Last week, several women’s rights organizations began a campaign to have advertisers pull their marketing budgets from Facebook, in response to domestic violence against women images that were getting posted. As of this writing, 15 major companies are reported to have done so due to this outcry.

Very quickly I’m going to jump out of the story to put my clarification that I do not condone domestic violence against women (or against men for that matter, another big issue). Some people may start reading this, realize that I’m a man trying to start a discussion about this, and either discount my opinions entirely or claim that I’m trying to legitimize it. That is entirely within your rights to do so, but I do hope that I can be heard out a bit.

In the original posting on Think Progress, found here, a screenshot of a distasteful image enlarged to show ads next to it is captioned with “An example of Facebook promoting violence against women”. My issue has nothing to do with the image itself or the ads, but with the caption. Facebook is not promoting violence against women. A user of Facebook has posted an image that was not removed, and like every other image on Facebook, ads appear next to it when it is enlarged. I freely admit that I do not have enough data to show if lopsided reactions to content like this are the norm, but thankfully Facebook has quickly come out in support of changing some of their policies based on this campaign.

This could easily devolve into an argument over what rights should be given to free speech in a paid and branded ecosystem. It is true that we all have the right to vote with our wallets, and that if we choose to shame companies into leaving an advertising system due to our beliefs, we can do so. I do think it’s an interesting reminder of how Facebook is so involved with so many lives, when the conversation that started this debate, as well as the responses to it, took place mainly within Facebook (including the commenting system on the ThinkProgress blog).

When a system grows so large that its user-base covers a large swatch of connected humanity, should it also reflect the entirety of that humanity?

Instead I want to bring up another topic that has been hitting home recently, especially as an organizer of a WordCamp. That’s the inclusion of more women speakers. As private conversations have shown, as well as a variety of blog posts, this is an issue on a lot of people’s minds.

I am in no way perfect. Last year I said that we had no female speakers because of a lack of interest, but that’s not a good enough excuse. For my part, I only received one submission from a female speaker for the event, and she sent it in about a month after we had our lineup finalized. Still, I can’t use that as an excuse, and with the committee, I intend on targeting a more diverse group of speakers to represent our global community. I think that WordCamp Miami did a great job of that this year, with equal speakers from a gender, race and even sexual orientation point of view.

The only “but” that I’m going to insert here is that I don’t intend on artificially stacking the deck. Affirmative action is not the political controversy in America that it used to be, but the issues on both sides still remain. While I’ll do my best to be inclusive, I also think that we should be fair to the actual speakers who express interest. If 3/4 submissions this year are from men, it’ll still be a big increase over last year, but it won’t be reason for me to discount a number of speakers unfairly to fill an imaginary quota.

I have no doubt that this issue partly stems from issues outlined in those previously linked posts. Leadership roles have to be taken by everyone who considers themselves worthy enough to submit a talk, as they are in essence putting themselves out there with the possibility of rejection. Tech culture is still unfairly positioned as a men’s game, which is clearly not the case unless we make it so.

I’m trying to learn from my mistakes and improve. I know that there is more that I can do, and more that can be done in general. Does anyone have any good advice on how I can be more fairly inclusive?

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