Ever since I started visiting Denmark in March 2018, there was a lot of building work going on. Well, it's a city, I suppose there always is; but in particular, the city squares Rådhuspladsen and Kongens Nytorv were something like 75% closed off and behind building hoardings. And scattered around the city, 15 more building sites, all preparing the way for something that, for me at least, was rather exciting: the creation of a whole new Metro line, with 15 new stations, and two existing stations extended to provide interchange points.

A month or so before I first visited Copenhagen, I thought one evening "I know, let's find a map of the metro network – familiarise myself with it bit before I get there". And I looked it up, and found it, and thought: is that it?

I'd been working in London for the last ten years, and London's tube network looks like this:

In fact I was part-way through my effort to visit every single one of London's tube stations - all 270 of them - and find the labyrinth in each station. I didn't quite get to complete this before I left the UK to go and live in Denmark, in January 2019; but I have now visited all 270 of London's tube stations, and found / photographed / documented the labyrinth in 267 of them (the other 3 are currently absent).

So anyway, back to Copenhagen: two lines, 22 stations. This network opened in 2002, so it's all very modern, compared to London. The trains are small and driverless, the ride is smooth, the stations are small and efficient, and it just works. Though, I have to say ... they're rather dull. After having toured London's network, I loved seeing the variety of the stations: a huge variety of architecture and character and scale and flow and ... just brilliant, I'm so glad I've visited them all! But Copenhagen's ... well, it just doesn't have the history yet. And of the M1 and M2 line stations, 13 are on the surface, and 9 subterranean. And of those 9, they are uniformly dull, and grey. Sorry, but they are.

So, back that building work: a new metro line, "M3" Cityringen. I moved to live in Copenhagen in January 2019, and throughout the course of the year, gradually the two main building sites, Rådhuspladsen and Kongens Nytorv, became smaller and smaller, as the work neared completion. And finally, on Sunday 29th of September, 2019, the line opened!

With M3 Cityringen the network grew from 22 stations to 37; in 2020 we're expecting part of the M4 line to open, with two more stations (Nordhavn and Orientkaj), with the southern part of M4 coming in (I think) 2024.

I've finally got round to visiting all the new stations – trying every corridor, every stairwell, every escalator, and therefore I now have favourites and opinions and questions.

So, shall we get started?

Frederiksberg Allé

Heading down into the station, the first thing we notice (compared to the old M1 and M2 lines) is ... colour!

Most of Copenhagen's subsurface metro stations follow the same template, with a few variations; and Frederiksberg Allé almost does too. The stations are generally well-lit and spacious, with long lines of sight. This particular station's quirk is the entrance being offset slightly to the side.

One of the interesting things to look for in each station is the roof: some of them have genuine skylights; some of them are built to look a bit like skylights, but they're fake, because there's actually a building on top. Frederiksberg Allé has the latter:

Almost all (or maybe all?) the new stations have lots of space for bikes too. Almost uniformly across Cityringen, the bike area is orange:

Frederiksberg

Frederiksberg is one of the two stations which provide interchange to the old M1/M2 lines (the other being Kongens Nytorv). So here we can easily see the old and new lines if not quite side by side, then at least very close to each other.

Frederiksberg's paneling is grey, but a much prettier and more interesting kind of grey than the old M1/M2:

Here we see the old and new stations coming together:

There's also an exit directly into Frederiksberg Centrum shopping centre (just like the other interchange, Kongens Nytorv, actually: that has an entrance directly to/from Magasin):

There are also proper skylights here, and the lifts, and an extra exit to the shopping center car park.

