I want to highlight what I believe is the most important part of Gareth's email:
On 08/15/2014 08:40 AM, Gareth J. Greenaway wrote:
During the CFP review process the answers to both of these questions would be hidden from the reviewer and would only be available after a talk has been accepted and published. The information from these questions would also not be published.
I believe that gender (and diversity in general) in our industry is an issue we all are trying to work on. And anytime you have a problem, the way to start tackling it is by quantifying that problem, and you do that with data.
If we're getting 50% submissions from women and only 5% of talks are from women, that's a different problem than if 5% of submissions are from women and 5% of the talks are from women. (I'm making up numbers here, ftr).
SCALE has a long, long history of promoting diversity. For many years we hosted Women in Open Source mini-conference. It helped in many ways, evidenced by the fact you see a larger percentage of women at SCALE - even now that WOIS is gone - than at most other technical conferences (by my personal observation).
I would like us to gather this optional data and publish the statistics. I hope that this will encourage others to do so as well. Doing that will shed light on the problems we have and the problems we don't have, and enable all of us to work together.
I discussed this with Gareth - and I suggested making sure staff couldn't see gender or age before all acceptances were chosen - which he ran with. We both believe this is an important issue to start addressing in new ways. The reason we discussed this, is because we want to do this in a way that makes everyone feel safe from discrimination.
So if you have concerns or ideas to improve this, we want to hear it. Further, if you think this is a good idea, *please* speak up. Not everyone agrees this is a good idea, and support from our female population (and our young population) will be useful in showing we're on the right path.
Thanks!