On Wed, March 20, 2013 7:16 am, Jorge Contreras wrote:
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 6:53 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.
I would strongly recommend that legal counsel be consulted before any such
"list" is produced or used by IETF/IESG/Nomcom. (FYI, this is totally
outside my own area of legal expertise, so IAOC would need to incur some
expense to hire competent counsel in this area)
Great, now the lawyers are getting involved. A sure sign this has gone
way too far.
The factors listed above are those that an employer cannot discriminate
on. It says nothing about diversity or the alleged benefits that diversity
brings to a group. For example, a company is prohibited from not hiring
someone because he or she is Catholic but it does not mean that the
company must work to have some arbitrary percentage of Catholics in
leadership positions or among the general workforce.
Absent any evidence of discrimination there is Disparate Impact
Theory which says that the mere fact that a process produces a result
that does not satisfy an arbitrary goal with respect to a protected
group is justification for actively discriminating in favor of that
protected group to "balance" it all out. I really, really hope that is
not where we are going in the IETF. It would wreck this organization
if we had a committee that performed such a blatantly political activity.
If that is not where the IETF is going, then the categories listed above
should not have anything to do with selection of candidates for leadership
positions. It doesn't matter to the IETF if the candidate is a disabled,
pregnant, lesbian, Wiccan. What matters to the IETF is whether the
candidate is qualified.
Dan.