The mainstream media has picked up that within the atheist community, there’s been a growing discussion about a perceived lack of diversity among the people viewed as leaders of this movement. I’m not going to rehash the entire discussion (Ashley Miller’s 2013 article "The Non-Religious Patriarchy: Why Losing Religion HAS NOT Meant Losing White Male Dominance" provides a good starting basis) but much of it has focussed on (the important) discussions of why and how the movement should build diversity, with not as much being said about whether things are actually changing.

In the spirit of Sense About Science’s Ask For Evidence campaign (though unaffiliated in any way), Chris Hassall asked me while I was living in Leeds if I could help him research trends in diversity among the leadership of the skeptic/atheist community. It’s a question he’s been thinking about for a couple years (at least) and one I was eager to help answer (particularly being unemployed at the time).

Using as much data as I could find from Google and getting in touch with organisers, we compiled a list of 630 people who have spoken at almost 50 different conferences over the past decade. We made our best estimates of age, sex, education, and ethnicity and were able to show that diversity has increased over the study period.

Once the work was done, we submitted to the journal Secularism & Nonreligion and after some edits from the reviewers, we’re published. It’s an open source journal and our data is available through figshare for those who have novel ideas on how to reuse our work.

What did we find?

Compared to the global gender-balance of the non-religious community, significantly more of the speakers are men and more of the slots available to speak at have gone to men.

Diversity among the speakers has increased

Why is this important?

There’s been a dearth of evidence in the discussions about diversity in the atheist community. Most focuses either on personal anecdotes or specific events/people and their actions or commentary. These discussions are clearly important – personal stories tell us that sexual harassment has happened at atheist and skeptic conferences and those making sexist comments should be challenged. But to make our efforts to change things – particularly at the systematic level – we need to mirror the successes of the evidence-based medicine movement (and by extension the more recent science-based medicine movement). This should seem obvious to a community that prides itself on using reason and evidence to guide its worldview, yet such a discussion has been slow to come.

Similar thinking motivated the BC Humanists to commission a poll into the state of the broader non-religious public in BC in 2013 and I suspect it also motivated American Secular Census and the Atheist Census projects.

We hope that this paper starts a discussion on how to better use evidence in our efforts to improve the community. While the trendline is positive, there is still work to be done.

I’m hoping to follow up this work with a talk I can give at Skeptics in the Pub (or elsewhere) and possibly future investigations. I’m also happy to answer any further questions about this work. Send me an email [email protected] or leave a comment below (or on the paper itself).

Sidebar: The sad ironies

I fully recognise the irony of a sociological paper being published by a PhD in Biology and a MSc in Physics. I also realise that this is a discussion about diversity coming from two white men. Nevertheless, I hope it still proves a valuable contribution to the broader discussion and I encourage everyone to listen to people from different backgrounds with different perspectives. Comments are welcome on the paper itself and both Chris and I are eager to discuss this work further.

Reference: Hassall, C and Bushfield, I 2014. Increasing Diversity in Emerging Non-religious Communities.Secularism and Nonreligion 3:7, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/snr.as

The 67 page decision is available on the APEGA website.

So what happened?

Ladislav Mihaly was trained in (then) Czechoslovakia  and earned two Masters degrees in engineering. He applied to APEGGA to register as a professional engineer in 1999. APEGGA required Mihaly to pass a standardized engineering ethics exam (NPPE) complete three confirmatory exams and take or pass an engineering economics equivalent exam. Mihaly failed his first attempt at the NPPE and missed the makeup exam do to a car accident.

He requested a reactivation of his application in 2002, and only then claims to have been made aware that his degrees were not considered equivalent to even a bachelors in Alberta. Mihaly argued with APEGGA that his experience should allow him to waive the make-up courses and exams, as any graduate ten years out of college likely has little time, energy, or even ability to pull the random skills out they learned in college (does anyone remember how to integrate by parts). He subsequently failed his NPPE again and APEGGA withdrew his application for not writing the exams within an allotted period.

In 2006, Mihaly tried again (not being certified by APEGGA would mean that he could not work as an engineer, many in that situation end up in minimum wage and entry level jobs – think of the foreign doctor or professional driving taxis). With an updated CV, APEGGA still requested he complete the three confirmatory exams and economics course. They also rejected his one year of experience at a Calgary gas company as insufficient. He refused to write the required exams and in 2008 filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

In evaluating the credentials of foreign applicants, APEGA uses a few different criteria:

1. If they’re familiar with the university and consider it equivalent to an Albertan school, you simply take the ethics exam.
2. If they’re familiar with the university but think it’s missing some aspects, you are required to take make-up exams/courses and the ethics exam.
3. If they’ve never heard of your school, you take all the make up exams/courses and the ethics exam.

APEGA judges schools based on global “foreign degree” lists, which it shares with similar professional bodies across North America (who all have roughly similar accreditation procedures).

In coming to their decision, the Tribunal wrote:

[180] In any event, I do find that certain requirements for licensure made of Mr. Mihaly perpetuated disadvantage thus constituting substantive discrimination… The imposition of additional exams or requirements without appropriate individualized assessment or the necessary flexibility, restricts the ability of immigrants to work in their respective professions and continues to perpetuate disadvantage in these groups. … While I understand that the imposition of policies to ensure competency and safety in professional fields may be necessary, the nature of certain policies imposed by APEGGA on immigrants such as Mr. Mihaly with foreign credentials, appear too restrictive and categorizes immigrants, not based on individual assessment, but rather on the country from which qualifications were received.

