Dear Malcom, Thank you for your input to the gender diversity discussion after the LT presentation of Shane.
Sharing of ideas and concerns, and followup discussion are very welcome to define more clearly and precisely the goals we try to achieve. Having said this, we want to reply on one part of your feedback in which you formulate a concern. On 24/10/2016 17:52, Malcolm Hutty wrote: > I do take issue with the speaker's personal claim that we should aim to > "be better than our industry" and that we should measure success by > whether female participation more closely matched 50% than matched > female participation in our industry. And I'm worried by his call for > the programme committee to act to move us in that direction. > > I think we all know where this is going; we've all seen this kind of > gender politics in other spheres. This assumption is not what was meant with "be better than our industry". In our aim for more diversity, the PC will not choose submissions from women over better quality submissions. Speaking purely on program selection: we have not and do not intend to do that. Our goal is to reach a better diversity in submissions; more diversity in the final selection should follow from that automatically. We hope that we are inclusive of women currently, and thus have a similar female:male ratio as we do in our industry. It has been mentioned that we did in the past, but we shouldn't take it as a given. To improve our industry's ratio (and as consequence our own ratio), we believe that this is the truly valuable cause to have. The example mentioned in the presentation showed how PyCon was successful to attract more women by drawing in more women into the industry first (more specifically into the Python language). This also resulted in higher attendance ratio of women at the PyCon conference (reflecting the Python community/industry). Efforts spent here are not lost, as it benefits the community as a whole and has long term results. But we realize this is a big task. Regards, the RIPE PC -- Benno J. Overeinder NLnet Labs http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/