Aksel Møllers Have

I rather like the texture of the wall paneling here. I think it's rather lovely:

I also rather like its imperfections:

Other than that we've got the usual sort of set-up: main entrance with elevator; side entrance for bikes, wrapping round the back of the station:

Here's a little detail I noticed here: where many older stations would have had a metal "groove" ramp next to the stairs, to slot your bike in, here it's kind of subtly built-in: a smooth, rounded edge to the stairway, so you can get your bike up and down:

And we have rather lovely skylights here too:

Nuuks Plads

Now it has to be said ... not all of these stations are amazingly different from each other. This one felt rather similar to the last:

I love how light these stations can be:

Nørrebros Runddel

I quite enjoyed the slight irregularities in the texture of the walls here:

Here there's no proper skylight, so the roof is light, but not open to actual daylight:

Nørrebro

At Nørrebro we're back to colour, but more bold than before: red!

Actual daylight, too, so that's nice:

There's still a bit of building work going on though, to make interchange between the M3 metro and S-tog easier:

Skjolds Plads

The walls are back to grey again here, but this time with an interesting "wave" texture, as they bow in and out:

Apart from that, it's kinda the usual: skylights, spacious, back entrance for bikes. Good stuff :-)

Vibenshus Runddel

So it turns out that Vibenshus Runddel has a surprising unique feature: colours. Not just colour, but colours, plural:

Here the wall panels tilt back slightly, so that the underside of each panel protrudes slightly, and there's where the colour is. It's rather nice actually!

This station is in the corner of Fælledparken, so here's the main entrance:

And on the surface, the skylights:

Sadly the bike area & entrance here were closed off when I visited.

Poul Henningens Plads

Another new feature on the walls here: an interesting horizontal/vertical rectangular pattern:

Apart from that it's the usual kind of layout, albeit with a slight kink in the corridor on the way out, if I remember correctly.

Trianglen

Light grey walls here, but they're shiny! What it lacks in colour, it makes up for in light:

No skylights here, though I'm not sure why, because there's loads of space on the surface, if I remember correctly. Weird.

Østerport

At Østerport we're back to BIG BOLD COLOUR:

The exit closest to Østerport main station is currently a rather temporary, rattly, noisy, and bouncy scaffolding staircase. It's actually quite disconcerting:

Hopefully before long they'll build a proper link between the two stations.

Meanwhile, a distraction: What are these? I keep seeing them but I don't know what they are:

Marmorkirken

On to Marmorkirken, which is well as being in perhaps the most spectacular setting of all the stations ...

... is also of a very different structure to all the other stations. I'm guessing they didn't have much space to work in here, squeezing the whole station between the church and Store Kongensgade, not just on the surface, but subsurface too. The result is a station with a very different feel indeed.

The only long sightline here is immediately below the surface, along the bike storage / ticket hall area:

Deeper than that, though, things are rather different from everything else. The escalators, instead of being formatted like this, as they are in most stations:

are, in Marmorkiren, more like this (excuse the quick sketch):

So the whole station has a very different feel: not so spacious, perhaps even a little claustrophobic.

The walls have this rather attractive marbled pattern, echoing the church above:

And down at platform level, the platform space is quite narrow, and not backing on to the other platform. This is platform 1, the higher platform; platform 2 is below this.

And right at the bottom, aaaaaaaall the way down, is platform 2:

Right. On we go.

Kongens Nytorv

Along with Frederiksberg, Kongens Nytorv is the other interchange point with M1/M2 – the difference here being, because it's so central, this station is built to handle much more traffic. It's big (compared to the rest of the network).

Straight away this feels bigger: the station is wider, there's more distance between the two platforms. The (fake) skylights are wider. The placement of the escalators is such that they don't take up as much space:

The corridor at one end of the M3 leads out, down a rather long corridor that doubles back on itself ...

... and then out to Det Kongelige Teater:

The other way, if we take the escalators up from the M3, we get to the ticket hall area ...

... which then leads into the impressively open interchange area:

Y'all know I like patterns, textures and geometry by this point:

The main exit, to where Strøget meets Kongens Nytorv:

Meanwhile of course the old M1/M2 station is still there, though now with what I think are rebuilt entrances. It took me a while to figure out why there's a step up here, before you go down. I assume it's to stop too much rain flooding down the stairway:

Meanwhile the bike area here – you remember I said they're nearly all orange? This is the exception. It features an artwork called "Fra sted til sted" (From place to place), by Pernelle Maegaard:

I have to say, in contrast to M3, M1/M2 looks very drab:

Again we have the exit direct to shopping, this time to Magasin:

Last detail from Kongens Nytorv: another artwork. I've seen it before, but never realised it was an artwork:

Gammel Strand

Alright, only four to go. Gammel Strand: another interesting one, and again, perhaps because of its placement: it's deep, and built below the canal.

