--On Monday, October 1, 2018 12:45 -0800 Melinda Shore
<melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
>...
Melinda,
I knew that was a badly flawed example. You have just pointed
out one of several reasons why. In my defense, it isn't an
example I (as one of those white, North American, heterosexual,
male types) made up. It came, as accurately as I can remember,
out of a conversation among several rather experienced women in
computing at which I had the unique advantage of being the only
male present. No one, least of all me, doubts that the
experience is still different, but part of the argument was that
they, because of years of industry experience that they have
survived, couldn't claim to accurately represent women in
general or even a cross-section of women starting in the
industry. Of course, given a choice between having them speak
for, or try to represent, those other populations of women and
either having a man do it or to have no one speak for them at
all, they would be the better choice, but it would still be one
population group trying to speak for other groups that they are
either not part of or for which they represent a corner case.
> 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.
Agree completely. See above.
> 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.
I'm actually somewhat optimistic in the medium term if we can be
as open as possible (including trying to do some recruiting as
others have suggested) to very broad and diverse (by any
quantitative or qualitative measure people can think up)
populations of newcomers. That includes continuing
improvements and how we try to do mentoring. I think it
includes trying to get much more open to mostly-remote
participants in mentor roles than, e.g., the EDU team has been
in the past, if only because that might be a way to expand the
pool of potential mentors and make it more diverse.
There are still questions that I don't even know how to
formulate, much less think for which I have answers. For
example, if we have newcomers who would prefer mentors who are
"like them" on some set of dimensions but we have no candidate
mentors with both those properties and expertise in the IETF and
the technology of interest, how do we advise them about
matching? I think that they should make the choices rather than
having the choices made for them, but I'm not even completely
sure about that. It really doesn't change the matching problem
when there is no really good comprehensive match, only who is
responsible.
However I still think significant improvements lie in those
directions, even in the medium term. If that makes me more
optimistic than you are, maybe I'm just naive.
thanks,
john
