--On Friday, May 04, 2012 11:01 -0700 Ted Hardie
<ted(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:43 AM, John C Klensin
<john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
"But, even a step or two in the direction of promoting or
preferring less-able women in order to make IETF bodies more
diverse would be likely to result in shooting ourselves in our
collective feet."
I think the analysis here is subtly wrong. If you have two
candidates who can clearly do the job, it seems to imply that
you should always still stack rank them and pick the higher
ranked. But that's a very local optimization.
Efforts to increase to diversity are a very different
optimization--by making more visible that opportunities are
present for all, these initiatives attempt to increase the
pool of talent over time. If people who would previously have
left a field stay or folks who had not thought of entering a
field do so, that field wins. The scale of that win can be
the field of "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math" or it
can be "working group leadership" or "the IETF". But a bigger
pool of talent to draw from is a big win for almost any sized
field.
Ted,
I completely agree with that way of looking at things. I was
reacting to something else --not a choice between "two
candidates who can clearly do the job" but to models that easily
can (and in some demonstrable cases in communities close to
ours, clearly have) shifted past that and into scoring systems
in which so much weight is given to diversity (by some measure)
that significantly less-qualified people --people who would be
unlikely to do as good a job or even an adequate one-- are
chosen in preference to more qualified ones who do not satisfy
the diversity criteria.
I don't think the IETF wants to go there. I'm reluctant to get
into name-calling by identifying examples of organizations
on-list that interact with the IETF that have gone down that
path, but will do so in private if needed.
john