Pete: > Your "eyeballing" had you put the ratio at about (snip)
FWIW, I took a database of first names, added a little piece of code on my document statistics page to guess genders to calculate aggregate numbers. I get results such as 13% of recent RFCs having female authors. Perhaps inline with some of the eyeballing numbers from this thread. (Details in http://www.arkko.com/tools/docstats.html - btw it does *not* retain per-individual information anywhere). However, there are a number of caveats. To begin with, there's a horrible 20-30% recognised error rate (unclassified names). And an unknown unrecognised error rate. And I looked at the recognised errors, and was able to tell my computer a few more names that it should recognise, but not much. Secondly, the situation is getting worse. Early RFCs were often unrecognisable, since first names were abbreviated. Then it got better, but now it is getting worse, drafts have a >30% recognised error rate. My theory is that our participation gets more international, and the databases that we can find for this sort of thing tend not to be so good with international names. I'm guessing participant lists would be worse than drafts. My conclusion is that it is difficult to come up with numbers either by eyeballing or data mining. Information from registration (country, newcomer/not, gender) might be useful from this perspective. But see below. Anyway, enough with engineering the measurements for now. I think some of these numbers are interesting, but only from a trend perspective, not in their absolute value or comparison to other numbers. We should get back to discussing how we can "encourage more talented people to participate", as Ted put it. That is the important thing. Clearly, we like engineering. Obviously I went for it as well. But we should recognise that measurements are just a tiny detail. The best we could hope for is that a couple of years down the road we could pat ourselves in the back for making an improvement that is actually visible in the measurements. But that's it. Jari