…

[201] In my view, this process [of using foreign degree lists], which relies mostly upon secondary sources of information and global criteria, is a poor substitute for directly assessing the education of IEGs who come from different countries. Such an assessment has the potential for significant inaccuracies and has very significant effects on foreign trained engineers.

…

[211] The problem with requiring the FE exam for all candidates is that it is a one size fits all approach without taking into consideration an individual’s background, specific training and experience.

The exam is compared to a case where a competent female firefighter lost her job after a “run 2.5 km in 11 minutes” test was introduced.

The decision notes that APEGA’s “individualized assessment” is mainly a review of documents to decide what exams to give the applicant. It only looks at transcripts, resume, references, and lacks a full view of the applicant’s history, leaving it ill-suited to judge their competency. The law governing APEGA requires it to “correct a perceived academic deficiency,” yet it does this solely by assigning exams. No specific interventions or efforts to help an applicant are provided, despite the “integrative approach” specified in law.

In paragraph [222], the decision notes that despite taking the National Professional Practice Exam (NPPE) three times and failing, APEGA provided little more than a study kit. No effort was made to train Mihaly nor were alternatives suggested.

[223] The approach here is again a one size fits all approach like that taken with the FE exam. This approach is particularly unhelpful to foreign trained engineers who need assistance in understanding APEGGA process and its requirements.

APEGA argued that with 68,000 members and 1500 international applications per year, additional efforts would be too onerous on APEGA (similar arguments form the basis for their appeal). But the tribunal argues that given APEGA’s own numbers, only 375 applicants per year would require individual consideration – a not prohibitively large number for a group as wealthy as APEGA.

Mihaly asked for no specific remedy from the court, except for noting his possible monetary losses due to his inability to practice as an engineer. Nevertheless, the tribunal awarded him $10,000 in damages from APEGA and demands that APEGA fully consider Mihaly’s qualifications and aid him in developing any lacking skills.

My thoughts on the case

Engineers tend to be conservative and resistive to change. APEGA has an important role to play in the safety of Albertans and no one is arguing for a relaxation of standards for engineering certifications. The current system aims to put the onerous on foreign applicants to prove their competency, while engineers trained in Alberta schools benefit from a more straightforward path. Discrepancies will always exist though between jurisdictions with different priorities, so some test must be applied.

In its current state, the tribunal found that APEGA did the least it possibly could in judging foreign applicants. It relied on second-hand standardized rankings of international schools, gave standardized tests to applicants, and offered little to no help in studying for those tests. Those with inadequate training are required to take make-up courses, which ignore potential on-the-job experience that might make up for any gaps.

The tribunal is not calling on APEGA to throw out their standards or even radically change them. Simply to take into account individual circumstances with honesty and integrity. By blanket-assessing all foreign applicants into a minimal number of possible paths, and without providing support to those who require it, APEGA puts barriers in place for applicants from less wealthy countries.

These barriers may not be insurmountable for all but their existence is a form of discrimination and having made no effort to remedy it, I side entirely with the Tribunal.

Broader comments

In almost every court case I read of in the media, the issue tends to get parsed down to sound bites. In this case a racist professional association versus a lazy foreigner who didn’t want to jump through the proper hoops.

The truth is always much more complicated than that though. I just wrote over a thousand words on a case that spans 67 pages. And in that case a lot of detail is fleshed out.  And in almost every case, I find myself in full agreement with the judge’s reasoning. When you go through the arguments, considered logically and based on the principles of fundamental human rights, it should at least be understandable, if not agreeable.

And of course, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that APEGA has acted in this way and intends to appeal the decision, having dealt with similar organisational inertia in my protest of the Iron Ring ceremony (which involves the same people but is not officially a part of APEGA). Hopefully this brings about some discussion amongst the membership and puts some pressure on APEGA to consider how to develop more inclusive procedures.

From the reports, it sounds like Ian Harris was funny and a hit.

Unfortunately, the host for the evening at Yuk Yuk’s, the comedy club that hosted the event, was less humorous: discussing rape, ranting about feminists, and generally complaining about half* of the human species. When his ‘jokes’ fell flat, he suggested men would pretend to not find them funny or boo him just to get laid.

This line isn’t unfamiliar to anyone who tries to defend their jokes against the “politically correct police” or the liberal censorship brigade.

What it misses though is one of the keys to good comedy and satire: The targets of your jokes should be at least as well off as you.

Consider the medieval court jester. This ancient comedian’s job was not to mock the poor and destitute but to provide some relief to them by satirizing the nobility.

Jokes and comedy are a means of social equalizing. We make fun of ourselves, those like us, and poke fun at those in positions of privilege relative to us.

When the jokes are used the other way – when the rich mock the poor, when men make fun of female stereotypes, when white people joke about Asians or people of colour, etc. – it’s merely another form of oppression. Making fun of someone beneath you is pathetic. It’s kicking someone when their down.

There’s a human need to cheer for the underdog. We like it when our team comes from a few points behind to win and feel outraged when a dictator prosecutes their citizens. Similarly, the most effective comedy breaks down privilege and gives the otherwise disadvantaged a chance to stand up for themselves.

Aim your jokes up, otherwise you just look like a dick.

*Approximately