Isn't enforcing a gender ratio just more gender discrimination? How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"? You are just discriminating against the other gender.
Counting a 50/50 gender split as a win is silly if you have put together a shitty conference just to satisfy some ratio. Why not have the best person for the job? I don't care if you are male/female, black/white/pink/purple/transparent, straight/gay/transgender, human/animal/robot/script, able bodied/disabled or anything in between....put the best person in the job - that is real gender equality.
She knew the issue was the lack of submissions, so she worked hard to get lots of talk submissions from women. When she actually selected the talks, she did so without knowledge of the person's gender. She got the ratio she wanted by encouraging submissions, not by enforcing a quota.
That's my issue - the ratio she wanted just perpetuates this gender discrimination. Unless the gender ratio of expert speakers in this industry is somehow exactly 50/50, she has discriminated against one gender just to satisfy her magical ratio.
Whether she did this blind to the applicants gender is of no consequence - she thinks it was a win when IMHO, is just gender more discrimination.
Is it unfair to point out that discrimination is evident if the proportion of women speakers at the conference is not equal to the proportion of female experts in the field? That the general population is a little over half women does not imply that every profession's demographics are 50/50. Before claiming that the true problem is that women are less likely to apply and therefore a system based on people applying of their own accord must be flawed, perhaps we should first take a look at the demographics of the field itself (and eventually we'll have to go all the way back to middle school, when girls with a talent for math or technical subjects seem to suddenly lose interest).
In this (and other similar) case(s), we can conclude that there's no difference between male and female speakers, since the gender ratio resulting from blind judging matches the submission pool. In other words, there's no essential gender difference in technology, there's just a demographic artifact of sexism.
So if the larger demographic continues to mirror that artifact, that's not an argument for reproducing that artificial split in the conference. Indeed, taking care to mix the submissions pool to reflect the larger gender split does nothing but perpetuate an artificial and historical and culturally driven imbalance, when we can clearly see that no essential difference between the sexes exists. It's not discriminatory to balance out a contingent happenstance that doesn't accurately reflect essential differences.
A bit shorter: There's nothing discriminatory about the removal of undeserved advantage.
"It's not discriminatory to balance out a contingent happenstance that doesn't accurately reflect essential differences."
It is when you are doing something that gives people a career boost, and being a speaker at a conference is definitely a career boost. If you keep targeting a minority in some field to speak at conferences, then the members of that minority will have an advantage in advancing their careers -- they are being given more of a voice than other people. If the imbalance in the field itself is large, which is the case in technical fields, then that minority is getting more of a boost.
In other words, what you are doing is trying to hide the fact that you are giving an advantage to a particular group. It is no different than asking GRE questions about polo.
"A bit shorter: There's nothing discriminatory about the removal of undeserved advantage."
That is not what happened here. Nobody had an undeserved advantage in the conference admissions process; the problem lies elsewhere. Conference speakers are a surface-level problem.
If you start in a field where women and men are equally represented, but where men dominate conferences, this sort of thing might make sense. You are starting in a field where that is not the case, painting a "fix" on the surface of it, and calling it a victory. It's not a victory, it is discrimination, and the effort spent on this farce should have been spent on solving the broader demographic problem (but I suspect that the author of the article has run out of ideas on how to solve that problem, and has instead chosen something easier to work on).
If you're saved from competing against a certain number of potential competitors in getting accepted to a conference, you have an advantage. If you're saved from such competition because of historical demographic imbalances, you have an undeserved advantage, and removing that advantage is not discriminatory, any more than forcing the conference organizer's nephew to go through the blind judging process is discriminatory. Or do you think systemically mitigating nepotism is discriminatory to those with familial connections?
Perhaps a different question is in order: If men have an advantage in getting selected for conferences because they're men, then do you think the blind judging is discriminatory? After all, it removes an advantage they have.
