Re: [Eligibility-discuss] [Gendispatch] New Version Notification for draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation-00.txt

[Michael StJohns <[e-mail]>]

Barry -

You tiptoed right across the line in to an ad-hominem discursion, 
arguing against who Lloyd is, rather than addressing his argument.  Not 
appropriate and somewhat deserving of an apology I would think.

Mallory -

The literature goes back further than just your single reference.  And 
in general, the literature claims that "diversity",  not solely "gender 
diversity" is what leads to "productivity, creativity and ...".  Please 
take a look at RFC7704 for a more complete discussion.  I don't agree 
with all that Dave had to say, and I believe he actually misinterpreted 
[Kellogg], but I believe that document is a better starting place than 
your Vervoe reference to a pretty much unsourced light copy document. In 
other words, I believe you need better support for your argument than 
the cited references.

Next, your "make sure you pick at least one of gender N" algorithm is 
naive in that as stated it would result mostly grabbing a woman 
(non-male?) who belongs to the pool of organizations with single 
volunteers.  [[ the max 2 org slots are usually filled before slot 10 is 
filled ]].

  I'd have to check, but that pool is rather small relative to the whole 
pool and the pool of women from organizations with single volunteers is 
a small fraction of that. (Unless the large organizations actually 
resulted in a woman being selected, the 5-6 slots the current algorithm 
guarantees them means that the remaining 4-5 slots would where the 
required selection would take place)

We have a nomcom selection algorithm that's problematic in that it can 
be gamed by organizations with large numbers of volunteers.  Deciding 
that we're going to take one of those 10 slots and assign it to one of a 
small group of 5-10 women each time we do the selection would result in 
a substantial over representation over time by specific persons and a 
specific class of person.

The above two paragraphs are based on the analysis I've done over the 
last 1/2 dz nomcoms and the selection patterns.  I'd have to run a 
number of simulations to confirm my conclusions above, but I think my 
conclusions are close to what the math would show.

Finally, as Lloyd points out, him/her/em/eirs/Ze is not one of the items 
passed on to the selection algorithm at this point, and not  everyone 
would be happy with sharing their personal concept of their gender with 
the community.

We pick randomly, and with the exception of the 2 person per org limit, 
any volunteer has an equal weight in being selected.  If you believe 
some group is underrepresented in the pool, the solutions is to recruit 
members of that group to volunteer.

I appreciate what you're trying to accomplish, but giving any class of 
participant a "me first" by virtue of their membership in that class 
seems to be problematic and may result in causing as many problems as 
they solve.  I can see people who want to be on the nomcom claiming 
membership in that class and an outcry when that's revealed.

