--On Friday, May 04, 2012 11:01 -0700 Ted Hardie <ted.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:43 AM, John C Klensin > <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > "But, even a step or two in the direction of promoting or > preferring less-able women in order to make IETF bodies more > diverse would be likely to result in shooting ourselves in our > collective feet." > I think the analysis here is subtly wrong. If you have two > candidates who can clearly do the job, it seems to imply that > you should always still stack rank them and pick the higher > ranked. But that's a very local optimization. > > Efforts to increase to diversity are a very different > optimization--by making more visible that opportunities are > present for all, these initiatives attempt to increase the > pool of talent over time. If people who would previously have > left a field stay or folks who had not thought of entering a > field do so, that field wins. The scale of that win can be > the field of "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math" or it > can be "working group leadership" or "the IETF". But a bigger > pool of talent to draw from is a big win for almost any sized > field. Ted, I completely agree with that way of looking at things. I was reacting to something else --not a choice between "two candidates who can clearly do the job" but to models that easily can (and in some demonstrable cases in communities close to ours, clearly have) shifted past that and into scoring systems in which so much weight is given to diversity (by some measure) that significantly less-qualified people --people who would be unlikely to do as good a job or even an adequate one-- are chosen in preference to more qualified ones who do not satisfy the diversity criteria. I don't think the IETF wants to go there. I'm reluctant to get into name-calling by identifying examples of organizations on-list that interact with the IETF that have gone down that path, but will do so in private if needed. john