[diversity] RIPE attendee gender trend: Update for RIPE 77 and RIPE 78

Shane,

This is, as ever, fascinating and wonderful. Thank you.

For Icelandic names, wouldn't working on surnames be easier as my understanding is they're fairly clear on whether the person is the son or daughter of one of their parents?

Thanks again,

Brian

Brian Nisbet
Service Operations Manager
HEAnet CLG, Ireland's National Education and Research Network
1st Floor, 5 George's Dock, IFSC, Dublin D01 X8N7, Ireland
+35316609040 brian.nisbet at heanet.ie www.heanet.ie
Registered in Ireland, No. 275301. CRA No. 20036270

________________________________________
From: diversity <diversity-bounces at ripe.net> on behalf of Shane Kerr <shane at time-travellers.org>
Sent: Monday 20 May 2019 17:25
To: diversity at ripe.net
Subject: [diversity] RIPE attendee gender trend: Update for RIPE 77 and RIPE 78

Hello all,

I don't think that I published and update of the earlier work done
tracking trends of gender of RIPE meeting attendees. Here's one
including RIPE 77 and RIPE 78.

Basically we look at first name and country and try to guess the
attendee's gender based on that.

You can see the repository on GitHub which explains the approach, and
how to use it yourself. I have a separate branch that I'll merge into
the main page when the meeting is over, which will give final statistics:

https://github.com/shane-kerr/ripemtggender/tree/ripe78

For RIPE 78, we have a relatively lot of names that the underlying
genderize.io tool can't even make a guess about: 26 in all, compared to
16 at RIPE 77 in Amsterdam and 18 at RIPE 76 in Dubai. 12 of these are
Icelandic names. I'm happy to hard-code these to the correct values if
anyone wants to help me with that (I don't know about Tryggvi,
Kristbergur, or Örvar, for example).

As for the overall trends, the trend of more women attending does
continue but there does not seem to be any sharp increase. I don't think
we can see a strong signal from when the diversity task force started
working, although of course the data is very messy, it was not too long
ago, and the actual numbers depend on a huge number of factors (city the
meeting is held, quality of the guesses, hard disk prices, and so on).

I pushed the date out to find when we might have 50% women attendees at
the meeting, and using the current eyeballed polynomial match it's 2026
or so. While that seems not too horrible, I doubt we will follow that
trend line and I think that 2026 is a best case. But we remain ever hopeful.

As a bonus, I also went through the membership of the RIPE Programme
Committee since it's inception (I think), as well as the chairs of RIPE
working groups in roughly the same period. (I used the historical RIPE
meeting site for PC membership, and slides from the opening plenary with
pictures of the WG chairs for the WG chair membership.) This picture
looks bad, since it seems like women are under-represented compared to
RIPE meeting attendees. This strikes me as an area requiring special
attention, and it can be done; for example the IETF has taken specific
efforts to ensure enough diversity in their leadership positions.

Anyway, I've attached a few charts so you can see for yourself.

Cheers,

--
Shane