. If you’re assuming misogyny, then its cascading effects will result in a lot of the “top people” being male in a “male field”. Hence, the speakers would be male by any unbiased selection process. You can’t use this kind of review to pick speakers if you’re aiming to promote people you believe are marginalized. That’s like saying, “well let’s use the size of people’s fortunes to choose speakers, surely that’s a good measure of success”, but obviously you’re going to get a biased panel there too, not a population-representative one.
You can’t fix bias like this by starting at the top. You have to explicitly say, okay this happens, so to counter it let’s hear from some of those minority people and give them the opportunities they haven’t been getting, **so that they can then be on the par they would have had they not faced bias*. That’s what affirmative action IS, recognition that people are being held back at all levels, and then fixing that at all levels. You can’t both expect to get equal representation in things like these reviews *and* claim you need affirmative action. Blind reviews do not remove the long-term effects that cause people to not be in the top of the field to begin with. It would stop biased promotions, but it wouldn’t go back in time and fix everything that caused people not to rise who should have, which is what they seemed to expect. It only goes down one level, not the many layers of you’d need to reach through
The only place where this effect isn’t true would maybe be in the hacker world? Far as I understand that’s pretty much all self-taught and totally blind. Everything else relies on above-the-table, ie someone else offered to you, opportunities. All of which would be biased by prejudices.