On the surface we've got the Fiskerkone statue back at last. Velkommen tilbage, fiskerkone:

The bike entrance is out of action still, so it's down the escalator, or the main steps...

... and into a very long (by Copenhagen Metro standards) escalator, which is, for some reason, lit blue. Perhaps echoing the fact that it's taking us below the waterline.

At the "ticket hall" level, we can stand and admire the engineering, deep below the canal (hence, no proper skylights here):

The curious thing here is ... when the bicycle area opens, is it meant to link in to the main station? I can't see where/how that might happen, if so.

Again the station has a rather unusual escalator layout, adding to the space available at the platform level:

Rådhuspladsen

When I first came to Copenhagen, probably about two-thirds of the city square was shut off, as a building site. Quite the revelation, when in September 2019, it finally opened up, and the square was suddenly bigger! :-)

Rådhuspladsen's colour scheme is a rather bold black, adding more than ever to the idea that this is actually a Death Star, and you should be humming the Imperial March tune:

Meanwhile at the surface, there's something funny afoot. There are two sets of steps in, as normal (main entrance, and bike entrance), and there are also two elevators ... but one of them is out of action:

Here's the main entrance, with that out-of-action elevator next to it:

and here's a little further down those same steps:

so now I want to know: where does that door on the left go, and where does that elevator go? (Probably to the same place). The door doesn't look like a regular service door – it's too fancy for that, and it doesn't have service-door-type-labelling (you know: code numbers, voltages, warning signs, etc). No, it's just a glass door, locked, and blacked out. What is going on there?

Little detail: at the entrance to every station, there's a door, which I've not yet seen shut (I don't know if it's only shut for emergencies, or maybe it shuts every night. No idea). The silver handrail, when necessary, clicks out of position to allow the door mechanism to shut:

Of course to fit the station in, they had to get space from somewhere, so they made city hall, Rådhuset, smaller. But at least they added an extra tower, so that's nice:

Københavns Hovedbanegård

Almost there. Two to go. At København H, we're back to red:

At the surface, there's still lots of building work going on:

and apparently in future we'll have a slightly slicker tunnel route between the main station and the metro:

Mostly, these stations are very new, and still in very good condition, and almost everything works. Very Danish. Therefore, this amused me:

Enghave Plads

So, finally, we complete our tour with Enghave Plads:

It's a familar style, but no worse for it.

The bicycle entrance here was, again, shut off, so hopefully that'll be open some time.

So that's basically it. I hope you enjoyed this little tour of M3 Cityringen! Now if you'll excuse me, I really need to get out more.

Sources for the two map images: Metroselskabet DK; Transport for London

So ... it's been a full six months since the last post, and I'll be honest: one of the main reasons it's been so long is that the scripts I was using to update the site suffered from a particularly aggressive form of bit rot. Which is another way of saying: I got lazy when I put the site up first time. Anyway, I've finally got round to resurrecting the site so that it's in a serviceable state again, so here we are: another post. So, what's new?

Last time I wrote about being "on the cusp", and that turned out very much to be true. I wrote that on the Tuesday before Easter, while still living in Gentofte in the flat that I hated, but having secured new accommodation, due to start on May 1st. Moving day was slightly stressful, because for some reason the moving company didn't understand how much stuff I had to move (even though I told them beforehand), so I ended up basically paying double the quote – but it got the job done. I moved into this flat in Frederiksberg, and its so much better than the other place. It's almost ten times bigger than the room I lived in for three months. The spare room, which I used just for boxes and laundry for the first few months, is slightly larger than my entire room back in Gentofte. I like it here.

