Pete:
Your "eyeballing" had you put the ratio at about (snip)
FWIW, I took a database of first names, added a little piece of code on my
document statistics page to guess genders to calculate aggregate numbers. I get
results such as 13% of recent RFCs having female authors. Perhaps inline with
some of the eyeballing numbers from this thread. (Details in
http://www.arkko.com/tools/docstats.html - btw it does *not* retain
per-individual information anywhere). However, there are a number of caveats.
To begin with, there's a horrible 20-30% recognised error rate (unclassified
names). And an unknown unrecognised error rate. And I looked at the recognised
errors, and was able to tell my computer a few more names that it should
recognise, but not much. Secondly, the situation is getting worse. Early RFCs
were often unrecognisable, since first names were abbreviated. Then it got
better, but now it is getting worse, drafts have a >30% recognised error rate.
My theory is that our participation gets more international, and the databases
that we can find for this sort of thing tend not to be so good with
international names. I'm guessing participant lists would be worse than drafts.
My conclusion is that it is difficult to come up with numbers either by
eyeballing or data mining. Information from registration (country,
newcomer/not, gender) might be useful from this perspective. But see below.
Anyway, enough with engineering the measurements for now. I think some of these
numbers are interesting, but only from a trend perspective, not in their
absolute value or comparison to other numbers. We should get back to discussing
how we can "encourage more talented people to participate", as Ted put it. That
is the important thing. Clearly, we like engineering. Obviously I went for it
as well. But we should recognise that measurements are just a tiny detail. The
best we could hope for is that a couple of years down the road we could pat
ourselves in the back for making an improvement that is actually visible in the
measurements. But that's it.
Jari