Mike


On 11/22/2023 11:58 PM, Barry Leiba wrote:
> I've been involved in workplace gender diversity issues for more than
> 20 years, and my experience is that 100% of those who question the
> statement Mallory cites ("gender diversity has been shown to lead to
> more productivity, creativity and reinforces a culture of respect and
> value for all participants") are men.  100%.  I have never seen anyone
> question it who does not identify as male.  I think that's telling,
> and that we should think about it hard.
>
> Barry
>
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 11:29 PM Lloyd W
> <lloyd.wood=[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Hi Mallory,
>>
>> "gender diversity has been shown to lead to more productivity, creativity and reinforces a culture of respect and value for all participants"
>>
>> You're going to need some very strong references supporting that claim and similar assertions.
>>
>> Measuring gender diversity introduces privacy concerns; information may only be supplied voluntarily,  would need to be anonymised when aggregated... while gender by itself is not classed as sensitive data under the GDPR, in a predominantly male environment, identifying non-males may not be difficult. I suspect any measuring process will itself raise security concerns.
>>
>> And since this draft is advocating for affirmative action, it does need to say clearly upfront that it is advocating for affirmative action.
>>
>> Why have you chosen to focus here on affirmative action solely for gender, and not for, say, country of residence or culture, which have similarly very unbalanced representation in the IETF and nomcom?
>>
>> regards
>>
>> Lloyd Wood
>> [e-mail]
>>
>> On 21 Nov 2023, at 23:02, Mallory Knodel <mknodel=[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> A short draft to consider in the selection of nomcom voting volunteers to ensure minimum gender representation, available here and copied below:
>>
>> URL: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation-00.txt
>> Status: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation/
>> HTML: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation-00.html
>> HTMLized: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation
>>
>> ===
>>
>> Operation of the IESG/IAB Nominating and Recall Committees     M. Knodel
>> Internet-Draft                       Center for Democracy and Technology
>> Intended status: Informational                          20 November 2023
>> Expires: 23 May 2024
>>
>>
>>          Gender Representation in the IETF Nominating Committees
>>                draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation-00
>>
>> Abstract
>>
>>     This document extends the existing limit on nomcom representation by
>>     company in order to improve gender diversity by ensuring that not all
>>     voting members of the IETF Nominating Committee (nomcom) belong to
>>     the same gender.
>>
>> About This Document
>>
>>     This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
>>
>>     The latest revision of this draft can be found at
>>     https://mallory.github.io/nomcom-gender-representation/draft-knodel-
>>     nomcom-gender-representation.html.  Status information for this
>>     document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-
>>     knodel-nomcom-gender-representation/.
>>
>>     Discussion of this document takes place on the Operation of the IESG/
>>     IAB Nominating and Recall Committees Working Group mailing list
>>     (mailto:[e-mail]), which is archived at
>>     https://lists.elistx.com/archives/ietf-nomcom/.
>>
>>     Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
>>     https://github.com/mallory/nomcom-gender-representation.
>>
>> Status of This Memo
>>
>>     This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
>>     provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
>>
>>     Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
>>     Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
>>     working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
>>     Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
>>
>>     Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
>>     and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
>>     time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
>>     material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
>>
>>     This Internet-Draft will expire on 23 May 2024.
>>
>> Copyright Notice
>>
>>     Copyright (c) 2023 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
>>     document authors.  All rights reserved.
>>
>>     This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
>>     Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
>>     license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
>>     Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
>>     and restrictions with respect to this document.  Code Components
>>     extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
>>     described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
>>     provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
>>
>> Table of Contents
>>
>>     1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
>>     2.  Gender Representation in the IETF Nomcom  . . . . . . . . . .   2
>>     3.  Suggested Remedy  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
>>     4.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
>>     5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
>>     6.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
>>     Appendix A.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
>>     Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
>>
>> 1.  Introduction
>>
>>     The literature supports the claims that lack of gender diversity in
>>     hiring teams reinforce under representation of gender minorities in
>>     leadership positions and that lack of gender diversity in leadership
>>     perpetuates gender discrimination [Vervoe].
>>
>> 2.  Gender Representation in the IETF Nomcom
>>
>>     The IETF considers influence and weaknesses in nomcom selection in
>>     [RFC8713].  Likewise, gender diversity in IETF leadership should be
>>     considered a community strengthening exercise insofar as gender
>>     diversity has been shown to lead to more productivity, creativity and
>>     reinforces a culture of respect and value for all participants.  If
>>     we consider the nomcom as a "team", it will itself benefit from
>>     having more gender diversity among its voting members.
>>
>>     To address gender representation in the IETF nomcom, we need only
>>     ensure that all voting members are not of the same gender.  All
>>     attempts to ensure gender representation in the nomcom should
>>     include: a. increase participation in the community from women and
>>     non-binary individuals so that the eligible pool is more gender
>>     diverse.  b. encourage eligible women and non-binary members of the
>>     community to accept selection to the nomcom.
>>
>>     While the IETF does not routinely confirm the gender of volunteers,
>>     we have committed to improving gender diversity in the community by
>>     way of measuring it and identifying concrete steps to mitigate
>>     imbalance.
>>
>> 3.  Suggested Remedy
>>
>>     The “two-per-organisation limit” can easily be extended to ensure a
>>     nomcom consisting of no more than n-1 members from any one gender
>>     (where n is the number of available volunteer slots), requiring skips
>>     for the nth slot until a gender minority volunteer is chosen.
>>
>>     This assumes that for any given pool therein contains at least one
>>     gender minority volunteer.
>>
>>     This short remedy might update [RFC8713].
>>
>> 4.  Security Considerations
>>
>>     There are no security considerations for this document.
>>
>> 5.  IANA Considerations
>>
>>     This document has no IANA actions.
>>
>> 6.  Informative References
>>
>>     [RFC8713]  Kucherawy, M., Ed., Hinden, R., Ed., and J. Livingood,
>>                Ed., "IAB, IESG, IETF Trust, and IETF LLC Selection,
>>                Confirmation, and Recall Process: Operation of the IETF
>>                Nominating and Recall Committees", BCP 10, RFC 8713,
>>                DOI 10.17487/RFC8713, February 2020,
>>                <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8713>.
>>
>>     [RFC9389]  Duke, M., "Nominating Committee Eligibility", BCP 10,
>>                RFC 9389, DOI 10.17487/RFC9389, April 2023,
>>                <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9389>.
>>
>>     [Vervoe]   Vervo, "Gender Discrimination in Hiring Practices", 2022,
>>                <https://vervoe.com/gender-discrimination-in-hiring-
>>                practices/>.
>>
>> Appendix A.  Acknowledgments
>>
>>     Thanks to Martin Thompson and Suresh Krishnan for informed initial
>>     thoughts on bringing this idea to the community.
>>
>> Author's Address
>>
>>     Mallory Knodel
>>     Center for Democracy and Technology
>>     Email: [e-mail]
>>
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