I shan't ramble on too much longer, so let's just have the short version:

• Dating: on hold. It's just not that important to me right now.
• Job: going much better after I moved to Frederiksberg. I've taken various holidays of course, mostly back to the UK but also to Esbjerg and then Munich, and Barcelona. I'm looking forward to having paid holiday next year. (Danish law: in your first year of employment in Denmark, leave is unpaid).
• Danish: I still give myself a hard time, stressing over how little practice I get at the language and how rubbish I am at it, but back in September I passed the Module 4 Test without even realising I was taking it, so that's a good sign, eh?
• Friends: In terms of making friends in Denmark, it takes time of course, and there are various people who I've met, some of whom I'll meet again, and some I won't. In particular though I'm grateful for my friendship with Anja, and with the group of ladies I mentioned last time, and whom I have continued to meet ... I feel very lucky to have met them all, and to have been invited into their homes, and that we can open up to each other.

Bit of a rush of catching up, this post. Oh, and also I might start experimenting with writing posts in Danish. Anyway, it feels good to have resurrected this blog. Hopefully I'll have a lower barrier to entry now.

Last time, I wrote about the lying brainweasels who had led to me believe that everything was terrible and that I should just give up trying to settle in here. Stagnate, fail, and perhaps worse. I'm happy to say that quite a few good things have happened since then! But perhaps one also not so good, so let's take the rough with the smooth.

When I wrote the last article I'd just been to a viewing of a flat in Frederiksberg, and I was going to go to two more viewings the next day. Well, I did that, and the good news is, I said yes to one of them, and the contract is now all signed, and the deposit paid. So in a little over two weeks' time, I'll be moving in. And even though that means I'll be paying double-rent for a while, that's OK because (a) the new place is so much more expensive than the last, it's not really double-rent, in a sense, it's more like rent-plus-a-third; and (b) because DAMN, I still didn't realise just how much the old place was getting me down.

OK, so, I said there was a rough patch as well as good news, so here it is. All last week, I was away with a load of my colleagues, at a conference in Dublin. And the bad thing is: I let myself spiral into a terrible state of mind again on the Sunday when I travelled out, and I ended up saying some stuff, visible to the whole company, where I was just being really negative and criticising things. Ugh. The good news is that once this was pointed out to me, I pretty quickly managed to climb out of that hole that I was hiding in, and then enjoyed the rest of the week.

And why was I in such a terrible state of mind? (Someone asked me recently, "What are you stressed about?". I replied that it gets to a point where logic has flown out of the window, so I can't rationally saying that I'm stressed about anything; just that I'm stressed. However: something probably started it). Well, I think a good part of it was, you guessed it, my current living situation again. On the Sunday morning as I was getting ready, everything just seemed to be going wrong: there was no space to put anything down, my washing was in the way, the drier collapsed, nothing seemed to be where I expect to find it, I can't sit down and chill – all because of my too-small room. And then, after that, progressively, less and less reason was required for me to keep digging.

But. That's all in the past.

So where are we now? Well, half way through April, that's where; and that means I've got two more weeks left in my tiny room before I can FINALLY GET A PROPER PLACE, and also two more weeks left on probation before I get to find out whether depression kicked my arse so much it cost me that job. Fingers crossed.

Finally, a few tidbits:

• I went on my first ever date! With a Danish woman. We probably spoke something like 50/50 Danish/English. Well, maybe 30/70. A fair bit of Danish anyway.
• Straight after that, I had dinner with three other women I'd never met before – all Danish. This time it was almost all in Danish, but the downside was, most of it I couldn't follow. But some I could! A fun evening.
• And then when I got back from Dublin, I had a super hyggelig afternoon with eight other women that I'd never met before – again, all Danish. In fact ... I have quite a few thoughts on this, so I expect to do a separate post about this soon. :-)

Yes, this is a bit late – I've been here over a month now. Whatever!!

So, what am I doing here? (No, seriously: what the hell am I doing here??)

