Subject: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:11:28 -0400

All

The IETF is concerned about diversity.  As good engineers, we would like
to attempt to measure diversity while working on addressing and increasing
it.  To that end, we are considering adding some possibly sensitive
questions to the registration process, for example, gender.  Of course,
they need not be answered and would be clearly labeled as optional.

The IAOC would like to hear from the community on this proposal.  It plans to 
make a decision on its 18 April call in order to make the changes in time for the 
Berlin registration and will consider all input received by 17 April.  

Thanks for your feedback.

Ray
IAD

---

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:17:14 -0400

And please direct your comments to [email-masked]

Thanks

Ray

---

From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:17:30 -0300

I see no harm in including these type of question as optional.
Personally I do not care if it were mandatory but I think that the most
sensible thing to do is to add it as optional.

	It would be also good to see the complete set of questions.

	So, I support.

Regards,
as

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:45:04 -0700

On 4/11/2013 8:11 AM, Ray Pelletier wrote:
>      we are considering adding some possibly sensitive
> questions to the registration process, for example, gender.
...
> The IAOC would like to hear from the community on this proposal.

The world has quite a bit of experience with such survey efforts.  Done 
well, they can be helpful; done poorly that can be extremely 
problematic.  It is very easy to pursue this poorly and the IETF has no 
experience with this activity.

I encourage the IAOC to seek the services of an appropriate expert, to 
assist in the formulation and use of such questions.

d/

-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:00:45 -0700

Given how in my understanding, a key concern is really a perceived or real
diversity bias in IETF leadership, if you do add questions about diversity, please also add
the following questions. In fact, i think it would help the nomcom process to ask
these questions whether or not you also ask about diversity.

[Y/N] I understand the job requirements for an IESG member
[Y/N] I understand the job requirements for an IAB member
[Y/N] I consider myself qualified for an IESG/IAB position and I am willing to serve.
[XX]  How many hours per week does an IESG member need to spend on average on the job ?

Explanation:

The first three question could allow based on self assessment to evaluate whether
IETF leadership is biased based on diversity stats or not. Without these questions
i am sure somebody would come up with stats that simply map diversity of existing
leadership to the diversity stats of the community responding during registration.
Of course, self-assessment is not ideal, but much better than nothing.

Question number 4 is just a simple checksum question to assess if there was a mistake
in answering the prior three questions.

In addion of course  the generic questions i miss on almost every questionaire:

[ ] How much did you like the questions we asked (1=useless ... 5=perfect)

Please tell us what questions we should have asked:
[ at least 4 lines by 80 characters space for replies ]

Thanks
    Toerless

-- 
---
Toerless Eckert, [email-masked]
Cisco NSSTG Systems & Technology Architecture
SDN: Let me play with the network, mommy!

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:09:34 -0800

On 4/11/2013 8:00 AM, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> IETF leadership is biased based on diversity stats or not.

There are actually several questions in there.  It
would be interesting to know how the pool of people
willing to serve in a leadership role relate to the
pool of participants.  It would also be interesting to
know how the pool of people recommended by the nomcom
relate to the pool of candidates who've accepted
nominations.  Those are two very different questions
but I think they're both good ones.

Melinda

---

From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:33:21 -0300

On 4/11/13 1:00 PM, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> if you do add questions about diversity, please also add
> the following questions.

	Please no.

	This is about the registration form, not a survey.

.as

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:54:24 -0700

When adding diversity questions to the registration form, i think there should
be a very crisp description, whom exactly this information is made available to,
and how it is meant to be used.

If the total stats for example are simply made available publically and there
are not also other stats like the ones i asked for, then the effort will just
reinforce bogus statistical claims.

---

From: "Thomas D. Nadeau" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:58:07 -0400

questions must be optional to answer too.

Tom

---

From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:19:55 -0300

Yes, but then you would end up with a large registration form that
people may decide not to complete at all.

.as

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:23:51 -0700

> questions must be optional to answer too.

Definitely.

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:55:56 -0700

That's the tail wagging the dog.

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:43:48 -0700

Hi Ray,
>they need not be answered and would be clearly labeled as optional.

   12.5 % of IAOC voting members are female.
    0.1%  of IAB members are female
    0 %   of IESG members are female.

Based on the above measurements the IAOC is more "diverse".  The IAOC 
already collects gender-related information.  The other information 
requested in the meeting registration form is strictly for meeting 
attendance purposes.  The sensitive questions referred to above have 
nothing to do with meeting attendance.

Which other individual properties would the IAOC like to measure?

Regards,
-sm

---

From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:09:00 +0000

> Berlin registration and will consider all input received by 17 April.  

Seems like I'm in a minority among responders, but I think it's a bad idea.

First, what is suggested is not a survey. It's part of the registration form. This makes it totally non-anonymous. These sensitive questions are going to be linked to name and affiliation on the form. There is good reason why such studies are always done through anonymous survey. People answer questions differently when they're anonymous vs when they're not, skewing the results. Alfred Kinsey would not have gotten the results he got in his sexuality surveys without strict anonymity for the responders. Definitely not in the 1940s.

The other issue is that this will produce statistically invalid results because of non-response bias. Non-responders may be positively or negatively correlated with several groups the survey would like to measure.

Dave Crocker suggested getting an expert. I don't think that would help. Such an expert would tell you that the questions you can ask depends on the group you are asking. Questions that would be acceptable in one country, would be inappropriate in another. In Israel people are likely to answer sensitive questions truthfully, while in Germany concern for privacy might make these questions seem too personal. So how do you fit such a questionnaire to a, well, diverse group such as meeting attendants? 

I think skewed surveys are a worse basis for planning policy than just using common sense (yes, I know that's just another name for our biases). Surveys lend a scientific aura to data that is effectively non-representative.

Yoav

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:18:49 -0500

> Dave Crocker suggested getting an expert. I don't think that would help. Such an expert would tell you that the questions you can ask depends on the group you are asking. Questions that would be ac…

OK, are you proposing an anonymous survey, unrelated to registration?

Thanks,

Spencer

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:21:10 +0000

On Apr 11, 2013, at 3:43 PM, SM <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Based on the above measurements the IAOC is more "diverse".  The IAOC already collects gender-related information.  The other information requested in the meeting registration form is strictly for meeting attendance purposes.  The sensitive questions referred to above have nothing to do with meeting attendance.

With respect, this is sampling noise.  12.5% of 8 is 1.   Don't get me wrong—it's great that we have some diversity on the IAOC, but I don't think anybody should be patting themselves on the back just yet!

What diversity is the IAOC measuring?

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:26:32 -0400

>Berlin registration and will consider all input received by 17 April.  

I think this is a pretty underspecified proposal.

In general, you use a survey to answer specific questions that have come up during postulate creation.  As far as I can tell, the postulate so far is "We need to be more diverse".  And the question is "Just how diverse are we actually?"  Or is the postulate "We need a more diverse leadership"?  And the question is: "Does the diversity of the IETF as a whole differ from the diversity of the leadership in a statistically significant manner"?

Or more along the lines of "We think our ability to do the work of the IETF is impacted by the general composition of the IETF and IETF leadership"?  And the questions are "What work is impacted by the current composition?"  and "WIll a change in the general diversity structure mitigate those impacts?"

If we go with the diversity stuff, I ask what scales of diversity?

Gender?  
National Origin?
Company Size?
Company Sector (e.g. do we care about bell heads vs net heads)?  
Academic vs Commercial vs Fabrege Egg Headius ?  (Marshal Rose's term for those who attend standards meetings for the purpose of attending standards meetings).
Race?
Sexual Orientation?
Geek vs Nerd?
Age?

My personal observations over the years is that I've gotten the most useful forms of diversity FOR THE IETF PURPOSES by looking across company/organization and company size, region (pac/america/europe/asia - but after Company), and academic vs corporate.   Occasionally Geek vs Nerd (open source vs for profit stuff).

The rest - not so much.

I'd like a more fully specified proposal before saying yea or nay. I believe it should include the purpose (e.g.what exactly are you trying to find out and where did the question come from?)  and a list of a axes of diversity that might impact on the purpose.

Thanks - Mike

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:38:20 -0400

--On Thursday, April 11, 2013 20:09 +0000 Yoav Nir
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> The IETF is concerned about diversity.  As good engineers, we
>> would like to attempt to measure diversity while working on
>> addressing and increasing it.  To that end, we are
>> considering adding some possibly sensitive questions to the
>> registration process, for example, gender.  Of course, they
>> need not be answered and would be clearly labeled as optional.
>...
> First, what is suggested is not a survey. It's part of the
> registration form. This makes it totally non-anonymous. These
> sensitive questions are going to be linked to name and
>...
> Dave Crocker suggested getting an expert. I don't think that
> would help. Such an expert would tell you that the questions
> you can ask depends on the group you are asking. Questions
> that would be acceptable in one country, would be
> inappropriate in another. In Israel people are likely to
> answer sensitive questions truthfully, while in Germany
> concern for privacy might make these questions seem too
> personal. So how do you fit such a questionnaire to a, well,
> diverse group such as meeting attendants? 
> 
> I think skewed surveys are a worse basis for planning policy
> than just using common sense (yes, I know that's just another
> name for our biases). Surveys lend a scientific aura to data
> that is effectively non-representative.

I'm a little more optimistic about the right sort of expert than
Yoav is, but generally agree with his point of view (so not that
small a minority).  An additional observation and a suggestion:

-- Part of my non-IETF life/history permits me to claim some
expertise in survey design and avoiding or compensating for
various threats to validity, including some of those to which
Dave referred.  But I won't touch the sort of stuff you are
wanting to ask about -- it is just too sensitive, too
subjective, too tied up with national laws, and so on for a
rather long list.  Yoav and Ted have identified some of the
reasons, as have others.

-- If you are going to do something like this, I suggest that
you include an option on the registration form that, if checked,
will branch the registrant off to a separate survey that would
be appropriately anonymized (be sure you can explain the
method(s) you use to do that to this sometimes-suspicious
community). If one cannot easily get to the survey without
registering, the IETF and the results are protected from several
varieties of nonsense.  You will lose a few people who might
have participated in an inline survey, but will pick up some who
would be reluctant to answer the same questions if they were
integral to the registration documents.  You may also get
better/more reliable answers to possibly-sensitive questions, at
least if the questions themselves are well-designed.

best,
  john

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:46:18 -0500

Hi, SM,

This may be a misprint ...

> What diversity is the IAOC measuring?

By my count, the current IAB membership is 15 (12 Nomcom-selected, plus 
the IETF chair, plus the ExecDir, plus the IRTF Chair - these last two 
are ex-officio and non-voting).

If the IAB means "members", the number for females, as far as I know(*), 
is 2/15, or 13 percent. If it means voting members, the number for 
females is 1/13, or just under 8 percent.

Other diversities also matter, and I'm just doing math here (**).

Spencer

(*) In my spare time, I'm co-president of PFLAG Dallas, which is a local 
chapter of PFLAG, an abbreviated abbreviation of "Parents, Families and 
Friends of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual _and Transgender_ people", so I know I 
can't claim definitive knowledge on who's what ... only on what people 
appear to be.

(**) I think diversity matters, and didn't want us to look less 
gender-diverse than we are ...

---

From: David Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:50:40 -0700

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Spencer Dawkins
<[email-masked]>wrote:

>> With respect, this is sampling noise.  12.5% of 8 is 1.   Don't get me
>> wrong—it's great that we have some diversity on the IAOC, but I don't think
>> anybody should be patting themselves on the back just yet!
>>
> the IETF chair, plus the ExecDir, plus the IRTF Chair - these last two are
> ex-officio and non-voting).
>
> is 2/15, or 13 percent. If it means voting members, the number for females
> is 1/13, or just under 8 percent.
>

Agreed, however, it would seem to me that at least one question that one
might as is whether these percentages are representative of the IETF
population at large.

--dmm

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:07:05 +0000

On Apr 11, 2013, at 4:50 PM, David Meyer <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
Agreed, however, it would seem to me that at least one question that one might as is whether these percentages are representative of the IETF population at large.

A rough eyeball check at the plenary in Orlando suggested that it was not.   But we don't have any statistics.   Personally I'm not sure how much the precise numbers matter when they are as low as they appear to be at present, though.

---

From: David Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:10:23 -0700

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Ted Lemon <[email-masked]> wrote:

>  On Apr 11, 2013, at 4:50 PM, David Meyer <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> A rough eyeball check at the plenary in Orlando suggested that it was not.
>   But we don't have any statistics.   Personally I'm not sure how much the
> precise numbers matter when they are as low as they appear to be at
> present, though.
>

Yes, but that is a different question. --dmm

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:14:59 +0000

On Apr 11, 2013, at 5:10 PM, David Meyer <[email-masked]>
> Yes, but that is a different question. --dmm 

IOW, you are suggesting that the percentages among non-attending participants may be substantially different than the percentages among attending participants?   That's a point worth studying, but wouldn't likely be addressed by the proposed survey, unless some way were added to include non-attending participants.

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:38:35 -0700

Suggesting that simply diversity stats across all IETF participants can help
to deduce anything about leadership diversity bias is ignoring qualification
and availability of candidates. Thats why i proposed the questions i would like to see
in a questionaire.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:09:55 -0700

On 4/11/2013 1:26 PM, Michael StJohns wrote:
> In general, you use a survey to answer specific questions that have come up during postulate creation.
...
> I'd like a more fully specified proposal before saying yea or nay.

+10

Those are some of the reasons I suggested the IAOC get an appropriate 
expert.

As has been amply recounted by the various postings, this is a complex 
and sensitive topic that is far too easily mishandled -- semantically, 
socially and legally.

Get the help of someone with the necessary, specific skills.

d/

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:46:27 -0400

>>>>> "SM" == SM  <[email-masked]> writes:
    SM> 12.5 % of IAOC voting members are female.
    SM> 0.1%  of IAB members are female
    SM> 0 %   of IESG members are female.

    SM> Based on the above measurements the IAOC is more "diverse".  The
    SM> IAOC already

Stats without standard deviations are meaningless.

-- 
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [ 
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [ 
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:40:57 -0800

> and availability of candidates. Thats why i proposed the questions i would like to see

You don't really need a questionnaire to go to that.
Nominations are a crude metric but they're a metric
nevertheless, and it would be an interesting exercise
to see how the pool of people recommended represents
(or not) the overall pool of people who've accepted
their nominations.

However.  The question that would answer (approximately)
is whether or not there's bias in the nomcom process.

My own feeling is that if we were to find that the
numbers supported the notion that there's bias
present in the system we probably couldn't do anything
about it without tearing the organization apart, so,
we live with bias, and trying to identify whether or
not there's bias in the nomcom process would be something
along the general lines of opening the gates of hell
and we'd probably be better off not knowing for sure.

But I digress.  It seems to me that it might be more
useful to identify what it is you're trying to find out,
first, and in this case I'm really not sure why Ray asked
that particular question.

Melinda

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:49:15 -0700

At 13:46 11-04-2013, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>If the IAB means "members", the number for 
>females, as far as I know(*), is 2/15, or 13 
>percent. If it means voting members, the number 
>for females is 1/13, or just under 8 percent.

