On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 10:43 AM, John C Klensin <john-i...@jck.com> wrote:
"But, even a step or two in the direction of promoting or preferring less-able women in order to make IETF bodies more diverse would be likely to result in shooting ourselves in our collective feet." I think the analysis here is subtly wrong. If you have two candidates who can clearly do the job, it seems to imply that you should always still stack rank them and pick the higher ranked. But that's a very local optimization. Efforts to increase to diversity are a very different optimization--by making more visible that opportunities are present for all, these initiatives attempt to increase the pool of talent over time. If people who would previously have left a field stay or folks who had not thought of entering a field do so, that field wins. The scale of that win can be the field of "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math" or it can be "working group leadership" or "the IETF". But a bigger pool of talent to draw from is a big win for almost any sized field. regards, Ted Hardie
