Simon Bradshaw

As in you want a large copy of this one, or you'd like a similar chart produced for the Loncon programme?

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fjm.livejournal.com

Large one of this with explanation please that can be put on a board.
Think of it as a science poster for a project.

A1 is ideal.

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What was the membership split by gender?

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I would say 'approximately 50:50' but we will do a detailed count.

Eastercons have had near gender parity in attendees for some years now, which made any lack of parity on the programme all the more noticeable.

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bellinghman.livejournal.com

Regarding the overall membership, I'd have thought so too, but it's worth checking in case we're 'seeing' more women present than are actually there.

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f4f3.livejournal.com

Brilliant. And well done.

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I've now done a count. Our pre-registered adult attending membership (was about 650, of whom some 260 were women. That may be a slight underestimate, as some names are ambiguous. (The other members in our pre-con count of 760 included pre-supporting members and children.)

On that basis, our membership was about 40% female, so women were represented slightly better in our pool of programme participants than in the membership as a whole.

Not sure yet on day member figures, but my understanding is that these were fairly evenly split on gender.

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davidwake.livejournal.com

The woman on our panel was only there because she was Welsh.

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Well you were only on your panel because you were a puppet.

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davidwake.livejournal.com

Yes, puppet parity at Eastercons is just dreadful.

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f4f3.livejournal.com

*humph* so all women need to wear skirts now? #sorry

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andrewducker

It is an ongoing problem for how to represent men/women visually, considering that many women I know _don't_ wear skirts, and some of the men intermittently wear kilts.

The meta-problem being that there is no universal difference between men and women that could be easily displayed visually, short of ♂ and ♀.

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netmouse.livejournal.com

You can settle that the way scientists have for years with similar categories, and just use color-coding.

Every variance in appearance is going to have outliers. The most consistent visible variance between the genders, I believe, are that people who present as female tend to have breasts. Also, although many women do not have an hourglass figure, almost zero men _do_, so that could be used.
(Look at 1970s fisher price little people figurines).

Within closely related populations, also, women tend to be shorter than men. But that's just on average, of course.

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biascut.livejournal.com

The most consistent visible variance between the genders, I believe, are that people who present as female tend to have breasts. Also, although many women do not have an hourglass figure, almost zero men _do_, so that could be used.

I'd say hair distribution. I've a friend who had to give up cross-dressing when he became so much of a hippy that there was no distinction between his female presentation and his male presentation, except that the beard looked weird on his female presentation. Body shape is so hugely influenced by culture and particularly the way clothes are cut to emphasise the particular features that we associate with male or female.

Also, it would be so nice if just for once men and women could be represented as "Here is the default human. She is female. If you add a beard, you get a man."

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But - I hate to say but science! - the other part of the equation has to be an assessment of the quality of the panels so composed, as a benchmark. Then there could be a comparison say to Satellie with a result of some evidence on whether mandatory gender parity does or does not improve or impare panel quality.

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That's why I'm doing a more detailed write-up for the main convention blog.

We've had a lot of comments on the programme, so far all of them positive; in particular, there's been a lot of praise for the quality of items. I've not heard any comments at all suggesting either than any item would have been better had a woman been replaced by a man, or that any woman was on a panel in a token capacity.

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Fortunately, that's pretty much impossible. Firstly, it is very hard to get objective measures about the quality of a programme item, or an overall programme. Secondly, there are too many other variables in terms of which subjects are chosen for the panels, how much preparation is possible etc. You'd really need some kind of randomised trial, and that's Way Too Hard.

I say "fortunately" because I think the last thing we need is different Eastercons competing for some coveted "programme success rating", given every Eastercon is run by volunteers who are doing the best they can anyway.

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ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com

yes, this.

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I agree; the most we can expect is a subjective assessment, but I'd say we can observe whether or not there are comments that Con Programme X was noticeably poorer than Con Programme Y. It's early days yet, but I've not observed anything like this for EightSquaredCon, and in the past it hasn't taken very long for an Eastercon's allegedly poor programme to be commented upon.