If I use the 13% I can say that the IAB is more 
"diverse" than the IAOC.  Some organizations use 
political arithmetic to look good.

At 13:21 11-04-2013, Ted Lemon wrote:
>With respect, this is sampling noise.  12.5% of 
>8 is 1.   Don't get me wrong—it's great that we 
>have some diversity on the IAOC, but I don't 
>think anybody should be patting themselves on the back just yet!

Yes.

At 13:09 11-04-2013, Yoav Nir wrote:
>I think skewed surveys are a worse basis for 
>planning policy than just using common sense 
>(yes, I know that's just another name for our 
>biases). Surveys lend a scientific aura to data 

Yes.

>and we'd probably be better off not knowing for sure.

Yes.

The concern mentioned in the message from the 
IAOC is about diversity.  The definition I found for diversity is:

    "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements,
     the inclusion of different types of people (as people of different
     races or cultures) in a group"

Is that the definition the IAOC is using?

Regards,
-sm

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:20:50 +0100

Ray

Expert as the IETF (and its allied organisations) is in Internet
Engineering, I doubt if many of those skills transfer into Social
Engineering, which is the field in which I think this question lies.
Lacking such expertise, into how to frame a question in order to get the
answer which is wanted, how to interpret the results of a self-selecting
survey, complying with the legislation relating to the handling of
personal information in the countries involved, I think that the IETF
should stay out of this.

Tom Petch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Pelletier" <[email-masked]>
To: "Ray Pelletier" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Discussion IETF" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2013 4:17 PM
Subject: Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

Thanks

Ray

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:38:52 -0500

On 4/12/2013 12:49 AM, SM wrote:
>> If the IAB means "members", the number for females, as far as I
>> know(*), is 2/15, or 13 percent. If it means voting members, the
>> number for females is 1/13, or just under 8 percent.
>
> If I use the 13% I can say that the IAB is more "diverse" than the
> IAOC.  Some organizations use political arithmetic to look good.

Hi, SM,

I was just checking the math.

I couldn't possibly say what "good" means, and I'm interested in better 
understanding what "diverse" means, to this, ummm, at least somewhat 
diverse community ...

Spencer

p.s. And I wasn't trying to be snarky about the math. I blew the 
percentages in the first draft of my response, so I know it happens to 
the best of us :-)

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:01:15 -0700

Dear Ray,

Outcomes, good or bad, are often influenced by groups sharing a common interest.  Important questions should attempt to measure whether these interests reflect those of the larger Internet communities. 

No gender, sexual orientation, ethic, religious, or political background should be excluded, but attempting to ascertain the breath and distribution of interests based on questions used to measure some possible selection bias based on distributions of aspects unrelated to the endeavors of the IETF seems unlikely to improve outcomes.

When faced with some distraction from endeavors at hand, a friend of mine would exclaim "squirrel!" 

Regards,
Douglas Otis

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:12:50 -0700

> and we'd probably be better off not knowing for sure.

I still think that the IETF community at large has no intentional
diversity bias, so the process of discussing and analyzing
diversity in the context of leadership is to help better describe 
diversity induced job qualifications as well as uncovering any
potential unconscious bias to help overcoming it.

> that particular question.

Right. Being nomcom, i am of course interested to see what
answers we can get to help improve analyzing our situation, so
whether or not we can create good analysis vs. divesity fators,
I think the questions i proposed just by themselves would give
a good insight about awareness in the community about the role
of leadership, and maybe give us some more insight into the possible
pool.

Cheers
    Toerless

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:33:13 -0800

> potential unconscious bias to help overcoming it.

I think it's unintentional, as well, but I'm not sure
that's *much* of an improvement over malicious bias.
It certainly makes it far, far, far more difficult to
address.  As I said I think that looking at the pool of
nominees who've accepted their nominations and comparing
it to the pool of people selected would provide one
very rough measure of bias (explicit or otherwise) in
one stage of the process.

Melinda

---

From: Lou Berger <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:04:27 -0400

> one stage of the process.

While I've been very reluctant to jump on this topic, I have to ask what's 
the basis for this assertion?  A willingness to do/volunteer for a job says 
nothing about one's qualifications for a job.  Now if we somehow could 
compare 'qualified' nominees vs selected, I'd agree that that could be 
interesting....

Lou

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:11:32 -0800

On 4/12/2013 11:04 AM, Lou Berger wrote:
> While I've been very reluctant to jump on this topic, I have to ask
> what's the basis for this assertion? 

I think the numbers are pretty compelling, which is why
I think they would deserve scrutiny if there's the
possibility of remediation if a problem is identified.
However, it's pretty clear from the tone of the discussion
so far that no remediation would be possible, and so I
actually think it's probably a bad idea to attack the
question.  That does not mean, however, that the question
does not exist.

And I don't know if you intended to or not, but what you
communicated is "The best candidates are nearly always
western white guys," since that's who's being selected.
That's a problematic suggestion.

Melinda

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:01:00 -0700

Hi Spencer,
>I was just checking the math.

I understand. :-)

>I couldn't possibly say what "good" means, and I'm interested in 
>better understanding what "diverse" means, to this, ummm, at least 
>somewhat diverse community ...

There is an underlying uneasiness.  It has probably been there for a 
while.  Five women went to the microphone to openly raise an 
issue.  Some individuals from the IETF community  understood that the 
issue would not go away.  The word "diverse" is currently used as a 
placeholder for the issue.  I asked [1] the IETF Administrative 
Oversight Committee (IAOC) what their definition of "diversity" is 
as, as good engineers, the IAOC [2] would like to measure it.

Hannes Tschofenig once said that "nowadays everyone claims to be open 
and transparent" [3].  What was visible at a plenary was that there 
was one woman within a group of men facing a larger group in which 
there are only a few women.  There was also something else which was 
visible.  My guess is that it is a case of what I say and what I do 
are two different things.

Douglas Otis mentioned that "outcomes, good or bad, are often 
influenced by groups sharing a common interest.  Important questions 
should attempt to measure whether these interests reflect those of 
the larger Internet communities" [4].

Let's take IAOC members as an example.  NomCom chose two men from the 
United States.  The IAB chose a man from the United States.  The IESG 
chose a man from the United States.  The ISOC Board of Trustees chose 
a man from the United States.  There is a chart of IETF attendance by 
regions for the last seven meetings.  There isn't any publicly 
available information about attendance by men and women.  It's going 
to be difficult to argue that the IAOC reflects the interests of the 
IETF community unless a very large number of participants are men 
from the United States.

There hasn't been a woman on the IESG since 2009.  The last time 
there were two women on the IESG was in 2005.  There has been one or 
two women on the IAB over the years.

>percentages in the first draft of my response, so I know it happens 
>to the best of us :-)

Don't worry about that, I did not read it as snarky or anything negative. :-)

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78592.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78551.html
3. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg62409.html
4. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78603.html

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:17:32 -0400

> one stage of the process.

Speaking only personally, but as one of the fat middle-aged white men
from North America whose mother tongue is English, and as someone who
was selected by the Nomcom for something this year, I strongly support
the above.  It would not be a result to give us anything remotely like
hard data, but it would be a result that could suggest further
inquiry.  And it oughta be cheap to generate.  As long as we use it
carefully, such a result could be useful.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: James Polk <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:37:03 -0500

>That's a problematic suggestion.

I respect you, Melinda. I think you are smarter and more technically 
and philosophically qualified than me.

Having said that, what Lou asked was an honest question, yet you 
seemed to take it in the worst possible way. I'd say each of us is 
likely bringing our own baggage to how we each look at this 
'problem', if there is a problem at all (which doesn't appear to be 
universally agreed upon).

"since that's who's being selected" is a biased observation in and of 
itself. That's saying that because of the outcome, there "has to be 
bias" to skew the results this way - because it's the only logical 
explanation that could answer these results. My BS-meter is pegging 
into the red on that one.

The nomcom isn't randomly picking hats in a crowd. They are picking 
talent of those that have volunteered to serve. At any given time 
there could be 1 or 2 or 5 women how volunteered to server at 
particular AD slot, but there might be 1 "white guy" that is more 
qualified. From the audience at any plenary - that could appear "the 
fix is in" to ace out the women, but clearly (in this hypothetical 
example) it's not the case at all.

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.

I'd observe that this is likely the case of hurt feelings rather than 
unqualified males achieving the AD position in lieu of more qualified 
females - especially in the face of these rough ratio approximations.

I believe "we" need to reduce that ratio, and am for anything that 
increases the number of (qualified) women in this engineering 
organization. I am against artificially forcing the nomcom to 
implement a quota system to overcome low participation numbers of any 
diversity aspect.

Admittedly, I'm only teasing out the male/female diversity facet, and 
not any other the other - equally deserving diversity criteria.

James

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:06:16 +0000

On Apr 12, 2013, at 4:01 PM, SM <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Let's take IAOC members as an example.  NomCom chose two men from the United States.  The IAB chose a man from the United States.  The IESG chose a man from the United States.  The ISOC Board of Trustees chose a man from the United States.  There is a chart of IETF attendance by regions for the last seven meetings.  There isn't any publicly available information about attendance by men and women.  It's going to be difficult to argue that the IAOC reflects the interests of the IETF community unless a very large number of participants are men from the United States.

I'd like to take slight exception to one thing that this paragraph implies: that only a person who looks like me and comes from the same region can represent my interests.   I realize that given that I happen to be a white male from the United States, the world's smallest violin is playing somewhat unenthusiastically on my behalf at the moment.  But in fact I would object quite strongly to another white male from the United States representing me rather than a non-white, non-male not from the United States with whom I shared more views in common.   And this is not a matter of purely academic interest: there are many white males from the United States whose views I find vary across the range from puzzling to upsetting.

So in fact you don't need to put some percentage of white males on the IESG, the IAB or the IAOC to make me happy.   I want people on these bodies who feel strongly about open standards, rough consensus and running code.   That's the kool-aid I have drunk, and I want them to have drunk it too.

---

From: Lou Berger <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:26:37 -0400

Melinda,

On 4/12/2013 3:11 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
> question.  

> That does not mean, however, that the question
> does not exist.

No argument from me, I'm just asking that a comment/position/question
that I don't understand be substantiated.  I'm not sure if you missed my
point that you cut from my mail:

> A willingness to do/volunteer for a job says nothing about one's
> qualifications for a job.

I guess from your response that you disagree with the statement (which I
thought was pretty noncontroversial).

> That's a problematic suggestion.

I certainly, in no way, shape, or form intended such an implication.  I
have not idea how one could read it that way, but clearly we all have
our own biases that lead to what we imply and infer.

You may have also missed that I suggested that it would be interesting
to get a better understanding of the issue by comparing 'qualified'
nominees vs selected.  I just don't have any idea how to ascertain this
number. We could ask the nomcom folks for such statistics but, of
course, one would need to (a) trust the nomcom -- and I'm not implying
that any do not, and (b) ensure that the information could not be
related back to any particular nominee -- which I think is an issue that
makes this thought and question impractical given the size of the sample
pool.

Lou

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:13:01 -0400

>>>>> "James" == James Polk <[email-masked]> writes:
    James> The nomcom isn't randomly picking hats in a crowd. They are
    James> picking talent of those that have volunteered to serve. At

Volunteered, and who have employer/funding support.

The apparent bias that we are experiencing is the result of 30+ years of
high-tech employment bias towards the white male.  To be a qualified
candidate requires a bunch of things:
(and I mean "qualified" in both the qualities of the person, and the 
 various supports needed to do the job)

1) working for a moderate to large company for a sufficiently long time
   such that the company can spare the salary.
   (Or being sufficiently well connected that the person can find sponsorship)

2) being able to travel for a week+ at a time.

3) having been able to do (2) for enough years to have met enough people
   that the person's qualifications have been recognized.

and of course:
4) doing actual technical work!

that's some serious hurdles.  There a bias here towards older people who
have been in the same company for a long time, and who either have no
children, or had them at least ten years ago.  

Having a child (and I didn't do the hard work), restricted my ability to
travel sufficiently that I wasn't nomcom eligible for 5 years.... 

True, we have had people overcome hurdles: at least one IESG baby is
expected this year, and we didn't even have a parental leave policy
until Lisa wrote one.

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:32:51 -0700

Hi Ted,
At 14:06 12-04-2013, Ted Lemon wrote:
>I'd like to take slight exception to one thing that this paragraph 
>implies: that only a person who looks like me and comes from the 
>same region can represent my interests.   I

Let's see how many IETF participants (I'll exclude voting members of 
I* bodies if you are ok with that) share the view mentioned above.

I'll take the liberty of not expressing my view.

>So in fact you don't need to put some percentage of white males on 
>the IESG, the IAB or the IAOC to make me happy.   I want people on 
>these bodies who feel strongly about open standards, rough consensus 
>and running code.   That's the kool-aid I have drunk, and I

Thomas Narten mentioned that: "we have the tendency to pick the 
people we know and trust, which is understandable".  How many IAB 
members feel strongly about open standards, rough consensus and 
running code?  To know the answer I would have to actually know the 
IAB members.

Regards,
-sm

---

From: [email-masked] (Martin Rex)
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:55:42 +0200 (CEST)

SM wrote:
> Ted Lemon wrote:

Me 2!

> running code?  To know the answer I would have to actually know the 

I believe there is a problem for human beings that with more "choice"
the "picks" may get worse, based on an evolutionary cognitive limit.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

-Martin

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:51:35 +0000

On Apr 12, 2013, at 7:32 PM, SM <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Thomas Narten mentioned that: "we have the tendency to pick the people we know and trust, which is understandable".  How many IAB members feel strongly about open standards, rough consensus and running code?  To know the answer I would have to actually know the IAB members.

Are they really that hard to get to know?   A number of them are participating in this conversation. It's certainly hard to get time to sit with them at IETF meetings.   I don't know what the workload is like for IAB members, but I think I worked at least an 80 hour week in Orlando.

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:22:17 -0800

On 4/12/13 1:26 PM, Lou Berger wrote:
> that I don't understand be substantiated. 

And I'm telling you that I think the numbers are highly suggestive
of bias.  We can take a swing at getting a very rough handle on
that but I'm actually not sure that we should because it appears
to be the case that the cost of any remediation that some of us
might want to undertake would be higher than the cost of living
with bias in the system (this would be the considerable downside
to consensus decision-making processes with a very large participant
base).

> have not idea how one could read it that way, [ ... ]

A (male) friend once said that men are no more likely to notice
sexism than fish are to notice water.  I think that was far
too broad but generally true.  If I think that white western
men are being selected in disproportion to their presence in
the candidate pool, and I do, then telling me that "we only
choose the best" is telling me that white, western men tend
to be the best.  Pretty much every organization that applauds
itself for its meritocratic reward structure (to the extent
that an I* gig is a "reward") and yet only advances white
guys says the same thing.  It is a trope, and a familiar one.

Melinda

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:10:50 -0500

> Are they really that hard to get to know?   A number of them are participating in this conversation. It's certainly hard to get time to sit with them at IETF meetings.   I don't know what the workl…

So, I can only answer for one IAB member ...