I've responded elsewhere about how diversity at conferences assist in addressing the root cause of the imbalance. I would observe here that your prescription to address it in middle school rather than at conferences is too cute by half: lack of female participation at conferences is part of the lack of participation in STEM generally that serves to dissuade girls in middle school from continuing in STEM.
"lack of female participation at conferences is part of the lack of participation in STEM generally that serves to dissuade girls in middle school from continuing in STEM."
Do middle school girls go to conferences? Do they read conference proceedings? Are they even aware of conferences?
> Is it unfair to point out that discrimination is evident if the proportion of women speakers at the conference is not equal to the proportion of female experts in the field?
It's not unfair to point that out; it's merely wrong to "point that out".
Any number of contingencies could yield a distribution of speakers at a conference whose sex ratio doesn't neatly align with the corresponding ratio in the population of experts, however that's defined. The existence of such a distribution of speakers is not in itself evidence of discrimination on the basis of sex.
Discrimination on the basis of sex is, however, present in any situation in which the sex of applicants was in any way considered as a criteria of their admission to the conference. This is the definition of discrimination.
In other words, by considering individuals' sexes at all, one is actively engaging in sex-based discrimination. It's absurd to suggest this as the remedy to a situation that isn't necessarily the result of discrimination.
The only way to ensure that no discrimination takes place is to stop looking at the sex ratio of conference attendees in the first place, as it's no more relevant than distribution of shoe sizes among attendees.
Selecting the best person for the job isn't discrimination but IMHO, celebrating a 50/50 split is discrimination if that isn't the natural gender split.
WTF is a "natural gender split"? This is a cultural problem, and that culture like to hide behind a supposed nature which in large parts really just is learned behaviour, resulting from that culture.
And I'm saying that's based on culture more than nature. One can't suppress women more or less worldwide for millenia, then say "equal rights, voting rights, go!" (in some parts of the world), and then take time shortly after, without looking at all the power and role training that has been accumulated and is still in effect (it's not like feminism got through to every last one even in "the west", is it), and explain the remaining inequalities as "just the way it is" or whatever. "We" owe "them" a lot more than that, and not little of that is centuries, millenia of genetic selection. Now that smart women don't get burned at the stake so easily, and can choose their partners freely, we'll see if they won't catch up.. I kinda have my hunches ^^
As this case and others (c.f., GoGaRuCo, which uses the same method) shows, the natural gender split is 50/50. When the submissions pool is 50/50, and they do a blind judging of the submissions, they end up with a 50/50 split in speakers. In other words, they keep demonstrating that there is no essential difference in technology based on gender. When they hide from themselves the gender of the speaker, they end up choosing equally from men and women.
The fact she selected the talks without looking at the gender is great, and I missed on my first read (woops, I blame HN encouraging fast replies for more karma).
With only 18 applications and with her specifically encouraging people that she knew to apply it must be very likely that she knew who the individual was when going through the applications. So even though she claims that it was gender blind, it wasn't really.
She went out of her way to convince a particular demographic group to make submissions. That is where the discrimination lies.
Let's put it this way: if I went around giving extra encouragement to white men to apply, and then proudly announced that I had a blind review process, would you deny that there was discrimination? What exactly is the difference?
I recently attended 2 birthday parties for young kids, one on a weekday and one on a Saturday afternoon. The first, was mostly mothers, immediate family and their kids. For the second, the couple went out of their way to make sure that men could come to the birthday party. They send out adult invites encouraging alcohol beverages to be brought, and called all their women friends and asked them firmly to bring their boyfriends. I brought mine, who was begrudgingly included because of his perception it would be full of kids and women but he ended up having a wonderful time talking to other men (as well as hanging out with kids and their toys and of course some classic kids party food). Is this discrimination on the couple's part to try and reach past a culture of birthday parties full of just mothers and their kids?
See, the difference there is that the kids parents are already half men, half women. Professional technology workers are not half women, and unlike a child's birthday party, being invited to speak at a conference is a career-boosting event.
If disproportionate representation is not discriminatory, what exactly is it?
OK.. It wasn't clear to me from what you said before that you even viewed disproportionate representation in tech as the problem. I agree with that.