I was born in the Midlands area of England, and moved south, to a little bit north of London, when I was 2 years old. At school, I learned French, up to the age of 16 – and then stopped. Went to university, met a girl, moved in together, got married. My parents weren't ones for taking my sister and I on exotic holidays when I was young – a few trips over to northern France with the caravan, and that was it. And my partner wasn't keen on the idea of foreign travel at all, and so ... we didn't. So I settled in to a life of living and working in Britain, and taking holidays in Britain, and speaking only English.

And that's the way it was, for almost 30 years. But now: Denmark.

So what changed?

A reasonably short version of the story is: my friend Aimee, who used to work on the same team as me at the BBC in London, had the idea, the dream, of moving to Denmark. And she made it happen. But also, along the way, I got suckered into the dream too. But whereas she felt more convinced that she wanted to move, and could move, I wasn't so sure.

Around the same time Aimee shared her Danish dream with me, my wife and I started separating. So during the first half of 2018, as Aimee made more and more progress towards Denmark (visiting, finding a possible job, getting the job, setting a date to move), I was getting divorced; moving out of the town I'd always lived in, and instead to London; and just generally working out what I wanted to do with my life. Stay in London, working at the BBC? London, but working elsewhere? Move out of London again, but commute in? Move to the south coast? The north? Scotland? Denmark? Somewhere else?

Fast forward a little to August: Aimee had left the BBC, but not yet moved to Denmark; and I was by now pretty convinced that I wanted to do the same, but hadn't made any steps in that direction. Until one day when my boss at work had massively pissed me off, and that night (about 2am, if I remember correctly), I started applying for jobs in Copenhagen.

So, here I am. My divorce is almost complete – I think we're just in the queue at the courts for the decree absolute. My ex and I have disentangled our lives, but we're still really good friends, which is great. I left the BBC on January 11th, flew over to Denmark on January 17th, and started my new job on February 1st.

I've survived quite a lot of change and challenge over the last 7 years or so, and now I find myself in a new country, learning a new language, doing a new job, and trying to build up my circle of friends here to be more than 1. It hasn't always been easy, and of course there will be more challenges ahead.

But what am I doing here? Actually, grinning quite a lot!

I live in Denmark now, and am not too bad at Danish. How cool is that??

Last week I attended QCon London, a “Conference for Professional Software Developers” run by InfoQ. Three days of keynotes, presentations, facilitated discussion, and general open mingling with other delegates and and speakers.

It's the first time I've been to this conference. I went because last year my colleague Stephen went, and I could tell from his experience there, and from the online videos of the talks published later, that this was worth going to. So I signed up for this year at the earliest opportunity.

It's well known that the technology sector has a diversity problem. Go to almost any technology event in Europe / North America, and you'll see overwhelmingly white male faces.

Today is International Women's Day 2015: so what have I learnt of the diversity aspect of QCon, and about the inclusion of women in particular?

Do I expect I'll go again next year?

The speakers

For those used to technical conferences, you might be interested in taking a quick look at the diversity on show amongst the speakers at QCon London this week.

When I checked and did a rough count, there were 123 speakers listed, and quite a range of faces.

Or, so it might appear at first glance.

I very roughly counted males and females, white and non-white. By my count, this year's QCon speaker line-up included:

• 3 (2.4%) non-white women;
• 5 (4.1%) non-white men;
• 24 (19.5%) white women;
• 91 (74.0%) white men.

Only 74% white men? For the technology sector, that's actually pretty good! So, that's like, 26% of “doing diversity”!

Make no mistake: it's a lot better than most conferences, by which I mean that it's closer to being more representative of the population as a whole.

But that's still 78% male, and the world simply isn't like that. (In case it needs saying: it is, of course, 50% female, 50% male, give or take). And this lineup, while being more diverse than we've come to expect, is still 93.5% white, compared to 87% in the UK population as a whole.

Which doesn't sound so bad, but does mean that if you're attending QCon, and you're non-white, and hoping to see non-white speakers, then instead of the 16-ish speakers you should expect to see, you in fact see only 8; only half of what it should be.

