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

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 22-Nov-23 03:46, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
>> Il 21/11/2023 13:02 CET Mallory Knodel <mknodel=[e-mail]> ha scritto:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> A short draft to consider in the selection of nomcom voting volunteers to ensure minimum gender representation, available here and copied below:
>>
> I'm all in favour, but perhaps it is due time to have a discourse on Nomcom diversity in general, and not just in terms of gender. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only diversity provision in RFC8713 at this point in time is about employers. There are several other factors that could and should be taken into consideration, such as industry sector / area, and geography, to start with.

I'd like to point out that the idea of a random selection from a reasonably large pool was intended to solve the diversity problem without over-constraining it. Then, based on experience, we added the "maximum two per employer" limit to avoid an obvious attack model. Now, adding a second constraint ("minimum N per gender") may be a good idea and will not wreck the random selection model. However, I strongly believe that adding multiple constraints like geography, especially subjective ones like "sector", *will* over-constrain the random selection and we'd end up with an essentially predetermined committee.

Also, I think we should consider what would have happened for the last few years, if the proposed new rule had been applied. Under the actual rules we got (if I have all the correct genders):

23/24: 10 male, 0 female
22/23:  7 male, 3 female
21/22:  8 male, 2 female
20/21:  9 male, 1 female

So, 15% female over the last 4 years. Or to put it another way, the proposed rule would have got us up to 17.5%, and the "minimum two" rule would have got us to 22.5%.

One nit: if the volunteers are asked to select their own gender category, that isn't a binary selection. So is the algorithm male vs female, or male vs non-male, and how do we handle "prefer not to say"? Maybe that is more than a nit.

     Brian

> ICANN's Nomcom, for example, has provisions that ensure that there is at least one member from each of their five geographic regions, and is built to include all of ICANN's stakeholders, including various business groups. The ISOC Nomcom does not have mandatory diversity checks, but the charter says that it must represent "the broad range of members of the Internet community" and there is always care in ensuring gender and geographic diversity. The IETF is an outlier in this as well, and perhaps it could bring its Nomcom a bit more in line with modern Internet governance practices.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
> [e-mail]  <mailto:[e-mail]>  
> Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
> 
>