[ripe-list] Gender politics at RIPE

Dear Malcom,

Thank you for your input to the gender diversity discussion after the LT
presentation of Shane.

Sharing of ideas and concerns, and followup discussion are very welcome
to define more clearly and precisely the goals we try to achieve.
Having said this, we want to reply on one part of your feedback in which
you formulate a concern.

On 24/10/2016 17:52, Malcolm Hutty wrote:
> I do take issue with the speaker's personal claim that we should aim to
> "be better than our industry" and that we should measure success by
> whether female participation more closely matched 50% than matched
> female participation in our industry. And I'm worried by his call for
> the programme committee to act to move us in that direction.
> 
> I think we all know where this is going; we've all seen this kind of
> gender politics in other spheres.

This assumption is not what was meant with "be better than our
industry".  In our aim for more diversity, the PC will not choose
submissions from women over better quality submissions.  Speaking purely
on program selection: we have not and do not intend to
do that.  Our goal is to reach a better diversity in submissions; more
diversity in the final selection should follow from that automatically.

We hope that we are inclusive of women currently, and thus have a
similar female:male ratio as we do in our industry.  It has been
mentioned that we did in the past, but we shouldn't take it as a given.

To improve our industry's ratio (and as consequence our own ratio), we
believe that this is the truly valuable cause to have.  The example
mentioned in the presentation showed how PyCon was successful to attract
more women by drawing in more women into the industry first (more
specifically into the Python language).  This also resulted in higher
attendance ratio of women at the PyCon conference (reflecting the Python
community/industry).  Efforts spent here are not lost, as it benefits
the community as a whole and has long term results.  But we realize this
is a big task.

Regards,

the RIPE PC

-- 
Benno J. Overeinder
NLnet Labs
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/