The perception is important. It probably shows many things including "attendance is not participation".
Just for the completely unscientific hell of it, I just counted up the mic-sex in CCAMP's marathon meetings in Orlando. I counted minuted interventions and presentations. I counted each intervention in a conversation. I found a ratio of 7 male to 1 female. This proves nothing. Adrian > -----Original Message----- > From: ietf-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:ietf-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Pete > Resnick > Sent: 18 April 2013 16:29 > To: James Polk > Cc: ietf@ietf.org > Subject: Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration? > > I noticed this post from a few days ago, but I think instructive to talk > about. And this is not picking on James; I think it's likely that there > are many folk who have similar perceptions, and I think it's useful to > think about. > > On 4/12/13 3:37 PM, James Polk wrote: > > > 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. > > Your "eyeballing" had you put the ratio at about 70:1. I wouldn't be > surprised if this was a common view. However, when the whole diversity > conversation started, a few people quickly scanned through attendance > lists just to do a guesstimate of the actual ratios over the past 10 > years. They were seeing rates somewhere between 10:1 and 18:1 (with so > much variability due to guessing on the basis of names), and it's seemed > pretty consistent over the last 10 years. Over the past 5 years, the > ratio of Nomcom members (randomly selected from the community) is about > 10:1, which is consistent with those numbers. > > That's a factor of between 4 and 7 difference between an "eyeball" guess > and a rough calculation. I think that's likely an unintentional sampling > bias of your (and many other folks) eyeballs. And I think it's because > we have a tendency to subconsciously discount the numbers of people who > do not appear in leadership, or even simply don't behave "the way the > rest of us do". > > This isn't to say that we should spend all of our time on this question > by collecting statistics; that's just navel gazing. But we do want to > understand the nature of the problem and not let our guesses and > subconscious biases get in the way. > > pr > > -- > Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/> > Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478