I'm less busy during IETF weeks than most IESG members.

It happens that SM grabbed me for at least one extended conversation in 
the hallway in Orlando (he grabbed me for several conversations, but not 
all of them lasted half an hour), and I found that conversation very 
helpful from my side.

Again, for myself - I see my role as an IAB member to be as helpful as I 
can be, so answering questions is something I do, and I need to do more 
often.

There are places I have to be, during IETF weeks - for instance, we were 
interviewing ISOC Board of Trustee nominees at specific times - but 
there are places I'm going that I don't have to get to, if someone needs 
to talk with me.

Finally - there are people on the IAB with fabulous social skills, but 
I'm not one of them. If someone needs to spend time picking my brain, I 
usually do have multiple meals open during IETF week.

Spencer

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 23:37:55 -0400

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 06:22:17PM -0800, Melinda Shore wrote:

> guys says the same thing. 

Speaking only personally, I tend to agree with the above.  Despite my
earlier remark that I think it'd be good to get a rough idea about the
size of the problem, I'm not sure what to do about it.  I'm
particularly worried that I'm going to get to live through a repeat
experience.  The following is a cautionary tale, cartoonish but not so
far from the way I observed it.

In the parts of Canada where I lived in the 1990s, philosophy
departments (which had truly abysmal numbers of female faculty)
decided there was a shortage of female faculty -- despite the "facts"
that they'd always promoted only the best, were all sooper-rational
detached unbiased people, and so on.  The problem was, of course, made
considerably worse by the tenure system, which (owing to the quirks of
the historic expansion of departments) meant that an overwhelming
number of tenured faculty were roughly the same age.  In any case, the
Canadian Philosophical Association and, correspondingly, most
departments decided to adopt a principle that, whenever there was an
open spot, if there were two qualified people and one of them was a
woman, the woman should be chosen.

You can imagine the effect.  A large number of (usually in my
experience truly mediocre) male PhDs concluded that the only reason
they didn't get a tenured job was because there were "quotas".  (It
certainly had nothing to do with the overabundance of mediocre PhDs in
philosophy.)  Meanwhile, any woman who wasn't doing things from a
feminist perspective was automatically pegged as some sort of toady
trying to get in good with the patriarchy in order to get her portion
of the quota.  Deeply sexist men who went around enforcing the
"girls do girl-philsophy, not this hard stuff I do" could congratulate
themselves for being open minded and non-sexist, even if they made
jaw-droppingly obscene remarks to female students.  The entire
atmosphere was poisoned.  None of this was the reason I quit my
doctoral program (I was one of the mediocrities), but it sure didn't
count as a reason to stay.

The only lesson I really learned from that experience is that it is
incredibly hard for women[1] to be treated as adult colleagues in an
environment that acts overwhelmingly as a white male club.  I still
have no idea how to do anything about it except to try to be super
attentive to the problem all the time.  That's why I'd like us to have
an idea of roughly how badly we're doing: then we can pay attention to
our weaknesses in an effort to turn such attention into a strength.

[1] In this case, but I actually think this generalizes to other
groups pretty well.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Scott Kitterman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:36:50 -0400

>[1] In this case, but I actually think this generalizes to other

I've seen similar things in other contexts too.  I'd suggest turning the question around. I don't think the question of if there is bias or not is reasonably measurable. 

There is also a reasonable body of evidence that people who are in a small minority will tend to feel unwelcome regardless of if there are any actual bias or barriers. 

Rather the engage in navel gazing about bias detection, engage in finding ways to engage in encouraging more participation from ${group}.

The question to ask is "What can the IETF do to be more open/inviting?"

Scott K

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 09:12:38 +0200

I struggle to engage in this debate because in general I'm not sure how
my voice helps advance the general discussion.  But I do want to make
two points:

On 4/12/13 8:33 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
> I think it's unintentional [...]

 1. As others have said there are many forms of bias in play, which may
    require different forms of redress.  I expect we can be more
    successful in some areas than others.
 2. Let's be careful with using words like "unintentional".  For all we
    know there may be very good reasons that led to the results of this
    year.  This is not something I would expect to come out of a NOMCOM
    report, by the way, due to their confidentiality requirements.  And
    there is where I think we are most wrapped around the axle.

In any case, hard as it may be, we as a community have identified a huge
concern, and it would be regrettable if we didn't explore that concern
and try to find areas in which we could improve.  I claim  that doing so
will improve the IETF in the longer term.

Eliot

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:04:57 -0700

Hi Ted, Spencer

[I am merging my replies for convenience]

At 18:51 12-04-2013, Ted Lemon wrote:
>Are they really that hard to get to know?   A number of them are 
>participating in this conversation. It's certainly hard to get time 
>to sit with them at IETF meetings.   I don't know what the workload 
>is like for IAB members, but I think I worked at least an 80 hour 
>week in Orlando.

It's not that hard to get to meet an IAB member.  However, they have 
a busy workload which makes it difficult to meet them for a 
chat.  Speaking for myself, I have not had any difficult meeting a 
few IAB members.  I do not assume that the average IETF participant 
will get to know them.

At 20:10 12-04-2013, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>It happens that SM grabbed me for at least one extended conversation 
>in the hallway in Orlando (he grabbed me for several conversations, 
>but not all of them lasted half an hour), and I found that 
>conversation very helpful from my side.

I found the conversation helpful too.

>Finally - there are people on the IAB with fabulous social skills, 
>but I'm not one of them. If someone needs to spend time picking my 
>brain, I usually do have multiple meals open during IETF week.

I think that you are underestimating your skills. :-)  I would have 
spent that half an hour chatting with you even if you weren't an IAB member.

Regards,
-sm

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 03:19:21 -0700

Hi Melinda,
>guys says the same thing.  It is a trope, and a familiar one.

If you pick an Area Director who does not do the work the effects 
will be apparent within the area and during IESG evaluation.  If you 
pick a Working Group Chair who does not do the work the effects will 
only be visible within the working group.  The Area Director will 
probably step in and to limit damage.  If you pick an IAB members who 
does not do the work the effects will not be visible.  That applies 
for IAOC members too.

Michael Richardson commented about the "apparent bias that we are 
experiencing" [1].  The Area Directors, except for two of them, work 
for large vendors.  Is there a bias in favor of vendors? I don't 
think so; large vendors have money and can afford to provide funding 
support.  Is the problem about women being qualified and not having 
having met enough people that the person's qualifications has been 
recognized?  I don't know.

Andrw Sullivan provided a cautionary tale [2] about quotas.  My 
reason for not favoring quotas is that the entire atmosphere will be 
poisoned.  I would not try to convince anyone about that.  My opinion 
is what Andrew Sullivan mentioned; it is incredibly hard for women to 
be treated as colleagues in an environment that acts overwhelmingly 
as a male club.  An alternative is to have more women, not as tokens, 
but as persons who can make the environment less harsh.

What's missing in the discussion is how to make that happen.

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78626.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78637.html

---

From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:44:57 -0300

>>> and running code.   That's the kool-aid I have drunk, and I

	Me too, but when you have a diverse pool of people
who feel strongly about open standards, rough consensus and running code
and you choose only one category of the group, then we need to think
about how we end up in that situation.

Regards,
as

---

From: Lou Berger <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 08:09:58 -0400

Melinda,
	I'm not so sure debating the merits of a specific measure has value or
not is really that helpful, and I probably just should have ignore this
small point.  Let's say some limited measure of diversity is valid, what
do we learn from it?  Is the conclusion that only one group is being
discriminated against and that the IETF needs to address this one
specific form of discrimination, or is it that the top of the IETF is
far from diverse?  If the latter, I buy it -- the IETF has a diversity
issue.

As many others have said, there are many forms of bias and
discrimination -- all of which are harmful, and only some of which have
the legal protection (in your favorite country) that they should.
Irrespective of any specific statistic, I think this discussion has
shown that there is consensus that working to eliminate bias and
discrimination *in all forms* from the IETF is worth paying attention
to.  Do you disagree, are you saying that the IETF should only/first try
to address only gender bias?

I personally think all IETF participants should have voice in this
discussion, no matter if they fall into an obviously discriminated
against group or not.  This includes the full range of participants,
even newcomers, folks who have never authored an I-D, folks who by any
measure are significant I* contributors, and even "western white guys".
IMO the exclusion of any voice is itself a manifestation of bias.

Lou

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:32:18 +0000

> about how we end up in that situation.

Yes.   I'm not arguing that there is not a problem: I'm arguing that if the problem were solved, it would not make me feel less well represented.   The point is definitely not to turn that around and suggest to those who currently do not feel well-represented that they should not—the situations aren't analogous.

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:46:16 +0100

On 04/13/2013 01:09 PM, Lou Berger wrote:
> gender bias
...
> "western white guys".

It may be that the latter phrase is a common term in
north America, (I dunno) but fwiw it grates on me at
least.

If the issue we're talking about relates to gender,
then I think sticking to that is better and figuring
out how to make progress ought be doable even if
dissecting past or current nomcom decisions is not. I
really hope the design team folks succeed there since
its quite possible, even if may take quite a while for
success to be fully apparent.

If we're talking about many more kinds of diversity
then that's a different discussion, and IMO English
language fluency and funding are by far the most
overwhelming sources of skew. Skin colour is (I hope,
but also believe) far down the list so the "white"
bit above appears from my perspective like name
calling or something.

And of course I personally don't consider myself
"western" but Irish. I've no clue if that makes a
difference in this kind of discussion:-)

S.

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 05:56:52 -0700

A question because my institutional memory does reach as far back:
How much was Europe represented over the decades in IETF leadership ? 

Right now for example IESG seems to have maybe at least 5
europeans (don't really know how to figure out location for all of them,
those where just the easy ones for me).   But i would expect that this
was by far not the case going back in time.

Nobody cares about "diversity" for europeans in this round of the 
discussion, but i wonder if this was equally true in the past.

Maybe this evolution would be a good example to folks without that long
reaching institutional memory to show how the IETF leadership
does pretty well  reflect the evolution of the industry. If the
industry will become more diverse, IETF will reflect this equally.
If on the other hand we try to achieve greater diversity than the
industry, then we have a real challenge on our hand. 

The concentration to fewer and larger companies in todays vs. past
leadership was mentioned in before as "bad". I think its exactly
for the same reason.

On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 12:32:18PM +0000, Ted Lemon wrote:
> Yes.   I'm not arguing that there is not a problem: I'm arguing that if the problem were solved, it would not make me feel less well represented.   The point is definitely not to turn that around and suggest to those who currently do not feel well-represented that they should not?the situations aren't analogous.
>

---

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 11:18:29 -0400

> If the issue we're talking about relates to gender,

That's the question:

Optional question:
Check the block. Male/Female

Ray

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:48:15 +0200

SM,

Since you asked,  the IAB spoke on this subject as one voice last year
when the OpenStand RFC was released. 

As a current IAB member, and speaking for myself...

On 4/13/13 1:32 AM, SM wrote:
>
> Thomas Narten mentioned that: "we have the tendency to pick the people
> we know and trust, which is understandable".  How many IAB members
> feel strongly about open standards, rough consensus and running code? 
> To know the answer I would have to actually know the IAB members.

Well, say what you will about whether you believe me, but all THREE of
those are important to me, personally.  No standards organization
produces perfect results, but you have far less chance of spotting a
problem if you hide your processes from the public, reduce the voice of
experts, and don't pay attention to operational experience.

Eliot

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:15:22 -0400

--On Friday, April 12, 2013 23:37 -0400 Andrew Sullivan
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> The only lesson I really learned from that experience is that
> it is incredibly hard for women[1] to be treated as adult
> colleagues in an environment that acts overwhelmingly as a
> white male club. 

JJ Thompson, Grace Anscomb, etc., notwithstanding.  Similarly,
Grace Hopper, Jean Sammet, Jane Thompson, Martha Steenstrup,
Deborah Estrin, Sally Floyd, etc.

That doesn't change your point other than to identify a
different fallacy in the "girl-philosophy" hypothesis and its
computer science / networking analogies.   If you haven't heard
of some of the above, it demonstrations a slightly different
point.   It may also suggest that there is an area in which the
IETF is absolutely non-discriminatory: there is no evidence
that the IETF has been any more effective in driving, e.g.,
Martha or Deborah out than with Crowcroft, Elz, Clark, Chapin,
...

    :-(
    john

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 08:57:09 -0800

On 4/13/13 4:09 AM, Lou Berger wrote:
> Do you disagree, are you saying that the IETF should only/first try

Clearly not, Lou.  For one thing, I've repeatedly said that
we're underperforming on a number of axes - repeatedly, and
for another I've said some number of times that I don't think
that we can do anything about gender bias and that the costs
of addressing it given our decision-making structures
combined with the very vocal opposition to even looking at
the question, let alone addressing it.  Experience suggests
that gender bias is one of the most deeply-rooted, difficult-
to-deal-with bias problems.  The IETF punts on a large number
of hard technical problems and it would not be inconsistent
to punt on a hard social problem.

So no, I'm not saying that at all, Lou.  I thought I was
pretty clear about that.

Melinda

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:05:57 -0400

>Deborah Estrin, Sally Floyd, etc.

And to confuse this even more, what was most important about Martha, Debbie and Sally with respect to the health of the IETF were their presenence in the academic and research space, not so much their gender except as possibly role models for new female attendees.  

Maybe what we do is ask some of the large network companies to fund a few research fellowships on topics that might be of interest to the IETF in the 3-5 year time frame for post-doc types?

---

From: Lou Berger <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:16:56 -0400

On April 13, 2013 12:57:09 PM Melinda Shore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Clearly not, Lou.

Great. Glad to hear we agree.  That said, some may prefer to focus on just 
gender (or some other form of) bias first, and I wouldn't fault them for 
that...

Lou

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:32:42 +0100

> Maybe what we do is ask some of the large network companies to fund a few research fellowships on topics that might be of interest to the IETF in the 3-5 year time frame for post-doc types?

They actually do that already. More of would be welcomed of course.

But there's no emphasis on grant holders coming to the IETF. I think that'd be a fine thing for the grant-givers to strongly encourage since its not on most grant holders radar. (Grant-givers can't require it btw and get their tax back in some places as I understand it - awards have to have no strings attached.)

But throwing in some dosh for a few IETF meetings is something some people reading this could maybe make happen.

S

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:01:55 -0400

>>>>> "SM" == SM  <[email-masked]> writes:
    SM> Michael Richardson commented about the "apparent bias that we are
    SM> experiencing" [1].  The Area Directors, except for two of them,
    SM> work for large vendors.  Is there a bias in favor of vendors? I
    SM> don't think so; large vendors have money and can afford to
    SM> provide funding support.  Is the problem 
 
I believe that there is a bias in favour of large vendors.
It's not that the nomcom picks people from large vendors, but rather
than it only gets candidates with support, and large vendors find it
much easier to support people.

AS A RESULT, we have 30+ years of the promotion and retention (not getting
laid off..) of people from those large vendors as well.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:11:06 -0400

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Richardson <[email-masked]> writes:
    Michael> AS A RESULT, we have 30+ years of the promotion and
    Michael> retention (not getting 
    Michael> laid off..) of people from those large vendors as well.  