78% male. 93.5% white.

In this sector, however, 22% female counts as so far above the norm that it won't have happened by accident, which implies that the organisers took deliberate steps to include more women, which implies that they care about diversity — which is great. But at the same time we all need to recognise that it's still not enough, and we should demand more.

The audience

The organisers don't collect the diversity profile of the audience, so that information is harder to assess quantitatively.

I tried two different (but similar) ways of measuring the audience diversity, and I admit, both methods are highly unscientific. Firstly, as I sat waiting for the keynote, I just looked around at the people sat nearest to me. Secondly, I took a photo of a larger area of the audience, and counted faces later.

Doing a quick sample of the 50 people sat around me while we waited for Friday's keynote, it looks like about 16% female, 84% male. Which again, is a long way away from 50/50, and it's notably even more skewed than the speaker line-up.

As for white / non-white: again, based on the people sat around me: roughly 88% white, 12% non-white. So actually, on this highly unscientific sample, this one's pretty much on-target, matching the figures for the UK population as a whole.

The count of faces in the photo came to 82 white male, 5 non-white male, 2 white female, 3 non-white female. That is, 95% male, 91% white.

On inclusion

I noticed before the conference started that QCon publishes a code of conduct, and it's nice and clear, concise, and good to see. And with one exception, I neither witnessed nor heard of any harassment or anything else that would violate the code of conduct.

We'll come to the exception later.

People with special mobility requirements were pretty well catered for (but it was hard to work out how to get to the 6th floor). Several people noted how the speakers would be using “she” or “her” more, to refer to actors in their stories (such as: “Your CTO says <x> and she knows what she's talking about…”), instead of just thoughtlessly going with male as the default. Speakers' slides would include little stick figures to represent people — and those stick figures were often women.

All in all, a huge step (compared to tech industry norms) in the right direction. Sadly, the free tee-shirts being given away by the sponsors were obviously not made for women.

And, then… the exception.

On-stage transphobia and its effects

Just before the keynote on the last day, one of the track hosts, John T Davies, made transphobic remarks whilst on stage. It only took a few seconds, but in that moment, much of the good work that QCon had done was very quickly undone: I no longer felt completely welcome, or safe, or included. I felt threatened. At risk.

During the next presentation, I saw the official twitter account post an apology.

In the mid-morning break, I went to speak to the organisers on a different matter, but ended up talking to them about the on-stage comment. I spoke to Silke D'Alessandro, and we were joined by Floyd and Roxanne, founders of InfoQ, and Nitin Bharti; and it was very reassuring to see their obvious concern over the incident, and to see their commitment to diversity and inclusion. They said that they'd spoken to Mr Davies about the incident, and that ahead of his own talk this afternoon, he'd make an on-stage apology.

This conversation was great to have, but at the same time, it's not why I came to QCon: I was here for the conference. So I felt frustrated that, because of what was said on stage, I felt unable to participate in this part of the conference, because of this unwanted distraction.

I joined the next session late (having missed the first half); had lunch, ate alone, my head still full of these distractions. I went for a walk outside, just to forget this, to be an anonymous tourist for half an hour.

Back at the conference for the afternoon, and the next two talks went well. For the third afternoon slot, I popped along to see Mr Davies give his on-stage apology (before I would then quickly switch rooms to go to the talk I actually wanted to hear). Unfortunately, for whatever reason, his apology came across as diminishing and insincere.

I went to talk to the organisers again, to point out that the apology was not good enough. In fact, the apology itself was harmful. And all credit to them: once again, Floyd, Roxanne and Silke said all the right things, completely understood the problem, and said that they'd be taking further action.

I thanked them, and left. But by this point I was furious. I went to hide, to vent, to calm down. As a result of just a few seconds of offensive content on stage this morning, I was missing a significant proportion of the conference.

