[Eligibility-discuss] Re: draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation-05

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

> From: Tara Tarakiyee <me=[e-mail]>
> Specifically, all male NomComs creates an appearance of bias, and those have happened far too often in the past decade. The solution prevents NomComs from being dominated by one gender alone. If we no longer have all male NomComs, then it worked. I've personally stopped trying to make any promises beyond that.

That sounds a lot like virtue signalling.

If we make this change, maybe there will be more women appointed to 
leadership, or maybe since nomcom members can't appoint themselves, the 
smaller pool of women candidates will mean fewer appointments.  I don't 
know and neither does anyone else.

As I wrote a while ago, if we are serious about this, we don't have to 
wave our hands and guess.  We have many years of statistics about who the 
candidates were and who were appointed as a baseline.* Then we can say we 
will try this and see what happens, do it for five years or so, then come 
back and look and see if the numbers are different.  This is not rocket 
science, and it's not beyond the ability of the IETF.

Are we serious or not?

R's,
John

* - we'd have to guess some of the genders based on the names but I think 
that for statistical purposes that's close enough