However, as I said below, I think having tech conferences with women present might be more than just a trick to pretend that the problem is solved, but actually be a tiny part of the solution.
> the kids parents are already half men, half women.
Biologically yes, but there is a wide range of single/mixed parent families and I disagree that the similarities are far different in terms of the need to make an emotional call for attendance.
So you are saying that this child's friends were mostly from single-parent homes? Are you denying that most of the child's friends had both a mother and a father?
Can you claim that the demographics here are even remotely close to the demographics among tech workers?
>Can you claim that the demographics here are even remotely close to the demographics among tech workers?
For voluntary attendance of a 2-year old's birthday? Yes, I'm claiming that the demographics are close, in the opposite.
I'd also like the add that the demographic of thinking people is equally balanced in terms of gender, and only culture tends to swing males and females different ways. I applaud the actions of Courtney to positively encourage women to present and thereby improve attendance levels by women.
If the review process was blind and the proposals were evaluated on their merits alone then in the selection process would have removed the author's demographic as a discriminating factor. The sample itself would likely be skewed (as in the discussed example), but as long as the speakers gave interesting, relevant presentations I don't see the issue.
I'll agree that there was obvious discrimination in who she personally sought out as speakers, but when it came time to select speakers for the event she didn't turn men away for being men or select women because they were women. She didn't sacrifice the quality of her conference to showcase women speakers, and each candidate that did apply had a fair shot as becoming a speaker. Personally, as it was her conference I don't see a problem with her seeking out the people she wanted to hear from for submissions; it appears it was discrimination based on the quality of the submissions that was the deciding factor, and for me that's what really matters.
In other words, instead of ending discrimination, we should just pile more layers of it on top -- rather than paint your white car pink, you'll load your white car into a pink 18-wheeler and just drive that to work, proudly proclaiming that you have diversity in your color choices (and then one day, someone will point out that you don't have a rainbow-colored ride, so you'll load your pink truck on a rainbow-colored train and demand that someone lay tracks from your house to your office).
I don't think ending discrimination is a simple thing and that in this case increasing the visibility of female experts in an area can have nontrivial antidiscriminatory effects (e.g. encouraging young women to go into an area, making women feel more comfortable at a conference, etc.) even if it involves positive discrimination.
Anyway, I'd still be interested to hear from you how (following your metaphor) you would suggest to dismantle the white car directly.
"in this case increasing the visibility of female experts in an area can have nontrivial antidiscriminatory effects (e.g. encouraging young women to go into an area, making women feel more comfortable at a conference, etc.) even if it involves positive discrimination."
It may make women feel more comfortable at conferences, but there is a much deeper problem here. Discrimination is discrimination, regardless of whether or not it affects a disadvantaged group in a positive way. There is also the risk that such discrimination will only deepen the problems that caused the disproportionate representation in the first place: people might conclude that a woman's success in a technical field was the result of the advantages she was given (e.g. by being given an unfair boost in being invited to speak at conferences), and in the worst case this will reinforce notions that women are not as good as men. I have heard the last concern from women in computer science and technical fields -- women who worked hard to get where they are, who now worry that other people will doubt their abilities because of this sort of thing.
"Anyway, I'd still be interested to hear from you how (following your metaphor) you would suggest to dismantle the white car directly."
The car is not the problem; the paint on the car is the problem. While it is more expensive in the short-term to repaint the car, in the long run you realize savings (less fuel than the truck, no need to lay down rails, etc.). The point here is that the problem can be attacked head-on: the problem with female representation at conferences is a reflection of the problem with female representation in the field, which may be harder to solve but whose solution will ultimately save effort and pain in the long run. Why waste resources on solutions that make the situation even more complicated, when we could spend resources on solutions that simplify the situation?
