RE: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

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The perception is important.
It probably shows many things including "attendance is not participation".

Just for the completely unscientific hell of it, I just counted up the mic-sex
in CCAMP's marathon meetings in Orlando. I counted minuted interventions and
presentations. I counted each intervention in a conversation.

I found a ratio of 7 male to 1 female.

This proves nothing.

Adrian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pete
> Resnick
> Sent: 18 April 2013 16:29
> To: James Polk
> Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?
> 
> 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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