Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

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I noticed this post from a few days ago, but I think instructive to talk about. And this is not picking on James; I think it's likely that there are many folk who have similar perceptions, and I think it's useful to think about.

On 4/12/13 3:37 PM, James Polk wrote:

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.

Your "eyeballing" had you put the ratio at about 70:1. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a common view. However, when the whole diversity conversation started, a few people quickly scanned through attendance lists just to do a guesstimate of the actual ratios over the past 10 years. They were seeing rates somewhere between 10:1 and 18:1 (with so much variability due to guessing on the basis of names), and it's seemed pretty consistent over the last 10 years. Over the past 5 years, the ratio of Nomcom members (randomly selected from the community) is about 10:1, which is consistent with those numbers.

That's a factor of between 4 and 7 difference between an "eyeball" guess and a rough calculation. I think that's likely an unintentional sampling bias of your (and many other folks) eyeballs. And I think it's because we have a tendency to subconsciously discount the numbers of people who do not appear in leadership, or even simply don't behave "the way the rest of us do".

This isn't to say that we should spend all of our time on this question by collecting statistics; that's just navel gazing. But we do want to understand the nature of the problem and not let our guesses and subconscious biases get in the way.

pr

--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478





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