On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Karen Sue Rolph <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear colleagues, > > I hope someone with survey design experience will be at this event and > collect data on how many mothers manage to attend this event. We need to > know whether women have adult or young children, and whether they are single > parents, their ethnicity, and professional training. This will provide > truly useful data, if done scientifically. I can help write an instrument > if called upon to do so. Let us not overlook single parent fathers and > alternative parents. My hypothesis is that there will be extremely few of > any of these. Dads (in some ethnicities) get a social 'bonus' for being > parents (increased social status), unlike mothers, so its important to > distinguish clearly who is supporting and raising children, not just having > parented and kids exist in the world kinds of data.
FYI, every event for women in open technology and culture that I have attended where we asked for this information had a very low rate of women who were parents - around 5%. At the Ada Initiative, we believe we must include women with children in our mission. Since one of our co-founders has a small child, we are aware of at least some of the challenges involved in having children and participating in open technology and culture. This is one of the reasons that the Ada Initiative is providing free childcare to AdaCamp attendees, although we only had one person apply in time for the deadline to register for childcare. We plan to advertise it better in the future. Childcare has turned out to be fairly easy to provide, and we hope to be able to help other conferences provide childcare in the future. -VAL -- Increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture http://adainitiative.org _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
