On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Margaret Wasserman
<mrw(_at_)lilacglade(_dot_)org>wrote:
Hi Stewart,
On Mar 20, 2013, at 2:04 AM, Stewart Bryant <stbryant(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Age
Disability
Gender reassignment
Marriage and civil partnership
Pregnancy and maternity
Race
Religion and belief
Sex
Sexual orientation
The U.S. has a similar (although not identical) list, and it may vary a
bit state-by-state.
If we are going to have an itemized list of diversity characteristics,
we should not pick and choose, we should include the full list.
While I certainly wouldn't suggest we start discriminating based on _any_
of these factors, it is very difficult to measure our results in some of
these areas, as we do not collect this information from IETF attendees, nor
do we publish the age, disability status, gender status, marital status,
religion or sexual orientation of our I* members.
I am not suggesting that we start collecting or publishing this
information, just saying that it makes it hard to tell whether our
leadership is reasonably representative of the community in some of these
areas.
I would say that in this case we are almost surely automatically fair:
while one can suspect that gender or geographical origin could add a bias
(even an unwanted one), if I do not know the, say, sexual orientation of a
candidate, I cannot discriminate (even on a subconscious level) using that
information.
Also, I think there are some area where diversity is important to the IETF
that are not on this list, like geographic location, corporate affiliation
and industry segment (vendor, operator, researcher, etc.).
Margaret