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Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

2013-04-12 15:06:10
Hi Spencer,
At 07:38 12-04-2013, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
I was just checking the math.

I understand. :-)

I couldn't possibly say what "good" means, and I'm interested in better understanding what "diverse" means, to this, ummm, at least somewhat diverse community ...

There is an underlying uneasiness. It has probably been there for a while. Five women went to the microphone to openly raise an issue. Some individuals from the IETF community understood that the issue would not go away. The word "diverse" is currently used as a placeholder for the issue. I asked [1] the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC) what their definition of "diversity" is as, as good engineers, the IAOC [2] would like to measure it.

Hannes Tschofenig once said that "nowadays everyone claims to be open and transparent" [3]. What was visible at a plenary was that there was one woman within a group of men facing a larger group in which there are only a few women. There was also something else which was visible. My guess is that it is a case of what I say and what I do are two different things.

Douglas Otis mentioned that "outcomes, good or bad, are often influenced by groups sharing a common interest. Important questions should attempt to measure whether these interests reflect those of the larger Internet communities" [4].

Let's take IAOC members as an example. NomCom chose two men from the United States. The IAB chose a man from the United States. The IESG chose a man from the United States. The ISOC Board of Trustees chose a man from the United States. There is a chart of IETF attendance by regions for the last seven meetings. There isn't any publicly available information about attendance by men and women. It's going to be difficult to argue that the IAOC reflects the interests of the IETF community unless a very large number of participants are men from the United States.

There hasn't been a woman on the IESG since 2009. The last time there were two women on the IESG was in 2005. There has been one or two women on the IAB over the years.

p.s. And I wasn't trying to be snarky about the math. I blew the percentages in the first draft of my response, so I know it happens to the best of us :-)

Don't worry about that, I did not read it as snarky or anything negative. :-)

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78592.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78551.html
3. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg62409.html
4. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78603.html