Yes, it is hard, but there are people working on it. The woman who organized this conference should have worked with those people. I see efforts on the part of the professors in my department to bring more women into the field by focusing on the 101 course. It is not clear which approach works best; some professors have tried making the introductory course more graphics-oriented, theorizing that young women would be drawn to something more visual; others have tried to make the intro course more relevant to fields where women dominate, hoping to make the material more comfortable or familiar to potential dual-majors. I know one professor whose idea was to make the course more like a math course, with intellectually challenging problems and with the idea that high-school boys are more likely to have spent their time hacking, and thus will have an advantage in any course that is "hacker oriented" (and so making a theoretically rigorous course would help level the field).
There are probably other approaches that could potentially work better, but the point is this: the root of the problem is in the lack of women choosing to apply to or enroll in engineering and CS programs. I saw this problem first-hand as an undergrad (there were no women in my EE class; the department simply had no applicants at all), and I see it now in a CS grad program. This is not a problem that can be solved by layering more discrimination on top of it; instead, we need to remove the discrimination at the deeper levels. If women are being turned off the CS by 101 courses, or if they are not even bothering to take 101 courses or even apply to schools with CS programs, that is the problem that must be solved. I suspect that the ultimate solution will be found in middle school, because that is the age where girls with talent for math and science seem to lose interest in technical fields.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed answer. We might actually disagree less than I thought.
However, with your main point I still disagree. If I understand you correctly, you say that the problem can only be fixed bottom up: that we can't fix equal representation in tech by having some conferences with equal representation. I don't think it is that clear cut: for example, having an event with a disproportionately large amount of (1/2) female expert speakers might allow more women at an earlier stage of their career (depending on the event, maybe even high school) to picture themselves on such a career path.
So, within your metaphor, the white car might come out a little pinker after taking a ride in the pink truck...
Apart from that, I completely agree with you and women feeling restricted to other career paths much, much earlier is an important problem to solve. Even your example, the CS 101 class, is probably a later stage in that progress.
Correcting an imbalance is not the same as unbalancing something.
Looking to increase X at Y's expense is only discriminatory against Y if Y's current state is deserved. Unless you're prepared to argue that men deserve all the slots at a tech conference, it's not discriminatory to enlarge the applicant pool to seek greater female representation.
GoGaRuCo famously achieves high female participation with blind judging of submissions, simply by making sure that the applicant pool has a large number of women through efforts to reach out to, and evangelize in, female tech communities. Is that discriminatory against men?
The selection process was gender-blind. At no point did she enforce a gender ratio; it just worked out that way.
It is entirely fair to count that a 50/50 split as a win if you have a theory that gender is irrelevant to whether they are the best person for the job. (If you have a theory that the split ought not to be even, well....)
"(If you have a theory that the split ought not to be even, well....)"
Well...what? My theory is that the demographics of speakers at a conference should be equal to the demographics of the field itself. If the field is 95% men and 5% women, just how many women should we expect to see on a panel of ten speakers?
"The selection process was gender-blind"
Sure, but so what? She went out of her way to convince women to apply and did not do so for men. Masking that sort of discrimination with a gender-blind selection process is just as dishonest as masking the bias towards white upper-class men in university admissions by pointing to a blind review process.
I agree. However, the majority of speakers end up being male, white, able bodied. The question is, are these the best people for the job, or just the easiest to get to fill your slots?
It is unfortunately hard to know the answer to that question. Possibly the only way to find out is to get more speakers outside this group and see how well they are received.
>How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"?
If $x already experiences discrimination that is beyond the control of the organizer, the organizer discriminating against $y merely helps to balance things out.
Also, in this case gender was not considered in candidate selection.
My definition of "best person" has nothing to do with gender. This article is suggesting getting a gender balance is a win when selecting people to speak.
“If your system of finding worthy students or speakers to promote is to have them come to you and ask, but a solid body of research shows that women won’t do so, you’ve institutionalized a gap”
This applies just as much to finding employees. The resumes don't just appear out of thin air usually, and it's no excuse to say you just didn't get any from women.
I myself used this excuse in the past, but I hope not to make any excuses in the future.
