If, however, it comes down to the unknowns, on what basis do you give people a chance? Are you going to deny the chance for the minority, to be sure that you avoid positive discrimination? I would hope not.

I suppose that if it there are concerns, the fairest thing would be to give a scrubbed version of the proposals to a third-party, and have them choose what they think has the best merit, without the minority issue being even a possible factor.

No matter what, I would hope that you would not retreat to the safe haven of “honest male chauvinism”.

From the other side I have a big problem with positive discrimination, having grown up in Northern Ireland where it was forced on industry to a certain degree.

Part of the problem of positive discrimination is this; if you’re chosen to speak are you being picked because of your ability or because you have bits boys don’t have, or your skin colour is different, or you’re a disabled lesbian wheelchair bound dwarf?

There’s a move afoot to make positive discrimination legal in the UK when there are no other differences between candidates other than sex or race. That may well cheapen the employment of the people who are supposed to benefit.

I ran a competition in September to encourage more women to submit talks to a UK community conference; we had 3 entries, only one of which was from a new speaker. In the same way that there’s a massive complaint about the lack of women in the UK parliment it (hopefully) raises the thought that it’s not sexism but simply because women don’t actually want to do the role.