CFP Yoga Pants
Once upon a time, I was doing an on-site penetration test as part of a group that included an organizer of, let’s just say a conference I’ve recently said some things about to reporters. He had a committee CFP review call one evening, and I thought it might be amusing and/or enlightening to sit in the corner and listen in. The organizer in question agreed to let me listen in as long as I never told a soul. Oops, I guess I’m breaking that vow now. I believe he honestly thought that listening in to this highly ordered and professional process would make me sure that the CFP review process was fair and equal. In hindsight that might be the most troubling feature of this entire story, that what I witnessed was genuinely believed by the organizer to be proper behavior.
The purpose of the CFP committee conference call was to sort all the submissions they had received into three piles Yes, No, and Maybe. As they went through the proposals one by one, I noticed two things in particular that had me rolling around on the floor, pounding my fist almost into the floor (so as not to alert the other people on the call to my presence), and silently guffawing into the carpet. Not because it was funny; it wasn’t. Just because it was so cliché, I have to wonder on some level if the whole thing wasn’t set up in advance by the committee as some sort of performance art.
Some submissions were given a thorough enough examination that the title and abstract were read aloud and discussed. But every time a “famous” name came up, it went right into the Yes pile, as did lesser-known members of this particular infosec fraternity who were friends with any of the organizers. I can to some extent understand this; every event would want to have some speakers that can fill a room on the agenda. What amused me so much about it was that this particular event had vocally renounced that they invited any speakers, that everyone had to go through the CFP process. But it seemed a bit disingenuous if a friend or well-known speaker could just write “I like turtles,” in every field and still immediately get sent to the Yes pile.
And then, of course, there was the woman thing. No, I’m not about to tell you a horror story of how every time a female application came up a battle cry of “No girls allowed!” echoed across the Skype call and the life’s work of a potential genius disappeared into the No pile. But without fail, regardless of if the female in question was a potential first-time presenter or just as well-heeled in the qualifications department as the men who were sent straight to Yes, there was a long drawn out discussion about her work. A discussion that was at least nominally about her proposal, as the talk inevitably turned to her physical appearance.
Without fail it deteriorated into how she would look in yoga pants. This was before the Shmoocon Yoga Pants thing. Thus, while my second-hand knowledge of the whole thing made it seem like it was overblown, it was perpetually in the back of my mind that there might be something to it. To at least some subset of the infosec fraternity, how a woman (theoretically in most cases I assume) looks in yoga pants, is a critical factor to be considered in professional endeavors.
I never did figure out the nuances of exactly where between 1 and 10 on the “How your butt looks in yoga pants” scale you wanted to fall if you were going to have a shot at getting into the Maybe pile at least. Indeed, there were hints of that old chestnut that if a woman is too “hot” she can’t possibly be smart. On the other hand, there seemed to be no crime so deplorable as looking fat in yoga pants. I imagine it isn’t necessary to point out that other than the small subset of fitness gurus and the occasional cosmetic surgery aficionado, the men of infosec are rarely compared to Cary Grant in the appearance department. Nor was any aspect of the male submitters’ appearance mentioned at any time on the call.
This isn’t a horror story of the infosec fraternity’s evil plot to keep the women down. I couldn’t tell you if the yoga pants quotient even factored into the final decision, as this was the only review committee talk I listened in on. What bothered me about it then and came back to mind with the recent Twitter debates on CFPs, women, and meritocracy, was that this was supposed to be an example of good behavior. The conference organizer let me clandestinely listen in on this call to prove to me that their conference was not a cult of personality made up mostly of invited speakers from the infosec fraternity, and certainly did not have a “woman problem.” Even after the call was finished the committee member, who had watched me roll around on the floor somewhere between disbelief and vindication for most of the call, could not understand why anything that I had just witnessed may have instead confirmed my previous theories.
If these were supposed to be the good guys, then what exactly do the bad guys do at CFP reviews?
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