I missed a few words there.

As a result of the fact that we have representation mostly from large
vendors, (some of which did grow from nothing, mind you), there are the
various set of biases that have been inherent in the industry for 30
years in who gets support.    

-- 
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 11:22:24 -0700

Hi Eliot,
>when the OpenStand RFC was released.

I was actually not asking the question.

>Well, say what you will about whether you believe me, but all THREE of

I believe you.

The text which led to this message is: "whether these interests 
reflect those of the larger Internet communities".  That's not 
related to the initial topic (of diversity).

Regards,
-sm

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:32:27 -0700

Hi Michael,
>laid off..) of people from those large vendors as well.

This is a variation of the old boys club.  Let's say that there are 
two candidates.  Candidate A has 20 years of IETF 
experience.  Candidate B has 5 years of IETF experience.  If the 
choice is about choosing the best Candidate A will always be selected.

The following was written ten years ago:

   "The IETF appears to have created a 'ruling class' system which tends
    to re-select the same leaders from a limited pool of people who have
    proved competent and committed in the past."

   "Newcomers to the organization and others outside the 'ruling class'
    are reluctant to challenge the apparent authority of the extended
    'ruling class' during debates and consequently influence remains
    concentrated in a relatively small group of people.  This
    reluctance may also be exacerbated if participants come from a
    different cultural background than the dominant one."

NomCom rejected kings and presidents and created a ruling class instead. :-)

Regards,
-sm

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:03:30 -0400

> Deborah Estrin, Sally Floyd, etc.

I think we're in agreement, but just to emphasise: I have no idea what
the experiences of any of these were like, but I don't think
it's relevant that we can name some successful superstars.  My
point was that it is _difficult_, not that it's impossible.

A
-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:13:38 +0000

> This is a variation of the old boys club.  Let's say that there are two candidates.  Candidate A has 20 years of IETF experience.  Candidate B has 5 years of IETF experience.  If the choice is about choosing the best Candidate A will always be selected.

There may well be some of that going on, but there is something else as well, tied to very large time commitment required for area directors. 

At some point, the candidate has to be able to say something like "I spoke to my boss and he agrees with the time commitment." We already know that this creates a bias towards large companies whose products are directly affected by IETF standards. But it also creates a bias towards folks who are "well connected" inside their own company, and can use these connections to get someone to agree to foot their bill. And being "well connected" is typical of the old boys clubs.

Bias reduction would certainly be much easier if the time commitment required from volunteers was not so large.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 09:13:24 +0100

> Martha or Deborah out than with Crowcroft, Elz, Clark, Chapin,

And I'm not sure about the driving "out" rather than driving *on*
to bigger and better things. Also, speaking from personal
observation over the last 12 months in Cambridge (the original one),
at least one of those you mentioned is leading a very lively
research group including several active IETF contributors.

   Brian

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:44:20 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lou Berger" <[email-masked]>
To: "Melinda Shore" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2013 1:09 PM
> IMO the exclusion of any voice is itself a manifestation of bias.

I am in the happy position of not having attended an IETF meeting for a
while and for many, perhaps most, of those active on the lists I track,
I have no idea what they look like. White or black, western or eastern,
I have no idea.  An e-mail address of a CJK company used to suggest a
person of eastern origins, now it just means that the CJK company has
taken control of the western one.  Sometimes I cannot even tell male or
female, although the name used may give me a clue.  In one case, an AD
referred to a contribution as coming from a 'he' which is surely wrong,
that is a woman's name; but I do not know, cannot tell, only that the
contributions that she/he makes are valuable and I would be happy to see
them as, e.g., AD.

So perhaps, to reduce the bias, e.g. towards "western white", any system
of choosing should give preference to the views of those who do not
attend IETF meetings, for whom judgement is based solely on the
contributions the person in question is seen to make - via the mailing
lists - towards open standards and running code.

Tom Petch
(white, western)

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:50:51 +0000

> lists - towards open standards and running code.

We could also all be assigned masks, vocoders and randomly-generated numbers at the beginning of each IETF, and go around wearing burlap robes.

The problem with your solution is that at the moment it's actually pretty hard to participate in IETF without going to meetings.   It's a source of some frustration to me that despite having basically invented the Internet, the IETF still does business as if we were living in the pre-Internet era.   Three face-to-face meetings a year is a lot of carbon, and I think it also creates barriers for participation that are only readily surpassed by people who for whatever reason happen to have a great deal of advantage.   The degree of good fortune that allows me to participate in IETF as I do is breathtaking in its improbability.

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:14:30 +0300

Toerless,

> discussion, but i wonder if this was equally true in the past.

Can't say much about the leadership situation, as I have not tracked it. But there has definitely been significant increase of Europeans participating in the IETF work over time, though most of it happened many years ago. See http://www.arkko.com/tools/rfcstats/d-contdistrhist_norm.html  Asian growth has been a more recent occurrence. 

> leadership was mentioned in before as "bad". I think its exactly

True. And the Asian growth and lack of some other parts of world reflect some of those industry situations. But at the same time, I feel the situation is a little bit like discussing something in a group here you actually want to hear everyone's opinion. Since there will always be a few quiet ones, you take special care to ask the quiet ones for their opinions, and in the end may learn something important from them. The ones who do not have the strongest and largest industries may also have important input for us with regards to the Internet. This is why we need to continue with things like the ISOC fellowship program, or make an extra effort to get smaller companies involved. We can't change where work actually happens, but we should at least know who the "silent ones" are in the Internet community (yet with knowledge) and make an extra effort to get at least some involvement from them. Just think how much real-world networking and Internet work actually is being done around the world still in small companies, for instance, in addition to our large companies.

Jari

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:46:26 -0700

> The problem with your solution is that at the moment it's actually pretty hard to participate in IETF without going to meetings.   It's a source of some frustration to me that despite having basica…

Dear Ted,

Well said.  This speaks directly to what is limiting diversity, costs the Internet should remedy.  Although resources necessary to host meetings online are substantial, they pale in comparison with physical presence requirements.   I would have preferred if more females were in my all male engineering classes.  Lowering cost should reduce average participant age which should offer better gender/ethnic balance. 

IMHO, diversity is more sensitive to a predominance of those wanting to generate ad revenue with a preference for dancing fruit, at the expense of security.  This has introduced i-frames, pdf with javascript, java, and many other types of unauthenticated active and proprietary content that remain major security issues.

How can the IETF increase the preference for clean, simple, open, and secure working code?

Perhaps registration forms could ask about roles as related to marketing, engineering, management, or support.  From this, perhaps needed outreach can be better determined.

Regards,
Douglas Otis

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:17:34 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, April 12, 2013 7:22 pm, Melinda Shore wrote:
> of bias.

  This is the classic fallacy of "Affirming the Consequent". And like
all fallacies, the reasoning is just plain wrong.

  Dan.

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:52:04 +0300

Melinda,

> about it without tearing the organization apart, so,

I am actually a little bit more optimistic about it, for a couple of reasons. First, it does not take genius to understand that we have biases. We all do. And I'm not trying to minimise the problem by presenting it as a common occurrence, but it is a fact that we have biases. People tend to prefer status quo, select similar people to themselves for various roles, carry society's stereotypes about various tasks, etc. Not surprising that the IETF has that too, but of course it does not make me happy. We can try to reduce the bias, however.

What helps with this is education, information, and good examples. As for the information & education part, I think the discussion we've had on diversity has already made the issue better highlighted. When something is in people's mind they tend to take it into account. FWIW, personnel discussions that I've been involved as the chair have had a very serious discussion about whether there was something we could do here to improve some aspect of diversity. Again, this isn't the only factor to consider, and most IETF leadership discussions are pretty constrained, have limited pools of volunteers to choose from, and so on. But I think we'll see the effect of that in coming years. There won't be a revolution, but I think we'll see some effect. 

Secondly - and this is why I though some knowledge of our participant base would be useful - what I'd find useful is to get to a mode where we can look at progress. Is there a way to increase #countries #small companies #women etc? Be it about the participants or the leadership. Could we set a goal that we'll increase some aspect every year, 2014 to be better than 2013? It would be wonderful if we could track that somehow, while of course respecting people's privacy, not retaining any data, checking with experts, etc. And we could, of course, conduct a far more comprehensive surveys, I think we'll get to that as well. Later, perhaps when the design team comes up with some recommendations. And by their nature, such comprehensive surveys will be separate efforts. But Ray's question was prompted by the need to have the IETF-87 registration form up and running very soon and we wondered if some very basic information could be collected.

(Registration questions are not the only way to do this of course, separate surveys are a possibility. And I've experimented with using heuristics to make a guess of population's gender percentages. If you look at my document statistics page, you'll see the beginnings of some of the analysis. With truly massive error rates, of course. This could be repeated for meetings as well, I suppose. Not sure this is a viable approach, though.)

Jari

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:00:32 -0700 (PDT)

> Check the block. Male/Female

  Under the belief of "garbage in, garbage out", I tend to lie on
these sorts of repugnant questions. I invite others to join me.
The more suspect the quality of the data, the less value it has.

  Dan.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:24:14 +0100

> Just think how much real-world networking and Internet work actually is
> being done around the world still in small companies, for instance, in addition to our large companies.

Well, yes.

I'm typing this in Tarawa where I've been upgrading the island's internet, and my chances of attending an
IETF are rather slim. I'll just have to leave it to all you first-world western northern-hemisphere types,
no matter how much diversity you lack, and how much transport perspective you need.

Lloyd Wood
http://sat-net.com/L.Wood/

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:52:38 +0200

Dan,

On 4/16/13 2:00 AM, Dan Harkins wrote:

> Under the belief of "garbage in, garbage out", I tend to lie on these
> sorts of repugnant questions. I invite others to join me. The more
> suspect the quality of the data, the less value it has. Dan. 

Please don't.  We are trying to understand who we are.  Is that SO
unreasonable?

Eliot

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:21:28 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Elliot,

> Please don't.  We are trying to understand who we are.  Is that SO

  We already know "who we are". This question is trying to decide our
gender make up and nothing good can come of it.

  It will provide more "evidence" for people to make use of logical
fallacies-- "if P implies Q then look we now have evidence of Q
therefore P"-- which really have no place in an organization devoted
to engineering.

  And it will be used as a baseline for doing work towards some goal
that has not been justified, work whose very nature requires treating
people according to what they are instead of who they are.

   Look, bias stinks and when it exists its stench is detectable. I don't
recall seeing any evidence of bias being presented on this list. And I
don't believe there is any problem has been mentioned that we had or
have that is caused by this predominance of white men. It's just been
stated as a problem itself. We must have less white men. Why? Because,
that's why.

  This question is the first step down a path we really should not go
down. If I can't stop the question from being asked then all I can hope
for is that the resulting data are so obviously wrong that they will be
of no use to anyone-- e.g. Berlin registration is 63% female.

  regards,

  Dan.

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:48:14 +0200

Dan,

On 4/17/13 9:21 PM, Dan Harkins wrote:
>   We already know "who we are".

I disagree.  We make a whole lot of assumptions about who we are, but we
don't actually know, and that's why the question is being asked.  I
would clarify that IMHO the only reason this question should be asked is
for demographic purposes, along with others.

>  This question is trying to decide our

This would be putting the cart before the horse.  We first need to
understand facts.  If we don't understand facts, then people will
continue on assumptions.

> stated as a problem itself. We must have less white men. Why? Because,

Nobody has proposed that, and I think you can put a bit more faith in
your peers to not make important decisions based on "because".

Eliot

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:17:21 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Eliot,

> for demographic purposes, along with others.

  Pardon me, but that makes no sense. Asking about the gender make-up
of those who elect to register for a future meeting is going to tell us
little
about who we are. It will be a snapshot in time and it will not
representative
of "who we are" because we are more than just the people who register to
go to any particular meeting.

  And "...the only reason...along with others"? So then it's not only for
demographic purposes. Those other purposes aside from the "only" one
are what, exactly?

> understand facts.  If we don't understand facts, then people will

  The facts are already not in dispute. The I* leadership is predominantly
white and male. The fallacy works like this:

    "If there was bias in favor of white males then we would have a
     leadership that is predominantly white and male. We have a
     leadership that is predominantly white and male, therefore we
     have bias."

All this question will do is provide a snapshot in time of just how
predominant it is-- 5% female, oh that's bad, 8% female, oh my look
how skewed the I* leadership is. See, it's skewed therefore we have
bias! If P then Q, and Q (we now have the numbers!) therefore P.

> your peers to not make important decisions based on "because".

  What has been accepted is that "diversity is good". Further, it has been
stated that we cannot remove the race and gender from the problem
statement about our lack of diversity. As Margaret said, "I don't think
it is possible for [sic] remove race and gender from the list of axes,
though, since there is a notable lack of diversity in those areas."

  So a problem statement has been made: there is a notable lack of
diversity in the areas of race and gender. Why is this a problem? What
problem can we point to, now or in the past, that is the result of this
lack of race and gender diversity? Well? Hmmm? Anyone? Bueller? No,
nothing. So in lieu of nothing all we have is "because". If you don't like
"because" as a reason then fine, I will concede the point: decisions will
be made for no reason at all! That hardly seems better.

  And now the only action I see out of this whole diversity discussion on
the list is a plan to ask the gender of registrants for the Berlin meeting.

  If this is just some innocent question to find out "who we are" then why
don't we ask about the size of the organization we work for?  We all
agree that we have a diversity problem on that axis and there is a skew
for large corporations. No, the question is just about gender.

  Sadly, I can't put much faith in my "peers" to make important decisions
because they're asking the wrong questions so they can gather data
"while working on addressing" a non-problem.

  regards,

  Dan.

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:28:37 -0500

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.

> 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

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:34:04 +0200

On Apr 18, 2013, at 17:17, "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Why is this a problem?

I think you are more likely to ask this question if you think that if it is a "problem", then we *have* to "solve" it, e.g. by shooting enough of the white male people in the IETF that the numbers balance.

It is not that kind of "problem".  It is, however, a situation that a sizable part of the community have experience with.  The experience that, if you find ways to improve diversity where the cure is *not* worse than the ailment, the quality of the work actually improves from that.

You may simply not have that experience -- it wouldn't surprise me, as differences in personal experience are usually the most important reason why people incessantly argue.

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:43:09 +0100

On 18/04/2013 16:28, Pete Resnick wrote:
...
> subconscious biases get in the way.

Indeed. Ideally, though, we need a statistician to look at the
historical ratios (e.g. M/F ratios) in the attendee lists vs the
I* membership, to see whether there is a statistically significant
bias in the selection process over the years.

   Brian

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:01:27 +0200

Self inflicted confusion.  Please see below:

On 4/18/13 5:17 PM, Dan Harkins wrote:
> Pardon me, but that makes no sense. Asking about the gender make-up of
> those who elect to register for a future meeting is going to tell us
> little about who we are. It will be a snapshot in time and it will not
> representative of "who we are" because we are more than just the
> people who register to go to any particular meeting. 

