[Eligibility-discuss] Re: [Gendispatch] Re: Re: Re : Comments on Composition and Comportment of the IETF Nominatin g Committee draft

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 21, 2026, at 06:26, Rob Wilton (rwilton) <rwilton=[e-mail]> wrote:
> This might be over complicating it, but I was wondering if we should set the limit based on the ratio of participants at recently IETF that are of the dominant gender, vs non dominant gender.  E.g., perhaps take the average for the 6 meetings over the last 2 years).

With a weighting factor that can be adjusted, this might work, but without weighting, or with constant weighting, it probably wouldn't—if we actually succeed at changing the gender balance of the IETF, the weighting will be thrown off, and it's impossible to predict how this will go. So the question is, if you're going to be adding a fudge factor anyway, does the math actually math, or is it better to choose the number on the basis of other criteria?

> A few of other comments when I read the latest draft:
> I'm supportive of getting a better gender balance at the IETF, in NOMCOM, and in the leadership.  I.e., I'm supportive of trying to publish something in this area - possibly as an experiment if we are not quite sure of what algorithm we want.

I think it's fair to say that anything we do here, including nothing, is an experiment, so we should definitely be thinking about how to learn from that. I think we've run the original experiment long enough to draw some conclusions, of course... :)

> 
> If we have a small pool of non-dominant gender volunteers then they may start to be selected so frequently that they get tired of the extra NOMCOM work.  To me, this may argue against make the selection on non-dominant gender NOMCOM members too high relative to the overall pool makeup.

So, "if no members of the non-dominant pool are available, revert back to the dominant pool"?

> 
> A smaller pool potentially makes it easier for companies to potentially game the system and be more likely to always get members on Nomcom.  Whether this is a read/valid concern is unclear to me, but I think that it still exists as a potential issue.

You could also think of this as an incentive, though. We do have the per-company limit, so there's a limit to how much benefit they can get from this, but if this incentivizes companies to send more women employees to IETF, is that a bad thing? In any case, I don't think we have quite that dire a shortage (but don't know what the data say).

> 
> If someone was born female, but identified as a man then I read the doc as meaning that they couldn't be added to the non-dominant pool.  I'm not saying that this is problem, and perhaps my reading/interpretation is wrong, but just flagging.

I mentioned this earlier: it makes sense to enable representation for other genders, not just cis-male and cis-female. But each group potentially has its own interests, so if we are doing this entirely on the basis of "interests" that's probably not going to work. I get the sense from what I've read that one of the big benefits of increased diversity is that "different" people bring different perspectives to the table, and this is generally very beneficial for the organization as a whole.

But beyond that, I feel confident in asserting that nobody is going to be doing spot checks. So if the description of the second pool is so tight that a male-identifying non-cis person would not feel comfortable joining that pool, possibly the description needs work. On the other hand, perhaps that would be exactly as they would wish. I am not qualified to opine on the topic. This probably falls into "best is the enemy of good enough territory" for this iteration, but I'm happy to be corrected.