What is your response to the author's point that "ability and topics" are abstract concepts that don't take into account how people engage with a conference?
I think the author makes sense with that. People should be comfortable and feel safe, but then the author goes on to explicitly talk about gender and what I assume are racial minorities. I don't think that race and gender are the only disadvantaged groups in the world. Things like disability, mental illness, and country of origin can have a much bigger impact on whether somebody could become a speaker. Depending on how you slice it, you can end up with an enormous amount of these groups and I think the best way to promote fairness is to sometimes give them an advantage, but it should only be a portion of the whole. Eg a disabled speaker could have some very interesting insights on tech, especially when it comes to UI, but that doesn't mean we should try to make the conference have an equal amount of disabled people as speakers. It makes more sense to pick topics and technical ability in the vast majority of cases, because that's what people are there for.
> Eg a disabled speaker could have some very interesting insights on tech, especially when it comes to UI
I do understand their lived experience often differs from that of most of us and thus they can provide value sharing it, but that is not really the kind of normalization we should aim to achieve. In a similar vein, I'm disappointed whenever women speakers are still predominantly presenting gender issues. This might be necessary for now to break all those self reinforcing feedback loops that lead us to the current status quo, but just shows how long the road ahead of us still is.
> but that doesn't mean we should try to make the conference have an equal amount of disabled people as speakers
Pretending like anyone would generally want 50:50 representation of disabled is a bit of a straw man, isn't it? Its just that half of all humans tend to be female, thus this particular split when talking about sexes.
> It makes more sense to pick topics and technical ability in the vast majority of cases, because that's what people are there for.
I'd expect them to have done pretty much that, considering only 2 of 9 speakers are female.