And let's stop there.  The point of my originally muddled note was that
we shouldn't just ask about gender.  For that I apologize.  Also, I
wouldn't do this just one time.
> white and male. The fallacy works like this:

We don't have facts in evidence, and as I wrote above, I'm not even sure
we know which facts we need.  I can say that gender is probably one,
country of residence is something we have, age is something we don't
ask, but we do ask how many meetings you've been to.  We don't ask why
you're at the IETF and we don't ask which groups are important to you. 
We don't ask whether you plan to attend other IETFs and we don't ask
anyone who has attended an IETF but isn't back, why they didn't show. 
We don't ask questions about the experience, in terms of how people are
able to find their way through the process.  There are many questions we
don't ask.  Now granted, some of this is more than who we are, but also
how easy are we to work with.  How does language and location play into
this?

Personally I'd love to survey people going to OTHER standards
organizations and find out why they chose those other organizations to
pursue work, but then I'm not footing the bill for all of this, so...

This is not just about one attribute.  You're ALMOST right in that a lot
of us know each other.  Perhaps that's even a problem, in that others
can't break in.

Much of this is what I would expect the diversity team to explore.

Eliot

---

From: John E Drake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:05:59 +0000

Age, IQ, & shoe size?  (Ideally, they should be equal.)

Irrespectively Yours,

John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Eliot Lear
> Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2013 9:01 AM
> To: Dan Harkins
> Cc: [email-masked]
> of
> >   The facts are already not in dispute. The I* leadership is
> > predominantly white and male. The fallacy works like this:
> 
> We don't have facts in evidence, and as I wrote above, I'm not even
> sure we know which facts we need.  I can say that gender is probably
> one, country of residence is something we have, age is something we
> don't ask, but we do ask how many meetings you've been to.  We don't
> ask why you're at the IETF and we don't ask which groups are important
> to you.
> able to find their way through the process.  There are many questions
> we don't ask.  Now granted, some of this is more than who we are, but
> also how easy are we to work with.  How does language and location play
> into this?
> 
> This is not just about one attribute.  You're ALMOST right in that a
> lot of us know each other.  Perhaps that's even a problem, in that
> others can't break in.
>

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:44:34 -0700

> Please don't.  We are trying to understand who we are.  Is that SO

I don't object to filling out forms, and I would certainly answer honestly.
Who is "we"?  Just people who go to the Berlin IETF?
   - does it include remote participants via Jabber or other tools
   - does it include people who participate only on WG mailing lists?

The only bias I see is that it takes a lot of employer backing
and funding to participate in the IESG.  It is therefore the
companies that sponsor these participants have the most influence of all
over the selection process.

Hold another IETF in San Jose or San Francisco and I bet we get
way more balanced data than a site that requires a lot of travel,
especially since we have day passes now.

> Eliot

Andy

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:06:51 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, April 18, 2013 8:34 am, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> I think you are more likely to ask this question if you think that if it
> is a "problem", then we *have* to "solve" it, e.g. by shooting enough of
> the white male people in the IETF that the numbers balance.
>
> It is not that kind of "problem".

  Well that's a relief! As a white male (I know, a surprise, right?) I'm
glad to know I am not going to get shot.

>                                                    It is, however, a
situation that a
> sizable part of the community have experience with.

  I have been attended at least 40 IETFs over the past 18 years or so.
I certainly have experience with this situation. What is new, though,
is the statement that this situation is, in fact, a problem.

>                                                                                   The
experience
that,
> if you find ways to improve diversity where the cure is *not* worse than
> the ailment, the quality of the work actually improves from that.

  What is this "cure" of which you speak? This diversity discussion has
included statements like:

  "If the intent is to emphasize diversity (for some metric) over one of
the core skills [technical clue, admin skills, ability to work with others],
that's certainly possible."

and,

  "A small point to watch for, if there is a focus on a defined list of
groups [and there certainly appears to be one-- gender], is the
difference between discriminating /against/, versus ensuring
representation /from/."

  So? Are we going to emphasize diversity over core skills? Say that
one's gender or skin color matters more than their technical clue or
their ability to work with others? By what method are we going to
"ensure" representation? And what do we do if these efforts have not
resulted in the  proportions that are deemed to be acceptable? Use a
little more force? Quotas?

  Nobody has stated what the "cure" is for this situation so we don't
know whether it will be worse than the ailment. There is a huge gap
between "encouraging more women to volunteer" and "shooting
white men". And I really don't think we need to count the gender
make-up of a meeting if our "cure" was going to something close
to "encouraging more women to volunteer."

  regards,

  Dan.

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:41:57 -0400

>bias in the selection process over the years.

Yup.

We have:

1) The difference in composition between the world as a whole and the IETF.
2) The difference in composition between the industrialized nations as a whole and the IETF.
3) The difference in composition between the set of small medium and large networking companies as a whole and the IETF.
4) The difference in composition between the IETF (for some measure of that) and the composition of the set of IETF working group chairs.
5) The difference in composition between the set of IETF working group chairs and the set of members of the IAB and IESG.
6) The difference in composition between the IETF and the composition of the IAOC.

All of these are somewhat interesting statistical analysis problems.  My guess (without looking at the numbers) is the (1) is pretty large.  (2) is still large, but substantially less than (1), (3) is quite a bit smaller than (1) or (2) - all of these for pretty much any axis you want to evaluate.  

For your question, I differentiated between the IAOC and the IAB/IESG for one specific reason - an injected bias for the second group that mostly says that paying your dues as a working group chair is a pre and sometimes co requisite for becoming a member of the IAB or IESG.  I'm pretty sure the injected bias for the IAOC is "business experience" of some sort.

I haven't seen anything on the list that suggests there's selection bias for working group chairs - it's possible there is, but I can't actually recall any complaints going back say 10 years where the selection of a working group chair was intimated to be biased based on gender or any other criteria.  Given that the positions are about 90% self-selection and 10% area director approval, I don't know how you could do bias analysis there and get meaningful results.  That's question (4).  We can provide a statistical number for the difference, but the "why" is going to be elusive.

So going forward, what I think we should be more interested in is not so much the composition of the IETF, but the composition of the set of WG chairs and how that population compares to the set of IESG and IAB members.  That's question (5).  That question doesn't need to be asked on the registration forms for Berlin.

I'm not sure we have enough history yet for question (6).

I will note that besides the "must have been a WG chair" bias, we also have a "sell by date" bias, especially for IESG members.  By that I mean that a perfectly qualified candidate for the IESG who has been serving in that position for say 6 years is less desirable than one who has similar qualifications but hasn't yet served and may end up being considered "disqualified" even if fully qualified.  That bias is written into the 3777 considerations as is the WG chair bias.  It may be useful to take the set of current (or last 5 year) chairs, and subtract out any chair who has served at least 2 or 4 years as IAB or IESG and do the comparison with the IAB/IESG again.

Mike

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:00:17 +0300

Dan: the original reason for wanting to understand who the meeting participants are (as a subset of all IETF participants) was a desire to track our participation. Similarly to how we already track where they come from, and present that pie chart in the plenary. 

You raise an issue about making deductions about the leadership bias based on these numbers. I agree that such deductions would be highly questionable. But enabling such comparisons was not the intent. It truly was merely to understand where we are in terms of participation, and how it evolves over time.

Jari

---

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:31:10 +0100

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

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Pete
> Resnick
> Sent: 18 April 2013 16:29
> To: James Polk
> Cc: [email-masked]

---

From: James Polk <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:33:25 -0500

At 10:28 AM 4/18/2013, Pete Resnick wrote:
>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.
>
>>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.
>
>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.

I believe I did myself a disservice in assigning such a high ratio 
without saying it "feels like 70:1", which it does. But I'd truly be 
surprised if it's only 10:1 - and you can't make effective and 
accurate estimates based on guessing the gender of the names of an 
international organization like the IETF is.

Now, and this is purely from a defending myself pov, the feel of a 
70:1 crowd that's right in front of you from a 18:1 crowd isn't that 
much, especially if you're part of that larger number. There is a 
matter of the number of the group you happen to be part of is so 
overwhelming you tend to guess on the high side.

>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".

I have to disagree with you here. In my mind, this "feels like a 70:1 
ratio" has nothing to do with the ratios of leadership to the 
community within the IETF, it's from the gathering places and 
hallways where there are just wave after wave (after wave) of men. 
It's also from sheer lack of numbers of women within the WGs I've 
attended over the years (SIP related, MMUSIC, GEOPRIV, ECRIT, the 
whole TSV area, etc).

>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.

whether it's 70:1 or 18:1 - that's significantly more of one group 
that the other.

Thanks Pete for making this point, and causing me to clarify what I 
originally wrote.

James

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:03:25 +0000

> included statements like:

Personally, not wearing an AD hat or attempting to anticipate the conclusions of the study group, I think the cure is to encourage more talented people to participate who do not share the same characteristics as the existing members, specifically with respect to age, sex, culture and/or geography.   I think discouraging participation or limiting participation of existing participants is a bad idea, but encouraging new talented participants is always a good idea.

And then I think we need to have a kind of ongoing consciousness-raising about how cognitive bias works, and how it might be affecting our decisions as participants.   It's not enough to simply get a 50-50 male/female ratio, for example; if it were, the U.S. would elect female presidents slightly more than half the time, but of course we don't.

But fixing either problem without fixing the other will not have much impact on diversity; if we fix the cognitive bias problem (should it even exist, which I am not asserting to be the case), that won't matter if the pool of candidates lacks diversity; if the pool of candidates is diverse, that won't matter if we don't correct for cognitive bias.

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:34:28 +0000

On Apr 18, 2013, at 2:33 PM, James Polk <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I believe I did myself a disservice in assigning such a high ratio without saying it "feels like 70:1", which it does. But I'd truly be surprised if it's only 10:1 - and you can't make effective and accurate estimates based on guessing the gender of the names of an international organization like the IETF is.

Part of the problem here is figuring out what you mean by 70:1.   I think if you try to come up with a single ratio like this, you're oversimplifying to the point of uselessness.

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:07:15 +0300

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

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:51:02 -0500

On 4/17/13 2:21 PM, Dan Harkins wrote:
> Look, bias stinks and when it exists its stench is detectable.

Dan, leaving aside all of your other comments for the moment (many of 
which are straw men that nobody but you have suggested, speaking of 
fallacies), this one comment is a serious problem since it is so 
demonstrably false. Bias creeps in in all sorts of undetectable ways; if 
it was always detectable, lots of statisticians and psychologists and 
survey designers would be out of jobs. Aside from simple methodological 
data collection problems, bias is often caused by completely unconscious 
(and sometimes well intentioned) behaviors when it comes to human 
endeavors. The literature on this topic is so extensive that I can't 
even imagine why you would even suggest the opposite.

> We already know "who we are".

That's an interesting claim, and at least at first glance given other 
comments on the list, again seemingly false. As Adrian commented, 
perception is important. If it seems to some folks that the ratio of men 
to women throughout the IETF is 70:1, should it turn out that it is 
closer to 10:1 and the numbers in leadership are closer to 30:1, that 
would not only indicate that we don't "already know 'who we are'", but 
it could also be an interesting indication of why there might be 
statistical bias in the selection of leadership. (Or not. But it seems 
worthy of examination.)

That's my two message limit for the day on the IETF list.

pr

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:47:44 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, April 18, 2013 1:51 pm, Pete Resnick wrote:
> demonstrably false.

  I'm sure I speak alone when I say that I hope you are only leaving my other
comments aside for a moment and will return to them later. I would actually
like to see a response that doesn't snip a 30-40 line post into 1 sentence.

  If you would like to engage me off-list, I welcome that.

>                                 Bias creeps in in all sorts of
undetectable ways; if
> even imagine why you would even suggest the opposite.

  Now we're playing a subtle word game here. A bias that a statistician
might add is demonstrably different than what Melinda Shore has
_repeatedly_ referred to as "gender bias". So when I'm talking about
bias I'm talking about a form of discrimination based on gender. It is
the intentional passing over of a more qualified woman in favor of a
less qualified man. Exactly the same thing that is being referred to
when she says:

  "I'm telling you that I think the numbers are highly suggestive of bias".

What numbers are those? The observable numbers about I* leadership.
What is the bias being suggested? It is a bias against women. Straw
man? I think not.

  A statistician might put bias in his statistical result and a survey
designer might put bias in a question to elicit a favored result,
intentionally or unintentionally. But we both know that is not what
we're talking about here.

> statistical bias in the selection of leadership. (Or not. But it seems

  "We" are a volunteer standards organization that operates on a
consensus basis. For the purposes of "who we are" the number of
women that register for a meeting should be as relevant as the number
of people who register that are left handed, flat footed or double jointed
(for the record I am all three). In other words, not at all. There may be
a statistical bias in the selection of leadership that favors left-handedness
or maybe it disfavors left-handedness. Is that interesting? Maybe to
someone. Is it worthwhile in finding out "who we are"? No.

  Dan.

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:24:32 -0500

Damn. Breaking my two message rule.

On 4/18/13 4:47 PM, Dan Harkins wrote:

> less qualified man.

It's so nice when the straw men stand up and say, "Here I am! Look at me!"

"Intentional passing over"? "Intentional"???

I defy you to find anywhere in Melinda's messages.... Strike that: I 
defy you to find anywhere in *anybody's* messages on this topic where it 
says that the problem suspected is *intentional* gender bias.

Overt intentional sexists and other such bigots are never a problem of 
this sort; they're sincere in their beliefs easy to identify. Finding 
and eliminating their sort of bias is a walk in the park. It's the 
*unintentional* and *institutional* and *structural* biases that are the 
ones that creep in all over the place and are the least detectable.

If you think that all of this discussion is about intentional bias, you 
have been talking to yourself.

> we're talking about here.

Nonsense. That is exactly what we are talking about, whether it's how we 
ADs choose chairs, or how chairs choose document editors, or how we all 
choose nominees for the IESG or IAB, etc. If any of us thought we were 
talking about intentional bias, we would have packed up and gone home 
long ago.

> (for the record I am all three). In other words, not at all.

All of those features *should* be equally relevant (i.e., not at all). 
And if you could design an interesting addition to the Harvard Implicit 
Association Test <https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/> that 
showed whether people are or aren't unconsciously biased when it comes 
to left-handedness or flat-footedness or hypermobility (I hate that 
other term), I'm sure the Harvard folks would love to hear from you. But 
there *is* loads of nice evidence about unconscious bias when it comes 
to gender, especially when it comes to leadership roles and roles in 
engineering. I suspect (but until you design that test, can't provide 
evidence) that we *do* ignore (even subconsciously) left-handedness and 
flat-footedness and hypermobility when it comes to leadership positions 
in the IETF. But I also suspect that we are subconsciously influenced 
when it comes to gender bias; indeed, given what I know of the 
literature, it would be hard to imagine that we in the IETF are the 
astounding exception. So I think it's worth examining, especially given 
some of the interesting perceptual anecdotes seen already.

So, do we need to start this entire conversation over, overtly stating 
that we are not interested in looking at *intentional* gender (or 
corporate affiliation or other sorts of) bias?

pr

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:23:04 -0700 (PDT)

> corporate affiliation or other sorts of) bias?

