At 02:11 PM 4/12/2013, Melinda Shore wrote:
And I don't know if you intended to or not, but what you
communicated is "The best candidates are nearly always
western white guys," since that's who's being selected.
That's a problematic suggestion.
I respect you, Melinda. I think you are smarter and more technically
and philosophically qualified than me.
Having said that, what Lou asked was an honest question, yet you
seemed to take it in the worst possible way. I'd say each of us is
likely bringing our own baggage to how we each look at this
'problem', if there is a problem at all (which doesn't appear to be
universally agreed upon).
"since that's who's being selected" is a biased observation in and of
itself. That's saying that because of the outcome, there "has to be
bias" to skew the results this way - because it's the only logical
explanation that could answer these results. My BS-meter is pegging
into the red on that one.
The nomcom isn't randomly picking hats in a crowd. They are picking
talent of those that have volunteered to serve. At any given time
there could be 1 or 2 or 5 women how volunteered to server at
particular AD slot, but there might be 1 "white guy" that is more
qualified. From the audience at any plenary - that could appear "the
fix is in" to ace out the women, but clearly (in this hypothetical
example) it's not the case at all.
Eyeballing the IETF (and I've missed 2 meetings since IETF45, been a
WG chair for 8 years, and written or revised over 300 submitted IDs)
there is consistently about a 70-to-1 ratio of men to women.
I'd observe that this is likely the case of hurt feelings rather than
unqualified males achieving the AD position in lieu of more qualified
females - especially in the face of these rough ratio approximations.
I believe "we" need to reduce that ratio, and am for anything that
increases the number of (qualified) women in this engineering
organization. I am against artificially forcing the nomcom to
implement a quota system to overcome low participation numbers of any
diversity aspect.
Admittedly, I'm only teasing out the male/female diversity facet, and
not any other the other - equally deserving diversity criteria.
James