Andrew Sullivan <ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 06:22:17PM -0800, Melinda Shore wrote:
to be the best. Pretty much every organization that applauds
itself for its meritocratic reward structure (to the extent
that an I* gig is a "reward") and yet only advances white
guys says the same thing.
Speaking only personally, I tend to agree with the above. Despite my
earlier remark that I think it'd be good to get a rough idea about the
size of the problem, I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm
particularly worried that I'm going to get to live through a repeat
experience. The following is a cautionary tale, cartoonish but not so
far from the way I observed it.
In the parts of Canada where I lived in the 1990s, philosophy
departments (which had truly abysmal numbers of female faculty)
decided there was a shortage of female faculty -- despite the "facts"
that they'd always promoted only the best, were all sooper-rational
detached unbiased people, and so on. The problem was, of course, made
considerably worse by the tenure system, which (owing to the quirks of
the historic expansion of departments) meant that an overwhelming
number of tenured faculty were roughly the same age. In any case, the
Canadian Philosophical Association and, correspondingly, most
departments decided to adopt a principle that, whenever there was an
open spot, if there were two qualified people and one of them was a
woman, the woman should be chosen.
You can imagine the effect. A large number of (usually in my
experience truly mediocre) male PhDs concluded that the only reason
they didn't get a tenured job was because there were "quotas". (It
certainly had nothing to do with the overabundance of mediocre PhDs in
philosophy.) Meanwhile, any woman who wasn't doing things from a
feminist perspective was automatically pegged as some sort of toady
trying to get in good with the patriarchy in order to get her portion
of the quota. Deeply sexist men who went around enforcing the
"girls do girl-philsophy, not this hard stuff I do" could congratulate
themselves for being open minded and non-sexist, even if they made
jaw-droppingly obscene remarks to female students. The entire
atmosphere was poisoned. None of this was the reason I quit my
doctoral program (I was one of the mediocrities), but it sure didn't
count as a reason to stay.
The only lesson I really learned from that experience is that it is
incredibly hard for women[1] to be treated as adult colleagues in an
environment that acts overwhelmingly as a white male club. I still
have no idea how to do anything about it except to try to be super
attentive to the problem all the time. That's why I'd like us to have
an idea of roughly how badly we're doing: then we can pay attention to
our weaknesses in an effort to turn such attention into a strength.
[1] In this case, but I actually think this generalizes to other
groups pretty well.
I've seen similar things in other contexts too. I'd suggest turning the
question around. I don't think the question of if there is bias or not is
reasonably measurable.
There is also a reasonable body of evidence that people who are in a small
minority will tend to feel unwelcome regardless of if there are any actual bias
or barriers.
Rather the engage in navel gazing about bias detection, engage in finding ways
to engage in encouraging more participation from ${group}.
The question to ask is "What can the IETF do to be more open/inviting?"
Scott K