I managed to catch to the last talk of the day, and then, there was just one more item on the schedule: “Meet the speakers”, where the conference hosts and speakers are encouraged to mingle with the other delegates, and chat, share ideas, be creative. And it occurs to me: one of those other speakers is Mr Davies. Am I ready for that?

I seriously consider just going home. After all, there are no more talks. I could just slip away: many other people are doing so. I could too.

But I shouldn't have to. I came for the conference. This is why I'm here.

Meeting the speakers — and more

So I went. I grabbed a beer. I mingled.

Unlike the other “networking opportunities” — the coffee breaks, lunch, and so forth — where the mingling seems quite random, here it seemed far from random.

A lovely lady named Vanessa came up to me, to talk about this morning's incident. We compared notes about this conference, and past conferences, and how women are treated in the industry.

Then Roy Rapoport (of Netflix; this morning's keynote speaker) found me, and again, we're talking about the transphobia, comparing notes. About how he heard the comments, just before he was due to go on stage, so has to choose: make reference to it on stage, or act as if nothing happened? (He chose the latter, and I don't blame him). About he felt offended by the remarks too.

Then Floyd Marinescu (InfoQ) again, this time asking if I'm prepared to meet with Mr Davies. I know it could well be constructive to do so; and I know it's also fine if I say no. Even as I weigh up the decision, right there and then, I can feel the emotion, the anger, the frustration, the fear welling up in me: I'm still far too emotional about it, and so I decline.

Then I do some proper mingling: back to what the conference is meant to be about. At last.

As things are thinning out, I met with someone — who I shan't name — involved with organising the conference, who offered an opinion on Mr Davies' prospects of being invited back again. Enough said.

Then, finally, just as I'm leaving, another lady (whose name I didn't get) comes up to me, and again, it's to ask about the incident this morning. So we chat, I do my best to explain what happened, and about some of the following chain of events.

And then, the conference is over. Finally, it's time to go home.

Fallout

InfoQ's commitment to diversity at QCon is clear, and is to be congratulated. I wish that more conferences and events were like this.

But, transphobia was on stage. On show.

Make no mistake: incidents like this are exactly why diversity struggles in STEM fields. It drives people away.

What frustrates me so much about this is the uneven effect that such incidents have: I'm assuming that of the 1400 or so people attending, approximately 1399 of them didn't then spend a significant proportion of the day not focusing on the conference because of this.

Straight White Male is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

The closer you are to being a cis straight white male — the more the existing biases of the technology sector pander to you — then the less likely you are to find something that offends you, the more likely you can just get on with your job.

So the transphobia, on the whole, won't have upset non-trans people, and they'd have been able to get on with their day as normal. In fact, they might not have even noticed that there was a problem.

In contrast, as a direct result of the incident on stage, I missed a huge chunk of two talks, was greatly distracted from the others, missed several of the breaks and other opportunities to network, and even the “meet the speakers” mostly consisted of people wanting to talk to me about the transphobia — not about technology, which is nominally what we're all there for.

What next?

The diversity at QCon, compared to the industry as a whole, was good, so it's clear that InfoQ are trying. At the same time, I believe they can try harder: 78% male is still too high, and they are in a position to change that.

I'll admit, I was disappointed to see so few people speak up about the transphobia. If you see it, call it out. Speak up. Take action. Even if the offence isn't directly at you, it affects you, because it negatively affects diversity, and we all know that diversity — that is, having the make-up of the people in the industry reflect the make-up of the population as a whole — is a good thing.

Will I go back to QCon in future? Probably. The conference was well-run, with good content, and InfoQ's commitment to diversity is clear to see, not only from the speaker line-up, but also from their reaction to the unfortunate event of Friday morning.

But in future, can we get women's tee-shirts too? That'd be just great :-)

Update, Monday 9th March: On Friday, Floyd sent me Mr Davies' written apology, asking for my thoughts. I'm sad to say that this written apology was deeply troubling in its tone — "completely unacceptable" is I think also accurate.

March 8th is International Women's Day, celebrating the achievements of all women and calling for greater equality. Together we can make it happen.

Source for the speaker list: the QCon web site