If one want to enforce a policy to include demographics in ones recruitment process, the following large demographics should also be considered:
People of color.
Immigrants.
Those of young age.
Those of old age.
While women is clearly the largest demographic in that group, each listed group is commonly put in an disadvantage when applying for work. Outreaching to each of those groups is also the only way to get a work place that includes a fair portion from each demographic, as they are used to being denied and thus do not apply for as much work as white middle aged men.
One should also want to consider people previously convicted of a crime, as that is a very large demographic in the US and is one which also have a very hard time finding jobs. Many have given up on ever finding a good job, and do not apply for higher paying jobs even if they got a higher education that would qualify them for hire.
What you're doing is called "appeal to ridicule", but I can think of worse things than reaching out to all those communities, seeking greater participation. Ex-convicts might be at a disadvantage in expertise, and so fail to get selected in blind judging. But old grey unix neckbeards would probably be really interesting, and in every Aaron Swartz thread it gets mentioned that he was meaningfully involved in the RSS process at 14.
You can try to call it an appeal to ridicule, but I too would like to see more companies and conferences trying to reach out to communities which are used to be denied and thus do not actively seek as much opportunities for the risk of failing. Reaching out is a positive thing to do to society. Its altruistic and can bring positive rewards in return. While I would not want to claim that other people must do it, the reaching out that the author did has an positive net effect on society and I assume the conference itself.
I did not include ex-convicts as a joke. Many people get locked up falsely, and even more get locked up because they enter a plea barging that they shouldn't have. Many of those has some kind of higher education, but is put in an disadvantage because of some real, or imaginary mistake in their past (like downloading a song at age 9). Assuming that those people can't do work beyond sweeping floors, or that they have nothing to contribute to a conference is discrimination without basis.
As to the young and old, I too would like to see less agism in the work place and conferences. Old grey unix neckbeards tend to only be acceptable in some places. In regard to the type of conference the article discuss, game developer conferences, I think old grey unix neckbeards and 14 year old developers are a rare sight and clearly underrepresented.
Pointing out that there is more than one form of group under discrimination is not an appeal to ridicule, and it does not lessen the acts done by the author in the article. Rather, the method used by the author is an effective method to address discrimination without causing further discrimination by the act of exclusion.
Indeed. A good way to increase diversity in hiring is to set a rule: your hiring process isn't done until you've received a minimum number of applications from various demographics that are underrepresented.
You still pick the best applicant from all submissions, but it forces you to make sure that news of your position spreads into more than just the usual communities.
Not when the targeted demographic is historically under-represented. Making an effort to include those who wouldn't be is not the same as reducing submissions from those who are normally included.
How does a demographic become a)targeted, and b) under-represented? It comes across as arbitrary. Especially in the context of running a business to deliver value.
I think if you see all people as just people, a notion like "targeting a demographic" comes across as racist / sexist / and plain old discriminative. But that's just one opinion.
A demographic gets targeted just because it's under-represented. Women are under-represented in STEM for historical reasons that amount to widespread sexism.
You suggest gender-blindness is the solution. I don't disagree that such blindness is a worthwhile goal, but to simply say "let's all be gender blind now" without addressing an existing under-representation just cements the imbalance. Demographics realities have inertia. Women don't go into STEM just because that's not something 'that women do'. It's only appropriate to be blind once the imbalance is wiped out.
That's not to say that affirmative action as previously imagined is the right way to address the imbalance--it's been shown not to be for a variety of reasons. But as this shows, and as GoGaRuCo shows, when you eliminate gender advantages for men, women are selected equally in blind judging, so there's no essential difference between men and women, just an historical artifact worth eliminating.
I don't accept the notion of a demographic being "under-represented". I think it's arbitrary and you haven't addressed it. There is no "correct" amount of representation, and trying to offset workforce statistics due to some misplaced sense of morality is hardly altruistic. If people are discouraging women from STEM, address that. If people are racist, address that. You feel there's too many white people in your office? The answer isn't affirmative action, it's to quite being a racist. There's no such thing as too much of a race (unless, you're a racist).
