On 4/27/12 11:24 AM, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
I don't even know if the lack of female attendance at the IETF is a problem, because I don't know how our percentages map to the percentage of female networking engineers in the industry, or to the percentage of females who attend other major standards organizations, like the IEEE or the 3GPP. We are an engineering organization, so I wouldn't expect us to be half women, because there are a lot more male engineers than female ones.
Well, that's a problem. It's a problem that's out-of-scope for the IETF, but it's a problem. I've generally found the IETF to be a positive environment for women (remember Allison's women's lunches?) and in lo, these many years I've been participating I can only think of one incident that was clearly sexist (and that was just a few months ago) and only think of one that made me wonder. Other than that it's been copacetic, mostly, I think, because the leadership does seem to try to be mindful about this stuff. It's easy not to be, so all honor to whom honor is due, etc. etc. etc. Melinda