At 02:11 PM 4/12/2013, Melinda Shore wrote:
And I don't know if you intended to or not, but what you communicated is "The best candidates are nearly always western white guys," since that's who's being selected. That's a problematic suggestion.
I respect you, Melinda. I think you are smarter and more technically and philosophically qualified than me.
Having said that, what Lou asked was an honest question, yet you seemed to take it in the worst possible way. I'd say each of us is likely bringing our own baggage to how we each look at this 'problem', if there is a problem at all (which doesn't appear to be universally agreed upon).
"since that's who's being selected" is a biased observation in and of itself. That's saying that because of the outcome, there "has to be bias" to skew the results this way - because it's the only logical explanation that could answer these results. My BS-meter is pegging into the red on that one.
The nomcom isn't randomly picking hats in a crowd. They are picking talent of those that have volunteered to serve. At any given time there could be 1 or 2 or 5 women how volunteered to server at particular AD slot, but there might be 1 "white guy" that is more qualified. From the audience at any plenary - that could appear "the fix is in" to ace out the women, but clearly (in this hypothetical example) it's not the case at all.
Eyeballing the IETF (and I've missed 2 meetings since IETF45, been a WG chair for 8 years, and written or revised over 300 submitted IDs) there is consistently about a 70-to-1 ratio of men to women.
I'd observe that this is likely the case of hurt feelings rather than unqualified males achieving the AD position in lieu of more qualified females - especially in the face of these rough ratio approximations.
I believe "we" need to reduce that ratio, and am for anything that increases the number of (qualified) women in this engineering organization. I am against artificially forcing the nomcom to implement a quota system to overcome low participation numbers of any diversity aspect.
Admittedly, I'm only teasing out the male/female diversity facet, and not any other the other - equally deserving diversity criteria.
James