  Actually I think it would be better to explicitly state what is intended
to be done. If you think that we are subconsciously influenced when
it comes to gender bias then I'd like to know what is going to be done
about it. And if it's more than "nothing" then I'd like to know what our
goal is vis-a-vis the gender breakdown of leadership positions and
the lengths that we will go to ensure we reach it.

  If we're just gathering data to make a pie chart for the plenary then
it seems like a waste of time.

  Dan.

---

From: David Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:53:56 -0700 (PDT)

> it seems like a waste of time.

Without gathering a baseline, it makes no sense to postulate mitigations
because there is no way to judge progress.

Others have already noted that there are several different points of
concern. By measurement, it may be possible to establish that IESG
gender membership tracks general meeting attendance (or doesn't
track meeting attendance). If it tracks meeting attendance it
seems reasonable to finds ways to increase participation by
the underrepresented population in the whole IETF. If it doesn't
track the general population, then more detailed analysis is
needed of the process of selecting IESG members.

Collecting population characteristics is the first baby step.

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:58:05 +0000

On Apr 18, 2013, at 7:23 PM, "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> to be done.

This is what we are trying to figure out!

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:44:47 -0400

>      leadership that is predominantly white and male, therefore we

Just for the record, that is not a line of reasoning I am taking.

The line I am taking is something more like the following.  First,
assume that, if there were bias in favour of (we're not testing for
white, so I'm leaving that out) males, there might be an observable
pattern of difference between the percentage of women in "leadership"
positions and the percentage of women in overall participants.  So,
look at the "leadership" and the general participant populations over
time.  If there appears to be a difference, then that is reason to
encourage further inquiry.  If there appears to be no difference, then
we are justified in saying that there is no evidence of an issue.

That approach is just basic empiricism, and not the fallacy of
affirming the consequent that you're claiming people are making.  If
such an approach is controversial, then every modern empirical science
is on a shaky footing.  It's certainly true (Hume makes this point
rather more eloquently than I can) that such empirical argument is
_formally_ false.  But that's the wrong criterion, because empirical
argument is useful.  Even Hume played billiards.
 
> diversity in the areas of race and gender. Why is this a problem? 

Because some people report that they experience a chilly environment,
and we respect those people for their other contributions and would
like more people like them to contribute in similar ways, and
therefore we want to make the environment less chilly.  I'm sort of
surprised that that problem, which has been stated in my view quite
plainly more than once in this thread, isn't evident to anyone
participating.

> don't we ask about the size of the organization we work for? 

We don't need to.  A large number of participants include an
affiliation, and using by and large public data we could just find
this out using the data we already have.  I agree it would be useful.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:59:32 -0700 (PDT)

> plainly more than once in this thread, isn't evident to anyone

  Well, that is certainly not the message that I read. What I read was
that the I* leadership is 97% male (and 97% white) and that alone
puts into question the legitimacy of the IETF as an International
Standards Development Organization. If people are encountering a
chilly environment then that is a different issue.

  It has been a few IETFs since I've heard someone approach the mic
and say "that is the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time" and a few
more since it was said to me. That kind of brusqueness is part of our
culture but I think it can be off-putting and a barrier to contributing.
New people get intimidated around a bunch of aggressive type-A
personalities and may be reluctant to present or contribute for fear
of being put down.

  If we want to make the IETF a less chilly place that is more inviting
and we want to encourage participation maybe we should address
our cultural tics and idiosyncrasies that represent a barrier to entry
rather than enumerate the women who have registered for a meeting.
(And yes, I am talking about myself).

  regards,

  Dan.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:29:31 +0100

A statistician? This entire thread is basically arguing that the IETF needs a human resources department.

Lloyd Wood

________________________________________
From: [email-masked] [[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Brian E Carpenter [[email-masked]]
Sent: 18 April 2013 16:43
To: Pete Resnick
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

   Brian

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:03:15 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
To: "Andrew Sullivan" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 4:59 AM

  Well, that is certainly not the message that I read. What I read was
that the I* leadership is 97% male (and 97% white) and that alone
puts into question the legitimacy of the IETF as an International
Standards Development Organization.

<tp>
Yes, that is the message I am getting from this thread and it seems to
me to be a canard that originates from outside the IETF, perhaps in
groups promoting Diversity and Rights, as opposed to engineering.

I have encountered many network experts in my day job yet within the
IETF, I encounter a large number of seriously talented people, active on
many mailing lists, who are in a different league to the former group.
If we required the IETF to reflect the diversity of people who are,
e.g., IT network professionals, then the IETF would fall apart for lack
of ability.

And the IETF is unusual in its leadership.  Some organisations promote
the technically able, regardless of their lack of management skills, and
suffer as a result.  Leaders need to lead, and manage, and delegate the
technical aspects of the work.  The IETF is different.  WG Chairs and
ADs must have world-class technical skills - if anything, I think that
this comes at the expense of leadership, and sometimes wish that WG
Chairs and ADs had more management skills, but recognise that that must
not be at the expense of the technical skills.  Even so, being the most
brilliant editor of, say, a new security standard does not mean that the
person would make a good AD.

If the ADs of the IETF have to represent the diversity of the world -
which could in extremis be construed as so many Chinese, so many
Indians, so many Africans etc - then the IETF would be a less effective,
probably an ineffective, organisation.

So what's the problem?  And who says so?

Tom Petch

</tp>

If people are encountering a
chilly environment then that is a different issue.

  regards,

  Dan.

---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:53:02 -0400

Hi Tom,

> e.g., IT network professionals, then the IETF would fall apart for lack
[…]
> which could in extremes..

Has anyone even suggested that IESG should reflect the diversity of these groups?  Where is this coming from?  You are putting up strawmen, so that you can tear them down…

The question that people are asking is why the diversity of the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of _the IETF_.

There is no inherent reason why 40+-year-old, white, western males who work at large networking equipment vendors are inherently more capable of serving on the IESG than people from other groups within the IETF, and there would be _considerable internal benefit_ to having an IESG that was more diverse, because diverse groups make better decisions and better represent the needs of the whole organization.  Therefore, if there is something about our culture, our structure, our selection process, or the way we run our meetings that is causing us to predominantly select our leadership from a restricted group, we would have _more capable_ and _better_ leadership if we could find a way to broaden that pool.

_That_ is what this discussion is about.  This is not an effort to meet some externally imposed notion of diversity.

Margaret

---

From: Glen Zorn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:20:30 +0700

On 04/29/2013 07:53 AM, Margaret Wasserman wrote:

 >> If we required the IETF to reflect the diversity of people who
 >> are, e.g., IT network professionals, then the IETF would fall apart
 >> for lack of ability.
 > […]
 >> If the ADs of the IETF have to represent the diversity of the world
 >> - which could in extremes..
 >
 > Has anyone even suggested that IESG should reflect the diversity of
 > these groups?  Where is this coming from?  You are putting up
 > strawmen, so that you can tear them down…
 >
 > The question that people are asking is why the diversity of the IETF
 > leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of _the IETF_.
 >
 > There is no inherent reason why 40+-year-old, white, western males
 > who work at large networking equipment vendors are inherently more
 > capable of serving on the IESG than people from other groups within
 > the IETF, and there would be _considerable internal benefit_ to
 > having an IESG that was more diverse, because diverse groups make
 > better decisions and better represent the needs of the whole
 > organization.  Therefore, if there is something about our culture,
 > our structure, our selection process, or the way we run our meetings
 > that is causing us to predominantly select our leadership from a
 > restricted group, we would have _more capable_ and _better_
 > leadership if we could find a way to broaden that pool.

It seems like everybody in the IETF is already in that pool.  After all, 
any participant can self-nominate for an AD position; how can the pool 
get any bigger?

>
 >
 > _That_ is what this discussion is about.

Really?  It appeared to me that the discussion arose because some people 
were unhappy about the makeup of the IESG, not the selection pool.  
However, if what you're saying is true, that's great: since the 
selection pool is already universally inclusive, problem solved & we can 
turn our seemingly limitless capacity for bickering to other purposes ;-) .

> This is not an effort to meet  some externally imposed notion of
 > diversity.
 >
 > Margaret
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:05:37 -0400

>The question that people are asking is why the diversity of the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of _the IETF_.

Let's consider for a moment that this may not actually be the correct question.  Instead, consider "Why the diversity of the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of the set of the IETF WG chairs"?  I believe this is a more representative candidate population for the IAB and IESG.  

By my count (using the WG chairs picture page), there are 202 current working group chairs. Of these 15 are female  - or 7.4% of the population [It would be more reliable to do this for any WG chair in the last 5-10 years, but the above was readily available and I think provides at least the basis for discussion.  Anticipating the argument, I would assume for the sake of discussion a fairly similar percentage of ex-working group chairs per gender unless there is evidence to the contrary]

There are 14 (current area directors plus the chair) members of the IESG, of which none are currently female.

There are 12 current IAB members of which 1 member is female.

Assuming perfect distribution, that would suggest that 14 * (15/202) or 1.03 IESG members should be female.

Assuming perfect distribution, that would suggest that 12 * (15/202) or .89 IAB members should be female.

Assuming perfect distribution, that would suggest that 26 * (15/202) or 1.93 IAB + IESG members should be female. 

And pretending for a moment that picks for the IAB and IESG are completely random from the candidate set of Working group chairs, the binomial distribution for 7.4% for 27 positions is:

0 - 12.5%, 1 - 27.0%, 2 - 28.1%, 3 or more - 32.5%.  (e.g. about 40% of the time, the IAB and IESG  combined will have 0 or 1 female members).

for 7.4% for 15 positions  (IESG) is: 
0 - 31.4%, 1 - 37.8%, 2 - 21.2%, 3 or more - 9.5%

for 7.4% for 12 positions (IAB) is: 
0 - 39.6%, 1 - 38.1%, 2 - 16.8%, 3 or more - 5.4%

But the actual one you should consider is 7.4% for 14 positions (annual replacement):
0 - 34%, 1 - 38.1%, 2 - 19.9%, 3 or more - 8%.    

This last one says that for any given nomcom selection, assuming strict random selection, 72% of the time 0 or 1 females will be selected across both the IAB and IESG.  You should use this one as the actual compositions of the IAB/IESG are the sum of all the nomcom actions that have happened before.

There are statistical tests to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in populations, but my admittedly ancient memories of statistics suggest that the population size of the IAB/IESG is too small for a statistically valid comparison with either the WG chair population or the IETF population.

Of course, the nomcom doesn't select and the confirming bodies do not confirm based on a roll of the dice.  
But looking at this analysis, it's unclear - for this one axis of gender - that the question "why the diversity of the IETF leadership does not reflect the diversity of the set of IETF WG chairs" has a more correct answer than "the luck of the draw".

My base premise may be incorrect:  That you need to have been a WG chair prior to service as an IAB or IESG member.  I hope it isn't as I think this level of expertise is useful for success in these bodies.    

Assuming it is correct, then the next question is whether or not there is a significant difference in percentage of female attendees vs percentage of female working group chairs and is there a root cause for that difference that the IETF can address in a useful manner.

Mike

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:34:14 -0700

> Let's consider for a moment that this may not actually be the correct question.  Instead, consider "Why the diversity of the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of the set of the IETF WG…

Except that the IESG members select the wg chairs, which makes your 
baseline stastistic suspect; it's too easy for all sorts of biasing 
factors to sway the allocation of wg chair positions.

d/

---

From: Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:52:14 +0000

> Except that the IESG members select the wg chairs, which makes your baseline stastistic suspect; it's too easy for all sorts of biasing factors to sway the
> allocation of wg chair positions.

Mike actually mentioned that. Let's assume a simplified curriculum of participant -> author/editor -> WG chair -> IESG, which more or less reflects increasing seniority in the IETF. We may suspect that there is bias that, at each step, privileges some candidates over others. However, the mechanisms are different at each step. Self-selection, selection by WG chair, selection by the nom com. It makes sense to assess the filtering effect of each step independently, and in particular to assess the nomcom by comparing the pool of WG chairs to the selected nominees.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:57:03 -0700

On 4/28/2013 10:52 PM, Christian Huitema wrote:
> Mike actually mentioned that. Let's assume a simplified curriculum of
> participant -> author/editor -> WG chair -> IESG, which more or less
> reflects increasing seniority in the IETF. We may suspect that there
> is bias that, at each step, privileges some candidates over others.
> However, the mechanisms are different at each step.

Exactly.  Complicated processes, needing high quality data that gets 
complicated analysis, that we aren't well-enough trained to do well and 
aren't going to be doing.

All of which is why we should limit our attempts to do numerical
analysis for this topic, and worry far more about the basics, including 
such things as interaction (in)sensitivities, group tone and style, and 
observable misbehaviors, all of which are likely to produce biasing results.

d/

---

From: Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:14:57 +0000

> All of which is why we should limit our attempts to do numerical analysis for this topic, and worry far more about the basics, 
> including such things as interaction (in)sensitivities, group tone and style, and observable misbehaviors, all of which are likely to produce biasing results.

Certainly useful, but it is easy to inject one's own bias into such processes, and to overlook other factors. I may be biased, but I have the impression that the largest source of bias in IESG selection is the need to secure funding for the job, which effectively self-select people working for large companies making networking products. Gender may be the least of the problems there; there are other dimensions of diversity, e.g. academic vs. industry, network equipment versus internet service providers, software versus hardware, etc. Only a fraction of these segments can afford to have someone working full-time on the IESG. Now, having to work full time is a bit much for a volunteer position, and we may want to consider ways to remedy that.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:55:44 +0100

> The question that people are asking is why the diversity of the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of _the IETF_.
The evidence seems to be that human's are terrible at "guessing"
statistics, and the only statistics that are reliable as those
objectively gathered and subjected to rigorous statistical analysis.
You can often see this in human assessments of risk. It is
also in the nature of statistics that you get long runs of outliers, and
that only when you take a long view to you see the averages you
would expect. Again Humans are terrible with this, assuming
for example that a coin that comes up heads 10 times in a row
the assumption is that this is bias, and not a normal statistical
variation that you would expect in an infinite number of throws.

Given the diversity ratios that we see, it is unclear to me whether
we are observing a systematic effect or a statistical effect.

It would be useful to the discussion if we could see data on diversity
that was the output of a rigorous  statistical analysis. i.e. one that
included a confidence analysis and not a simple average in a few
spot years.

- Stewart

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:11:14 +0100

> Assuming it is correct, then the next question is whether or not there is a significant difference in percentage of female attendees vs percentage of female working group chairs and is there a root…
This is in line with my own estimate based on an approximation of 1:10 
which with random selection gives an error approximation of sqrt(1)=1

The other thing to remember is that whilst your proportional estimates 
are likely to be correct, in a random process you will get long runs of 
"bias" that only average out in the long run. So you will get long runs 
of 0. Very infrequently you will also get long runs of 27. In both cases 
it is in human nature to  would assume something is wrong, when it is an 
artifact of random numbers. Humans have considerable difficulty 
discriminating between systematic and statistical problems, and taking 
the long view rather than the short view.

