> This is a common mistake. If you aim for the already declining
percentage of women, you will not get far. You have to aim for the
percentage of population. The fact that only 37% of our industry is
female is itself a problem we have to address.
...
> But going back to the topic of this thread, until we have half of the
developers/speakers/users being woman, we have a problem.
I agree it's a common mistake, but I suspect I'm referring to a
different mistake. Equality is about equal /opportunity/. It's not about
forcing equal statistically representative numbers of people of various
diversity types into all industries equally. Everyone should have the
opportunity to do whatever they want.
But rather than assertions, lets look at what science says on the matter.
Which set of countries has more gender equality in STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) - GIS falls under the T and
some of the S:
Finland, Norway (Countries that address most of the issues in your
linked US-focused Forbes article)
or
Tunisia, United Arab Emirates?
Chances are you picked wrong. It turns out that in countries with poor
human/women's rights records (UAE, Tunisia) there are *more* females in
STEM, and in countries where there is more gender equality (i.e. the
Scandinavians), the women choose /not /to go into STEM.
For discussion see:
https://researchtheheadlines.org/2018/04/20/the-stem-gender-equality-paradox-from-fallacies-to-facts/
- and the actual paper:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719
It's great that you chose GIS, but given the choice, the research
indicates that most women chose something other than STEM if they live
in a progressive country, most likely psychology, education, and
healthcare, all of which are generally dominated by women. Given this,
to me at least, trying to force a perfect 50/50 gender balance would
thus seem to be doing a dis-service to people of both genders; it's not
equality of opportunity even if it does achieve perfect diversity.
On 2018-08-11 14:29, María Arias de Reyna wrote:
On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 2:43 PM, Jonathan Moules
<jonathan-li...@lightpear.com> wrote:
Once we have a 50% of speakers that are women (even 40%), we can start
saying that having a full keynoter line of women speakers is no diversity.
At the risk of asking a question that I know isn't meant to be asked - why
50%? Or "even 40%"? Surely the % should be around the same as the percentage
of the workforce that engage in the field? This survey indicates it's about
37% globally so 40% would be reasonable -
https://www.gislounge.com/gender-gis-workforce/
(Why the rate is 37% globally is an entirely different kettle of fish).
This is a common mistake. If you aim for the already declining
percentage of women, you will not get far. You have to aim for the
percentage of population. The fact that only 37% of our industry is
female is itself a problem we have to address.
The lack of role models (speakers? women in the mailing lists? women
in developer leading roles?) and specially the lack of a friendly
environment for women at work is a problem in most tech related
industries:
https://code.likeagirl.io/women-are-leaving-tech-and-management-is-responsible-a6187a4d5d81
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/28/why-women-leave-the-tech-industry-at-a-45-higher-rate-than-men/
Not my best talk (blame jet lag), but this can give you more
perspective: https://vimeo.com/241597584
And this also applies to racial diversity. If the global foss4g is
mostly white... we have a problem.
But going back to the topic of this thread, until we have half of the
developers/speakers/users being woman, we have a problem. And the
longer we ignore it, the worse it gets.
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