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You can try to get a feeling for the success of the programme (and indeed you should, if you're one of the people who put it together); and in this case I agree with you that it seems to have gone down quite well.

But I think Surliminal is making the point that we cannot compare "EightSquaredCon with gender parity" against "EightSquaredCon without gender parity" and anything else isn't answering the question "Gender parity: does it improve the programme?". I don't think that can be proved. I also think the ethical questions are more important - i.e. is it the right thing to do?

Edited Date: 2013-04-07 03:27 pm (UTC)

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The ethical point is an interesting one I hadn't thought of and don't honestly know the answer to. j live on a sea of people demanding evidence based policy these days so it was first thing I thought of! I agree there's no definite control study possible.

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We can't. All we can do is see if there are any instances of the sort of complaint that some of the panel parity sceptics predicted, e.g. that a female panel member would come across as clearly having been parachuted in to make up numbers.

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Well see my reply to MC. I take the point but still think after this amount of fuss it would be good to see some evidence nailed down as a test case. This isn't some backwards slur on the prog btw - I wasn't there but all the reports I've heard have been very positive. Guess I've spent too much time lately knocking around with behavioural economists who regularly quantify this kindof thing.

Edited Date: 2013-04-07 02:35 pm (UTC)

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vicarage.livejournal.com

And also how much extra work it was to adjust panel makeup to achieve this goal. Eightsquared made this a priority, other cons might want to spend that effort elsewhere.

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Very little; the effort, such as it was, went in to trying to get a wider general pool of programme participants. As I noted, we ended up with 190 people on programme, many of whom had not been on convention programme before. This turned out to help in a number of ways; we had fewer over-used people and a wider choice of prospective panel members for items.

What did happen now and again is that we'd end up with a panel with four people of one gender. When faced with this, we had a look at our volunteer pool to see if there was anyone of the other gender who looked like a good candidate and asked them. This worked both ways; in the end, we had one all-female panel and 21 of the remaining 72 panels had either one man or one woman (almost evenly split either way).

In practice, by far the most difficult programming constraint was availability. Over a third of our programme volunteers turned out to be planning to leave on the Monday of the convention, a good number of them before lunch. A smaller but still significant fraction were not available until well into Friday evening. This caused us real headaches and led to a lot of reshuffling.

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jamiam.livejournal.com

Could you describe what changed in your efforts to get programme participants between previous years and this year? How did you go about it in the past, and what did you do differently this year?

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To begin with, Eastercon is run by a different committee each year, although sometimes you will have a group where a fair number of the same people are involved in running several Eastercons (e.g. 2008, 2010 and 2012 had a lot of organisers in common). So it wasn't what we did differently to what we'd done, it was more what we did relative to what tended to have been done before.

A common comment is that Eastercon programme can get rather 'same-y', with similar items from year to year and much the same faces appearing again and again. In my view this is where the issue of male-dominated programme items arose; if you have the same set of people who were doing programme 25 years ago, when conventions were much more male-dominated, then you're probably going to have a male-dominated set of items.

The solution to this isn't to throw out the baby with the bathwater by never using any of these people again. A lot of them have valuable contributions to make to programme. Instead, we tried to widen the pool of prospective programme participants:

- We had a detailed volunteer form that we heavily publicised via our Progress Reports to members and on our blog.
- We actively contacted those authors who had signed up as attending.
- We encouraged people to suggest to other members who could have something to contribute to programme that they might want to volunteer.

We had to take the last of these points carefully; nobody wants to conscript people onto programme or make them feel pressured. But my own experience is that there are a lot of really interesting people who attend Eastercon but who are worried that nobody would want to hear what they have to say. Very often, if and when they are encouraged to volunteer to be on programme, they really enjoy it and we get a lot of very positive comments about their contribution. As such, we set out for 2013 to persuade our members that if you volunteer we will take your offer to be on programme seriously. In the end, we didn't and couldn't use everyone who volunteered, but we had a lot of first-time programme participants who were very well received.