For that reason, as I noted in my previous post, we need a rigorous 
statistical analysis with proper confidence intervals, rather than 
simple averages on spot years.

- Stewart

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:15:21 +0100

On 29/04/2013 06:57, Dave Crocker wrote:
> complicated analysis, that we aren't well-enough trained to do well 
> and aren't going to be doing.
>
>
Dave

Of all the social mixes  you would anticipate the IETF to be in the 
likely to do it, likely to do it correctly quadrant.

Stewart

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:09:00 -0700

> likely to do it, likely to do it correctly quadrant.

If by 'it', you mean statistical analysis of human behavior, no.  I'd 
expect our group methodology to be exactly as poor at it as we are...

d/

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:38:39 -0400

--On Monday, April 29, 2013 09:55 +0100 Stewart Bryant
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> The question that people are asking is why the diversity of
>> the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of _the
>> IETF_.
>> 

I mostly agree with this, but it means that attempts at
statistical measurement of populations we can't really
characterize are irrelevant.  In particular, as soon as one
talks about the "diversity of _the IETF_", one is talking about
the participant population.  There is no evidence at all, and
some evidences to the contrary, that the attendee population is
a good surrogate (approximation to a random sample, if you
prefer) for the participant population.   Making that assumption
by polling or measuring the attendee function and assuming it is
representative of the IETF may introduce far more biases than
most of what we are talking about.

> variation that you would expect in an infinite number of

On the other hand, as a loyal empirical Bayesian, I suggest
that, if I observe a run of 10 heads and, as a result, bet on
the next toss being heads, I am somewhat more likely to carry
home my winnings at the end of the day that you are if you
continue to bet on a 50-50 chance no matter how long the run
gets... _even_ if the rules are normal statistical variation.
Now, after an infinite number of coin tosses occur, you may be
proven correct, but part of the reason for that Bayesian
judgment (or a judgment based on moving average properties of
the time series) is that few of us are going to be able to wait
for that infinite number of tosses. 

> included a confidence analysis and not a simple average in a
> few spot years.

I agree.  But I also suggest that humans are pretty good at
binary comparisons and some longitudinal relationships that do
not involve population samples.  For example, with no effort to
compare the population statistics of the IESG with the
population statistics of the IETF (the precise comparison that
is most susceptible to the statistical problems both of us are
concerned about), it is easy to look at IESG membership
longitudinally and observe that, between the early 1990s and
2010, there were always at least one, and often two or three,
women on the IESG.  Since then, zero.    Now, based on around 17
years of moving average, I feel somewhat justified statistically
in believing that something odd is happening.  

I would feel much more justified if we went a couple years more
with no change in our procedures and how we think about things
and the "zero women" trend continued, but that illustrates the
other problems with this sort of analysis and an attempt to base
it on population statistics, especially the population
statistics of experimental design.  First, our having these
discussions have, I believe, already increased sensitivities to
the issues and maybe even how the community thinks about it.  If
we end up with a woman or three on the IESG a year from now, it
will basically be impossible to know whether that was 

	-- simply a return to normal behavior after a period of
	deviation that could be attributed to statistical
	variation or 
	
	-- whether it was because this discussion was
	effectively a consciousness-raising exercise that
	changed how decisions are made.

The second issue is that, as in a clinical trial in which it
becomes obvious (with all of those subjective human judgments as
well as strict statistical ones) that one of the treatment
groups is doing much better than others, it may be socially and
morally unacceptable to continue the experiment in order to get
cleaner statistical results.

--On Monday, April 29, 2013 06:14 +0000 Christian Huitema
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Certainly useful, but it is easy to inject one's own bias into
> such processes, and to overlook other factors. I may be
> biased, but I have the impression that the largest source of
> bias in IESG selection is the need to secure funding for the
> job, which effectively self-select people working for large
> companies making networking products.

Or at least large companies and mostly those with a significant
stake in the Internet.  I agree with this impression.   In
principle, we could separate gender (or other) bias from this by
comparing those who are willing to be candidates with those who
are selected.  I don't think that works in practice unless we
require people to get binding company approval before agreeing
to be candidates.  We have never done that.  Ignoring the other
bad effects it might have, it is a rational strategy for many
people to agree to be candidates after only a minimal discussion
with their organizations and then to have the serious discussion
only after the Nomcom's "please confirm that you are still
really available" note arrives.

> Gender may be the least
> of the problems there; there are other dimensions of
> diversity, e.g. academic vs. industry, network equipment
> versus internet service providers, software versus hardware,
> etc. Only a fraction of these segments can afford to have
> someone working full-time on the IESG. Now, having to work
> full time is a bit much for a volunteer position, and we may
> want to consider ways to remedy that.

Even within a company, there may be biases about who gets the
approval.  On the gender issue, we might be seeing symptoms of
something that is actually positive for the women engineers
although bad for the IETF.  A series of analyses[1] suggest
that, in standards bodies that are mostly working on mature
technologies, few companies consider it a good investment to
send design-capable people with good management skills to
standards meetings, much less to have them commit to standards
management activities.  When the technologies are less mature,
it makes more sense for organizations to commit design and
implementation talent for standards development and even for
standards management.  Marshall Rose memorably suggested that
those trends and others led to SDOs that contain a lot of
"Goers" rather than a lot of designer-implementer "Doers".  

If one were to hypothesize (I have no idea whether this is true)
that many of the women with design engineer capabilities who
attend IETF early in their careers have those talents recognized
by their companies and end up in positions that make it
unattractive to send them to the IETF --much to contribute all
of their time for a minimum of two to four years-- then we just
don't see them on the IETF.  Even if an exactly equal number of
incoming men have the same talents and the same recognition and
promotion pattern, the smaller number of incoming women would
predict an IESG that was largely or entirely men.

Another possible corollary to Marshall's analysis and the
earlier studies is that the leadership of any SDO will gradually
converge on entirely Go-ers or "professional standardizers",
simply because they are less expensive --in terms of loss of
skilled time for an extended period as well as more direct
costs-- than design or development talent.   That particular
issue isn't related to most of what we've been discussing as
"diversity" but it may be another very important and related
issue.  I don't think the IETF is there yet but I've wondered if
we are on the downhill slope.

best,
  john

[1] These analyses go back long before Rose contributed the much
more colorful interpretation and vocabulary to the discussion
that I've invoked above.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:46:07 -0700

On 4/29/2013 9:38 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
> First, our having these
> the issues and maybe even how the community thinks about it.

Actually, it probably hasn't.

It has raised awareness that there are people who are sensitive to the 
topic.  It probably has raised some people's awareness that there are 
serious issues here and that the IETF ought to pay attention to them 
(better).

I seriously doubt it has afforded many folk a sense of how to behave 
differently, and how to evaluate community and management choices in 
terms of diversity concerns.

Let's not confuse activity with progress.

d/

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:51:59 -0800

On 4/29/13 1:11 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote:
> "bias" that only average out in the long run. 

Right, although if "normal" statistical fluctuation gives us
a long period of woman-free leadership, somewhere in your long
run we might expect the same statistical fluctuation
to deliver unto us a stretch in which women are overrepresented
in the leadership.

Melinda

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:08:33 -0400

--On Monday, April 29, 2013 09:46 -0700 Dave Crocker
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> discussions have, I believe, already increased sensitivities
>> to the issues and maybe even how the community thinks about
>> it.
> 
> 
> It has raised awareness that there are people who are
> sensitive to the topic.  It probably has raised some people's
> awareness that there are serious issues here and that the IETF
> ought to pay attention to them (better).
> 
> I seriously doubt it has afforded many folk a sense of how to
> behave differently, and how to evaluate community and
> management choices in terms of diversity concerns.

I am trying (temporarily) to be more optimistic than that, but I
fear that you may be correct.  

If so, we may be in big trouble and/or wasting our time by even
having this discussion.  If raising awareness and sensitivity
isn't enough to get people to think about and make decisions
differently and the only criteria the community will accept for
either the existence of a problem or evidence that progress is
being made is hard, frequency-based, statistical (or statistical
analyses of experimental) data then,

 -- we can quibble endlessly about what should be
	measured and what the measurements mean and probably
	will, and
	
 -- we will never agree on quantitative criteria for
	progress or adequate diversity because such criteria
	will have the odor of preferential treatment and quotas
	(whether they are or not).

And that applies not just to selections by the Nomcom but to all
of the selections that are affected by the "select people whom
you know and know can do the job" behavior that has been
discussed at length in another thread.
 
> Let's not confuse activity with progress.

Indeed.  Let's also try to avoid defining progress in a way that
makes even useful activity impossible.   But, again, I fear you
are correct about all of this.

   john

---

From: John E Drake <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:16:32 +0000

What a concept.

Irrespectively Yours,

John

> Melinda Shore
> Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 9:52 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> > are likely to be correct, in a random process you will get long runs
> > of "bias" that only average out in the long run.
> 
> Right, although if "normal" statistical fluctuation gives us a long
> period of woman-free leadership, somewhere in your long run we might
> expect the same statistical fluctuation to deliver unto us a stretch in
> which women are overrepresented in the leadership.
> 
> Melinda
> 
>

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:38:07 +0000

On Apr 29, 2013, at 1:08 PM, John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:
> If raising awareness and sensitivity
> differently 

Statistical analysis shows that even when peoples' awareness is raised, biases continue to exist, not because the people are bad people, but because cognitive biases are simply not affected by "consciousness raising" alone.   So IMHO at least, what we are looking for here is not consciousness-raising, but some method of determining if we are indeed suffering from cognitive biases here, and if so, some method for actually addressing the problem.

---

From: Lou Berger <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:30:36 -0400

Did anyone notice the NPR piece this AM?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/29/178810467/blazing-the-trail-for-female-programmers

Perhaps it's time for an IETF equivalent/chapter of
http://railsbridge.org/, http://blackfounders.com/,
http://wisecampaign.org.uk/, etc. ...

Lou

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:47:35 -0400

>Statistical analysis shows that even when peoples' awareness is raised, biases continue to exist, not because the people are bad people, but because cognitive biases are simply not affected by "cons…

Yup.  The problem here is that the sample set of "leadership" positions is so small its difficult to get any reasonable measure one way or the other.   When you start mixing and matching gender, race, citizenship etc into the pot as possible determiners it just gets worse.

The normal measure for determining whether one population is distinct from another appears to be the Chi Squared test.  

Throwing in a matrix of 

            WG Chairs     IAB/IESG Members
Male         187             25
Female        15             1

And running the calculation (http://www.quantpsy.org/chisq/chisq.htm) using the Yates' values (because the sample size is so small), there is a 79.13% chance that any observed differences in the composition of the two groups is solely due to statistical variations.

And playing off of John's message, if you look around 2005 when there were 4 female members of the IAB and IESG (and assuming the same composition of WG chairs), that calculation yields  something 31.4% - or 2 chances in 3 that the differences were due to something other than statistical variations.

When I look at this as a pure numbers problem, I'm unable to say there is a cognitive bias in the selection process and in fact the numbers would argue against being able to say that without a much larger set of IAB/IESG members.

Mike

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:04:35 -0400

At 01:34 AM 4/29/2013, Dave Crocker wrote:
>Except that the IESG members select the wg chairs, which makes your baseline stastistic suspect; it's too easy for all sorts of biasing factors to sway the allocation of wg chair positions.

A couple of points: 

Actually, I don't think this is even a mostly correct statement - that AD select chairs.  I believe that most chairs are self-selected [e.g. hey AD, I want to run a BOF on this topic with the idea of forming a working group - here's the other person who might chair, what do you think?  Sure - go ahead, we may twiddle with things a bit at charter formation, but you look like you know what you're doing].  With one exception (where I was asked to chair an evaluation panel), that's been my experience.

Would you have evidence to the contrary? 

Second point: 

You ignored most of the post and went directly to my last question - 'If there is no statistical difference between the IAB/IESG and the WG chair set, should we then consider the relationship between the IETF attending constituency and the WG chair set?"    Say the average meeting had 1500 attendees.  7.4% would suggest that there are 111 female attendees.  If the actual number is higher or lower it MAY represent a  statistically significant difference in the composition of the two groups.  Or it may not.   And even then, may only have a very indirect impact in the composition of the IAB/IESG.  Care to do the analysis?

Later, Mike

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:15:58 -0400

>including such things as interaction (in)sensitivities, group tone and style, and observable misbehaviors, all of which are likely to produce biasing results.

But in which direction?

The same thing could be said of pushing personal or cultural biases into the interpretation of group tone, style, and taking offense at behaviors which one culture might construe as offensive but for 50 other cultures is just the way things work.  

We have an IETF culture - like it or not.  It changes over time, as the population changes.  We can't and shouldn't expect to be able to change it by fiat, or to adopt as whole cloth a bias free culture (for some values of bias).

Mike

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:28:47 -0400

>to deliver unto us a stretch in which women are overrepresented

Hi Melinda - 

Actually, look at the time frame around 2004-5.  Multiple women on the IAB and multiple women on the IESG.  Almost double the expected value of "2" given the WG proportions.  

One of the things I saw, but didn't comment on elsewhere, was that I had noted that a number of the women who had participated as IESG or IAB members have since stopped participating (attending actually) IETF meetings.  I didn't comment on it because I didn't have a good feel for whether that proportion was higher or lower than the men who have been IESG/IAB members and are now not participating.  Analysis of this might yield some data on whether or not we're losing long term female participants at a higher rate than long term male participants - if so, it may be worthwhile to ask former members the "why" question to see if there's anything we can do to mitigate.  Long term participants appear (my opinion) to be more attractive candidates for IAB/IESG positions.

Mike

---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:30:21 -0400

Hi Mike,

> We have an IETF culture - like it or not.  It changes over time, as the population changes.  We can't and shouldn't expect to be able to change it by fiat, or to adopt as whole cloth a bias free cu…

How you do you think a culture evolves to be more inclusive?  Might that start with discussions like these?

Margaret

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:39:18 -0400

For what it's worth, I'm not finding the current discussion is providing
me useful information for making decisions.  It doesn't really matter to
me whether the problem is selection of WG chairs or selection of
IAB/IESG/IAOC after WG chairs are selected.  I think it is valuable to
attempt to improve both situations in parallel, and the sorts of
conclusions being drawn from the statistical discussion we're currently
having cannot possibly change my opinion on that issue.

I'm not saying that my mind is closed to being changed; simply that I've
considered all the possible conclusions that I think could be drawn from
the analysis being considered and from my standpoint they don't affect
how I'd feel about various proposals that could be brought forward.

Which I guess speaks to John's point that I at least am a member of the
community who doesn't think the hard statistical analysis is useful
here.

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:04:05 +0100

> community who doesn't think the hard statistical analysis is useful
Sam,

Why would you disregard a statistical analysis? That seems akin to
disregarding the fundamentals of science and engineering.

Stewart

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:15:46 -0400

>How you do you think a culture evolves to be more inclusive?  Might that start with discussions like these?