To say more women should be in STEM is sexist. I mean, if more women get into STEM, great. But to say an entire sex should do something is nonsensical. It's entirely possible they don't want to study stem. It's possible they value other knowledge that is equally important. To say that they're under-represented is to belittle what individuals choose to do with their lives.
The problem is that the imbalance is what's discouraging women from entering STEM careers; addressing it just means doing things like this conference is doing to increase female participation.
But to say an entire sex should do something is nonsensical. It's entirely possible they don't want to study stem.
You realize these two sentences contradict each other, I hope. You say that it's non-sensical to discuss what the entire sex should do, then try to talk about what the entire gender may or may not want as a reason for (or against) acting.
To say that they're under-represented is to belittle what individuals choose to do with their lives.
No, it doesn't, because it doesn't require any individual to do anything, or to give an individual responsibility for what the entire gender does.
When I talk about "under" represented, I mean that absent the historical injustice of sexism, you would see a different gender balance. And as this conference and GoGaRuCo demonstrate, when you control for the historical imbalance, women and men are selected equally to speak in a blind process, thus showing equal ability, if not interest; it's reasonable to assume that after correcting the historical artifact, gendered participation ratios would be much closer.
I've already agreed that affirmative action isn't the answer, but this--community outreach, basically--isn't affirmative action in any sense.
> The problem is that the imbalance is what's discouraging women from entering STEM careers
I hear this quite a bit, but it always seems to be asserted without substantiation. What evidence is there that it's true?
And, more importantly, if we're going to make distinctions between individuals based on their membership in putative demographic categories, why not also distinguish between those who internalize that demographic category as part of their identity, and those who do not? It would seem that an inhibition to pursue one career or another due to demographics would likely indicate that one is part of the latter category; but would we not be more likely to prefer the former category, and want to work people who assert their own ambitions without allowing themselves to be constrained by internalized abstractions?
> A demographic gets targeted just because it's under-represented.
How are these demographic categories themselves not entirely arbitrary? How is analyzing a demographic category as though the definition of that category were preemptively relevant not an exercise in question-begging?
If you conducted a study that indicated that people with odd-numbered shoe sizes were "under-represented", would you begin targeting that "demographic"? Why would you have been looking at people's shoe sizes in the first place?
If acceptance decisions were made based on gender, that would be discrimination.
The article doesn't say that.
"To keep the selection process fair, Courtney chose applicants based on their pitches only, without looking at the speaker’s identity or gender. The result was a 50/50 split between male and female speakers, which she counted as a success."
It baffles me how you can consider men an "excluded demographic" in this scenario.
Disproportionate representation is fair (only) if the criteria of discrimination is justifiable.
An obtuse example: Gifted & hardworking athletes are disproportionally over-represented at the olympics, vice gifted + lazy, non-gifted + lazy, and non-gifted + hardworking ones.
In either case, how is what the woman did with this conference a good thing? On the one hand, she categorized people as "male or female" and on the other she created a situation where there were a higher proportion of women speaking at the conference than were even in the field.
No, I am talking about the disproportionate representation at the conference itself, because the field itself is what lacks diversity. Fix the diversity problem within the field, and if after that the conferences lack diversity, we can fix that problem too.
“If your system of finding worthy students or speakers to promote is to have them come to you and ask, but a solid body of research shows that women won’t do so, you’ve institutionalized a gap”
It's also a worthy goal to find out (1) why women don't ask and (2) work to encourage women to do that asking.
The more forward momentum is built, through efforts such as this, the less of a problem this is in the future.
It's impressive that she went through all of that extra effort to solicit submissions from a particular group and then didn't give any special preference to that group when accepting submissions.
That's the same approach Caltech took when it first started admitting women in 1970. Things get socially very awkward and uncomfortable for everybody when you have a school where almost all students live on campus and socialize primarily with fellow students, and the male/female distribution is severely unbalanced, and so getting more women was a priority.
