Subject: [Diversity] Interesting resource set on women in STEM

From: Narelle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2015 12:08:26 +1000

Whilst very much a work in progress this paper has an enormous amount of
useful info:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPbuVzQKp_GhAozC06UrLo/edit

Regards

Narelle

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From: Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 06:30:00 +0200

Thanks Narelle,

I hope we can determine the reasons for participants leaving the IETF. In
my opinion this article is not only women leaving STEM but there are many
people leaving it because it is not welcoming in these days, it is getting
complicated in many levels. First it is not taught well, secondly the great
participants in STEM don't have time or are hard to reach. For instance, in
IETF some new participants may think it is difficult to reach the managers
because it is a volunteering org., furthermore, in paid organisation it
gets busy that most don't reach only direct manager, while they have no
access to higher levels. This needs to stop in future, while our
environment is getting more social. However, the third problem is that STEM
participants may not be experts in social activities. In IETF it maintains
a discussion between participants but still few participants
have unpleasant behaviour/language which is killing the progress in
diversity/discussions. The fourth problem is that our higher management in
our organisations are busy with other important issues, so they may ignore
this because there is no much noise in the media about it. Overall, the
minority/majority issue makes things complicated that people like to leave
to go to better welcoming groups/organisations.

In my culture the problem gets more complicated (caused by
rulers/managers/majority), however, the main points are easy to solve if
all participants work together equally, and they all acknowledge each
other. For example, it can be strange that people don't answer question
only to whom they know, or it can be strange that their answer changes
depending on gender/race, or it is strange that an author does not
acknowledge one reviewer while their were few reviews, or it is strange
that a participant thinks he/she is not equal to others just because they
are different in STEM contributions. We should acknowledge all without
looking into contributions because we need all bits to build our
organisation future.

The solution is all about our highest-level managers in all the
organisations we participate in, they should take actions to solve/consider
those issues. Furthermore, we should not stop discussing, and contacting
the managers for details of their future actions and their plans. In this
discussion-list's organisation, ISOC and IESG are responsible in the
IETF diversity (or women/new-participants leaving rate) and hopefully they
have a plan for this issue. So far I think IETF is in good hands and it is
progressing but maybe slow.

AB

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 4:08 AM, Narelle <[email-masked]> wrote:

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