On 10/1/18 12:30 PM, John C Klensin wrote: > In some respects, that > may be another problem -- I've heard the argument that, to > succeed in engineering fields, women need to behave more like > men. Having not had the experience, I don't know whether that > is true. I've fairly sure that, as requirements go, it is > undesirable to interpret "try to be sure there are women" into > "it is ok to satisfy that criterion exclusively with women who > have behaved "like men" (whatever that means) all of their > careers. As enlightening as it nearly always is to overhear men discuss women in computing, it seems to me that there are times an intervention is called for, as in this case. With all due respect, John, these comments reflect some fairly widespread yet still peculiar notions around gender. For starters, while heaven knows that the very last thing that I want to see on an IETF mailing list is people trying to define what it is to behave like a man, the above comment is meaningless without a shared understanding of what "behave more like a man" means (AND NO, THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO HAVE THAT DISCUSSION). But more to the point, a woman who behaves "like men" is still a woman, has still been treated like a woman, and has the experience of being a woman. I am not optimistic about making progress on diversity issues in the IETF over the shorter because we will never be able to come to consensus on these issues. On the other hand I am optimistic about it in the longer term (albeit possibly much longer term) because of that arc of history thing. Soldier on, Melinda -- Melinda Shore melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx Software longa, hardware brevis