In short, what we did was to actively seek out and encourage participation. It worked, and we hope we've ignited an enthusiasm to be on programme in a new generation of participants.

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jamiam.livejournal.com

Okay, interesting. So you had a lot more variety in the programme participants as a result. Were the programme items they discussed also more varied this year, and if so, how did that come about?

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Again, that's a slightly awkward question to answer as Eastercons often have something of a theme. 2011 had a focus on military SF (it's GoH was David Weber); ours had quite a genre literature theme, with streams on criticism and the craft of writing. But we did try to come up with new items, and to have a fairly wide discussion so that done-to-death panels were identified and shoved aside.

(Example: we thought about doing 'Steampunk: Genre or Lifestyle' until just about everyone with any interest in the topic said "Not again!". Instead we had a panel on the political sensitivities of steampunk, which seemed to go very well.)

On our programme and suggestions form - and we made it clear you could do one or other as well as both - we asked for specific suggestions, as well as what people in general wanted to see more of, and indeed less of. We had an active programme subcommittee that had several meetings to brainstorm and refine our list of items.

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jamiam.livejournal.com

Okay, thanks for answering! I'm on the other side of the pond, so I hear a lot about Eastercon, but have remained largely ignorant of the details due to the sheer improbability of my having the funds to attend.

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It varied from panel to panel, according to the number of possible participants. Four authors to talk about how they do worldbuilding? Easy! Four people with expertise in near-Earth asteroids, or who have familiarity with both Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker? Not so easy! This is nothing to do with gender bias - it's just fewer available people makes the constraint harder to fulfil.

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No me neither. , merely saying. Of course trouble is no uncomplicated causation - eg if I'd known Mke A was doing a lot of programming I'd have xpected it to be of high quality (I wish I'd known!)

Edited Date: 2013-04-07 02:36 pm (UTC)

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Thank you! In fact, it wasn't until quite late in the day that I got involved, or I'd have been a bit louder about it.

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There were a few panels we'd have put you on too!

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If I'd known it would be QUITE such a cold weekend I might not have picked Cornwall!:-)

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You could indeed have joined us at Ice Station Cedar! It wasn't too bad - the JCBs managed to keep the car park reasonably clear of snow drifts.

I felt very sorry for GoH WJW and his wife who had flown in from Albuquerque...

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Lord! At least no snow in Cornwall and some sun! We went down a tin mine to get out the freezing wind off the sea at one point!

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Of course that's not to say mc s programming isn't high quality too! But you know I like your quirks :-)

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dougs.livejournal.com

This is a very pleasing statistic, and a very clear chart.

You may wish also to consider programme items where only one woman was named on the panel, but who involved very many more than 50% men as extra participants (eg Weakest Link), and programme items where only one man was named on the panel, but who involved very many more than 50% women as extra participants (eg Easter Worship).

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I considered that, but for this analysis have confined myself to programme items where the composition was determined by the programme team rather than by those who signed up (e.g. quizzes), voluntarily attended (the Easter Worship) or for that matter was arranged by someone external such as a publisher (e.g. the various launch events and publisher's parties in the Conservatory).

It was certainly gratifying that such events seemed to have a good gender balance (or even more women than men) but I didn't want anyone to be able to suggest that we'd biased our figures by including items where this wasn't down to us.

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dougs.livejournal.com

Makes perfect sense.

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ceb.livejournal.com

It just struck me that one brilliant thing about this Eastercon is that in none of the panels I went to did a panellist started off by saying "I'm So-and-so and I have no idea why I'm on this panel". Bit of a personal bugbear, that one.

Also I thought your volunteering form was excellent (though I *ahem* failed to fill it in).

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