I believe your statement implies some preconceptions - that you believe the IETF culture is not inclusive enough and that more inclusiveness will benefit the IETF.  I'm not sure there's evidence to support the first - hence the numerical analysis.   It may be the case that "we're not inclusive enough" is a correct evaluation, but see Stewart's note on the human tendency to impute patterns into random results.

I would ask this instead - "How does the IETF evolve to continue to be an effective, efficient, and relevant source of high quality Internet standards?"

If one of the answers to that question necessarily involves inclusiveness, then the conversation should go forward on that topic, but preferably not in isolation, not as the "fix this now" knee jerk (my perception) type of activity that seems to be going on.

Let me ask a couple of specific questions of you.  

Who have you mentored in the past 5 years?  Have  they ended up as working group chairs, or ADs or IAB members?   Do they mostly represent under-represented groups?  How many of them were employed by your employer (e.g. was this a work related task?)?

During your time as an AD, how many women did you arm twist/recruit specifically  (or ask nicely) to take WG positions in your area (as opposed to them coming to you or your co-AD)?  

How many non-employee, under-represented population attendees is your current employer supporting to go to the IETF?  Have you addressed this with your employer?

Why is the inclusiveness question more of an IETF question, as opposed to one of personal actions?

I'm asking the above, because I'm trying to get a calibration on what you mean by inclusiveness and how important it actually is for you, and possibly for your employer.

Mike

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:40:16 -0700

On 4/29/2013 12:04 PM, Michael StJohns wrote:
> Actually, I don't think this is even a mostly correct statement -
> that AD select chairs.

It is a long-standing, simple, objective, unvarying management fact of 
IETF procedure:  ADs hire and fire wg chairs.

> Second point:
>
> You ignored most of the post and went directly to my last question

I went to the meta-point that the line of discussion isn't 
methodologically meaningful or educationally useful.  Possibly you 
noticed one or two additional postings in this sub-thread asserting the 
same thing.

d/

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:41:18 -0700 (PDT)

> how I'd feel about various proposals that could be brought forward.

  Sounds to me like you have the cart in front of the horse. You already
have in mind various proposals (interestingly left unstated) and are looking
for data that can justify them being brought forward. Apparently, this data
does not help you justify these proposals so you find no use discussing in
it. Maybe we should let the data drive the proposals instead of the other
way around.

  Dan.

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:49:13 -0400

>>>>> "Stewart" == Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]> writes:

    Stewart> Why would you disregard a statistical analysis? That seems
    Stewart> akin to disregarding the fundamentals of science and

Statistical analysis is only useful if it's going to tell you something
that matters for your decision criteria.

Let's take Mike's most recent messages here.  It doesn't actually matter
to me whether the problem in gender diversity is at the nomcom level or
at the wg chair selection level.
So, a statistical discussion of whether there's bias in nomcom choosing
leaders from the wg chairs does not provide input that matters in my
decision criteria, so I disregard that particular analysis.

I certainly did not mean to imply that I disregard statistics, or even
disregard statistics in diversity discussions.  Simply, I don't find the
statistical discussion here pointful, and I think it's a sufficient
distraction that I felt a need to speak out about it.

---

From: Joe Abley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:55:20 -0400

> that matters for your decision criteria.

http://i.imgur.com/47D7zGq.png

Joe

---

From: Warren Kumari <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:01:33 -0400

> http://i.imgur.com/47D7zGq.png

Wow, that *was* useful, and has helped reinforce my belief that I chose the right browser -- "Think of the children, don't use IE."

Couldn't resist: http://xkcd.com/552/

W

--
There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and straong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!"
  -- Terry Pratchett

---

From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:20:45 -0400

At 04:40 PM 4/29/2013, Dave Crocker wrote:
>It is a long-standing, simple, objective, unvarying management fact of IETF procedure:  ADs hire and fire wg chairs.

The AD's do have the final say.  No question.  But  "select" implies that the own the entire process of creating and staffing a WG. Nope.

>I went to the meta-point that 

[Dave Crocker believes that]

>the line of discussion isn't methodologically meaningful or educationally useful.  Possibly you noticed one or two additional postings in this sub-thread asserting the same thing.

And one or two actually considering whether or not there was something to be gleaned from such data.

I'll take your opinion under advisement.  Thanks.

Mike

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:28:26 -0700

> The AD's do have the final say.  No question.  But  "select" implies that the own the entire process of creating and staffing a WG. Nope.

They do "own" it; that's a formal truth.

That they often delegate details and concur with self-organizing choices 
means nothing, in terms of their authority.

Don't confuse efficiency hacks with formal authority.

d/

ps. I'm sure this was really quite an important point to debate, 
relative to problems with IETF diversity and culture.

---

From: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:44:05 -0700 (PDT)

On Mon, April 29, 2013 2:28 pm, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> The AD's do have the final say.  No question.  But  "select" implies
>> that the own the entire process of creating and staffing a WG. Nope.
>

  But it might mean something in terms of the discussion at hand. If the
ADs are concurring with self-organizing choices as opposed to selecting
WG chairs, then they aren't really imposing a "looks like me" bias into
the selection process.

  Dan.

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:51:42 -0400

> WG chairs, then they aren't really imposing a "looks like me" bias into

OK, here: I have to step in now.
Let me look at the new working group chairs and BoF chairs in the App
Area (as that's my area) since I've been an AD (one year, so far).

Chair changes:
APPSAWG: added Murray Kucherawy and Salvatore Loreto
CORE: added Andrew McGregor
IRI: added Peter Saint-Andre

New working groups
WEIRDS: Olaf Kolkman and Murray Kucherawy
SCIM: Morteza Ansari and Leif Johansson
SPFBIS: SM and Andrew Sullivan
IMAPMOVE: Ned Freed and Alexey Melnikov
JCARDCAL: Bert Greevenbosch and Peter Saint-Andre
QRESYNC: Dave Cridland and Eliot Lear

BoFs at IETF 83:
SCIM: Eliot Lear and Steve Bellovin
WEIRDS: Andrew Sullivan

BoFs at IETF 84:
DSII: Beth Pale and Ted Hardie

BoFs at IETF 86:
AGGSRV: Peter Saint-Andre
JSON: Joe Hildebrand

In all but one of these cases, we (the ADs) contacted people and
*asked* them to chair.  The exception was DSII and Beth Pale, but this
was not a working-group-forming BoF (and Ted was the one we
solicited).  For the SCIM working group, Morteza was one of the
proponents of the IETF 83 BoF, but he did not ask to be chair, and *I
asked him* only after consulting with folks and getting opinions that
suggested that he would be a good choice.  That has generally been my
approach and Pete's to finding chairs: getting opinions other than our
own.

We have a couple of other new chartering efforts in process, and we'll
be handling those similarly: selecting people we think will be
appropriate to chair those working groups.

Of course, if someone comes to us and says that they'd like to chair a
working group, we will take that into consideration.  But we most
certainly do NOT simply appoint people because they're technology
proponents, nor because they ask us to.  My sense of the rest of the
IESG is that they behave similarly.

I can tell you unequivocally that the ADs appoint the chairs, and "own
the entire process of [...] staffing a WG".  We are not just taking
the people who come to us and saying, "Yeah, sure, you'll do."  We
also want to find new chairs -- in the working-group chairs list
above, Andrew, Morteza, SM, Bert, and Dave are all first-time chairs.

Pete and I are also actively looking to increase the diversity in App
Area chairs -- perhaps you'll notice that we have *no* female chairs
in the App Area, at least partly because we have no women who are
active in the App Area just now.  We're working on that (and on other
diversity aspects) -- see, for example, the first item here:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-apparea-0.pdf

We're always eager for suggestions for people to be on our list of
potential chairs; please send such to <[email-masked]>.  And,
yes, we *do* own the staffing process.

Barry, Applications AD

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:02:27 +1200

On 30/04/2013 08:49, Sam Hartman wrote:
...
> that matters for your decision criteria.

Yes. And I would like to know, in statistical terms, whether
there are significant differences between (for example) the
M/F ratios among (a) IETF registrants, (b) active participants,
(c) WG chairs & secretaries and (d) I* members.

[Discussion on the objective definition of active participation
is deferred for now.]

The null hypothesis would be that no significant differences exist.
If that turns out to be true, we know that our problem is only lack of
diversity among registrants. If it turns out to be false, we know
that we have an internal problem of some kind as well.

   Brian

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:33:01 -0400

>>>>> "Brian" == Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> writes:

    Brian> The null hypothesis would be that no significant differences
    Brian> exist.  If that turns out to be true, we know that our
    Brian> problem is only lack of diversity among registrants. If it
    Brian> turns out to be false, we know that we have an internal
    Brian> problem of some kind as well.

Yes.
I'll admit that that particular question--which is far more involved
than the numbers I've seen thrown around to date--is somewhat
interesting.

Although while it influences how I'd think about deciding on proposals,
there's no answer to that question that has a clear set of decisions for
me, even ignoring questions about methodology, definitions of
participants, etc, etc.

1) I may believe that increasing diversity among leadership so that the
leadership is more diverse than the population as a whole will help
increase diversity of the population.

2) I may believe that the diversity of the leadership  is more of a
problem in terms of either quality of spec or credibility of
organization than diversity of the participants/registrants.

But you've definitely started to get into a realm where the statistics
are more interesting to me.
And i'll drop this now, because I realize I'm only one participant and I
discussion that doesn't provide helpful information for me may well
provide useful information for others.

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:31:15 -0700

>Let me ask a couple of specific questions of you.

I think that these are good questions.

>Who have you mentored in the past 5 years?  Have  they ended up as 
>working group chairs, or ADs or IAB members?   Do they mostly 
>represent under-represented groups?  How many of them were employed 
>by your employer (e.g. was this a work related task?)?

I don't mentor IETF participants as I consider everyone who does not 
have a title as a peer.  None of the peers I have interacted with 
ended up as working group chair, Area Director or IAB member.  I have 
not given much thought about whether most of the peers I have 
interacted with represent under-represented groups.  My guess is that 
it is a significant number.

>During your time as an AD, how many women did you arm twist/recruit 
>specifically  (or ask nicely) to take WG positions in your area (as 
>opposed to them coming to you or your co-AD)?

I do some things on behalf of the Applications Area directorate.  At 
the last IETF meeting I asked four women whether they would like to 
do some reviews.  There was one positive answer.  There are people of 
different ages.  There are people who work for a range of vendors on 
the directorate.  There are a few people who work for 
universities.  There are people who come from different parts of the 
world.  The list of reviewers and the work they perform is published 
on an IETF web site [1].  If anyone has questions about 
under-represented groups in relation to the directorate please post a 
message to this mailing list and I will reply.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/app/trac/wiki/ApplicationsAreaDirectorate

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:11:22 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Margaret Wasserman" <[email-masked]>
To: "t.p." <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Dan Harkins" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 1:53 AM

Hi Tom,

[…]

Has anyone even suggested that IESG should reflect the diversity of
these groups?  Where is this coming from?  You are putting up strawmen,
so that you can tear them down…

There is no inherent reason why 40+-year-old, white, western males who
work at large networking equipment vendors are inherently more capable
of serving on the IESG than people from other groups within the IETF,
and there would be _considerable internal benefit_ to having an IESG
that was more diverse, because diverse groups make better decisions and
better represent the needs of the whole organization.  Therefore, if
there is something about our culture, our structure, our selection
process, or the way we run our meetings that is causing us to
predominantly select our leadership from a restricted group, we would
have _more capable_ and _better_ leadership if we could find a way to
broaden that pool.

_That_ is what this discussion is about.  This is not an effort to meet
some externally imposed notion of diversity.

<tp>
Margaret

The first I saw of this idea was the post by Ray, which said

> "The IETF is concerned about diversity.  As good engineers, we would
like
> questions to the registration process, for example, gender.

For me, this came out of the blue.  I have no idea why it is considered
that the IETF - note, IETF not IAB or IESG or IAOC - has become
concerned nor what evidence there is of concern.

And note, 'for example, gender' which seems to have become the only
measure under consideration; was that Ray's intent, or was he being coy
and leaving out other frequent lacks of diversity which are more
delicate to discuss? I immediately assumed the latter, based on no
evidence at all!  Given the way the discussion has gone, perhaps he
meant
'only and exclusively gender but I could not possibly say that':-)

As Michael StJohns has said,
"How does the IETF evolve to continue to be an effective, efficient, and
relevant source of high quality Internet standards?"
which I think is spot on.  I do not see diversity (lack of) as being
part of that until it is shown to be.  I do see the IESG as key to the
work of the IETF and see
filling positions there as challenging, perhaps a risk to the long term
existence of the IETF.  The requirements - technical knowledge,
experience,
time to spend on IETF business, e.g. - make the candidate pool rather
small
and I believe that any more constraints will weaken that pool and could
hazard
the IETF.

There are workshops for (potential?) WG Chairs; I would see merit in
more such sessions on how to work effectively within the IETF, at any
level, with a subtext of it is possible to do more, to 'advance', it is
really not (quite) impossible.  Diversity would have no place in such
workshops but it could increase the candidate pool for a variety of
posts.

Tom Petch
</tp>

Margaret

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:53:49 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Warren Kumari" <[email-masked]>
To: "Joe Abley" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Sam Hartman" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 10:01 PM

> http://i.imgur.com/47D7zGq.png

Wow, that *was* useful, and has helped reinforce my belief that I chose
the right browser -- "Think of the children, don't use IE."

<tp>
Warren

The correlation that has attracted attention near me is the marked drop
in crime rates compared with a reduction in the use of leaded petrol;
here, you can make a comparison with countries that have or have not
reduced the use of leaded petrol at different times, and the correlation
stands up, so perhaps Microsoft is not implicated in this one.

Tom Petch

W

--
There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally
religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without
warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the
need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat.
Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to
be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and straong-minded kind of
atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other
armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!"
or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!"
  -- Terry Pratchett

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:31:12 -0700

I think the statistics are very interesting and we should continue developing them, but we should also not be driven by them. I'll repeat again what I've said before: I can see increasing both participation diversity and leadership diversity being useful for the IETF. We are limited by various constraints, type of people who are in our field, where the industry is located in the world, funding resources, expertise gained by various participants, etc. But within those constraints, I'd see plenty of benefits to increasing diversity along many axes. (Or indeed even relaxing some of the constraints, such lowering participation costs by remote participation, or lowering leadership costs by requiring less than 100% time commitments.)

Jari

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:41:51 -0700

you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
-- bob dylan

we do not need measurements to know the ietf is embarrassingly
non-diverse.  it is derived from and embedded in an embarrassingly
non-diverse culture.

we need to do what we can to remedy this.  progress not perfection is
our goal.

measurement may be useful to see if we are having effect and/or what
things have effect (meeting locales, size of cookies, ...).

we should be asking the minorities and those struggling to particiate
what we can do to help.

randy

---

From: David Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:53:05 -0700

> we should be asking the minorities and those struggling to particiate

Nicely said Randy. --dmm

---

From: Ralph Droms <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:40:39 -0400

> we should be asking the minorities and those struggling to particiate

Agreed - without consulting a weatherman, we've been having a discussion (among a rather un-diverse group of participants) about where we are, as opposed to asking the questions Randy suggests.

- Ralph