On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Margaret Wasserman <m...@lilacglade.org>wrote:
> > Hi Stewart, > > On Mar 20, 2013, at 2:04 AM, Stewart Bryant <stbry...@cisco.com> wrote: > > Age > > Disability > > Gender reassignment > > Marriage and civil partnership > > Pregnancy and maternity > > Race > > Religion and belief > > Sex > > Sexual orientation > > The U.S. has a similar (although not identical) list, and it may vary a > bit state-by-state. > > > > If we are going to have an itemized list of diversity characteristics, > we should not pick and choose, we should include the full list. > > While I certainly wouldn't suggest we start discriminating based on _any_ > of these factors, it is very difficult to measure our results in some of > these areas, as we do not collect this information from IETF attendees, nor > do we publish the age, disability status, gender status, marital status, > religion or sexual orientation of our I* members. > I am not suggesting that we start collecting or publishing this > information, just saying that it makes it hard to tell whether our > leadership is reasonably representative of the community in some of these > areas. > > I would say that in this case we are almost surely automatically fair: while one can suspect that gender or geographical origin could add a bias (even an unwanted one), if I do not know the, say, sexual orientation of a candidate, I cannot discriminate (even on a subconscious level) using that information. > Also, I think there are some area where diversity is important to the IETF > that are not on this list, like geographic location, corporate affiliation > and industry segment (vendor, operator, researcher, etc.). > > Margaret > >