Gender was not considered when deciding on an applicant, but they made quite an effort to get more qualified women to apply, and to get those who did and were offered admission to choose Caltech.
This isn't the fastest way to balance the population (when I was there, 10 years later, they were only up to 15-20% women, and are up to around 40% now), but it allowed them to keep their high standards.
Saturday’s New York Times carried an article “How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up”, pointing out that women earn only a fraction of what men are paid. The Times cites some numbers: “77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women. The final dollar — so small that it can fit in a coin purse, represents 57 cents, for Latina women.”
While for the non-profit organization described in the article this is seen as a problem, a profit-minded business owner might see this as an opportunity. Why not find an industry with mostly male employees, offer jobs at 57 percent of the current wages in that industry, attract an all-Latina workforce, and crush the competition with labor costs that are a fraction of those in the rest of the industry?
How could the selection process be gender blind when she knew some of the applicants? Surely she would be able to tell who each individual was when she was going through the applications.
Which isn't a problem if you have blind judging of submissions--just make sure that your submission pool is diverse, and pick the best papers without reference to race, orientation, or gender.
..and if the field itself has a diversity problem, then what do you do? This is not a conference-level problem; it is a problem that starts much earlier in life and which will only be fixed by solving it earlier in life. Go to middle schools and figure out why girls who were doing well in math and science in elementary school suddenly lost interest in those subjects, and once you have worked your way from there to having more diversity in technical professions, we can talk about whatever diversity problems are left at conferences.
It may not be a conference level problem, but diversity at the conference level can go a long way to showing girls in middle school that STEM careers are viable for them. We know that a lot of the reason girls drop out along the way just is the perception of STEM as a male dominated field (and paralleling that, in countries like China where it's not considered strictly male, we see high female participation).
"diversity at the conference level can go a long way to showing girls in middle school that STEM careers are viable for them"
When was the last time you saw middle school students wandering around at a conference?
"We know that a lot of the reason girls drop out along the way just is the perception of STEM as a male dominated field"
Yes, clearly that's part of the problem. So why didn't the organizer of this conference go out of her way to invite middle school girls to see all the women she managed to get into the conference?
When I was an undergrad, the EE department had a problem: the policy of doubling female enrollment each year had to be revised to having female enrollment at all. Part of the solution was to print new admissions pamphlets that showed equal numbers of men and women, and equal numbers of white, Asian, and black people (none of these proportions even remotely reflected the reality of the department) smiling while working on their breadboard projects (also somewhat disconnected from reality). This is forgivable, of course, for the following reasons:
1. It is an advertisement. Advertisements always paint a rosier picture.
2. Nobody received any sort of career boost from being featured in the pictures.
3. The pamphlets were sent to high schools, which is exactly who the department needed to target to meet the goal of increased female enrollment.
Compare that to the conference:
1. Conferences are not advertisements for a field or job (usually)
2. Being invited to speak at a conference is a career-booster
3. The demographics at a conference have no impact on middle or high school girls' attitudes about math and science.
You continue to try to locate the problem in middle school while removing any means, direct or indirect, of addressing it. As you observe, speaking at a conference is beneficial to one's career; fostering female participation in conferences advances the careers (and visibility) of females in the field generally. You don't need to bus in a bunch of twelve year old girls and point at the female speakers. You just need the field itself not to look so totally male. In medicine, rising female participation outside of nursing has demonstrably accelerated the rate of female participation since the 1970s. The same can happen in the rest of the STEM field. It's obviously not a turnkey solution, but is valuable as part of a general attempt to diversify the field.
Isn't enforcing a gender ratio just more gender discrimination? How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"? You are just discriminating against the other gender.
Counting a 50/50 gender split as a win is silly if you have put together a shitty conference just to satisfy some ratio. Why not have the best person for the job? I don't care if you are male/female, black/white/pink/purple/transparent, straight/gay/transgender, human/animal/robot/script, able bodied/disabled or anything in between....put the best person in the job - that is real gender equality.