Re: Diversity of IETF Leadership

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On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <fred@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:>
> Yes, diversity is a good thing, and I'm all for it. However, I don't think it is a
> fundamental goal; the fundamental goal is (as Jari said) to get the best
> people for the job from the available talent pool. I don't know that
> political correctness automatically helps there.
>

So, I said this once before on a previous thread, but I still believe that
this analysis is wrong.  From an organiational perspective, the aim of fostering
diversity isn't "political correctness", it's enabling a larger pool
of candidates.
Here's how I put this before:

"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."

Note that this is true for many different kinds of diversity--regional,
gender, and company origin all can benefit from efforts to improve
the overall pool size of candidates.  It's also true long before we
get to the point of selecting I* folks--it is just as true for working
group chairs and other positions.  By picking competent candidates
from a variety of backgrounds, we encourage participation by those
with those backgrounds; that can be more important than a strict
stack rack among the competent candidates.

Just my personal two cents,

Ted Hardie


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