Re: Usenix board

[Elizabeth Zwicky <zwicky@greatcircle.com>]

Statistically, SAGE makes up just over 50% of USENIX. Last time I
saw the numbers, SAGE was about 30% female and USENIX was
more like 10% female. Call it 25% overall.

On the one hand, you would therefore expect something like half
SAGE and a quarter women. On the other hand, small samples
often naturally produce large anomalies; if you pick 8-10
people out of 10,000, you are unlikely to get a representative
sample. So the percentages will naturally be off.

USENIX does artificially affect the percentages as well.
There is a tendency to push down the SAGE representation,
(from 50%, not to 0!) because SAGE has its own board.
When it hits 0, however, we tend to try to recruit
SAGE people...

Women tend not to think of running for the board, which
artificially depresses their representation; USENIX
tries to compensate for this effect by searching them
out, but it doesn't always work. None of this is an
exact science, though, and there are a whole lot
of other kinds of balance (commercial vs.
academic, East coast vs. West coast, the US vs.
the rest of the world, people whose companies
are vendors in this space vs. people whose companies
are consumers, UNIX vs. NT, kinds of UNIX and
related operating systems vs. each other, etc.
etc. etc.)

I'm not enthralled with the imbalance, but I'm reluctant
to consider it a Problem as opposed to one of those
weird planetary alignments that happens sometimes.

	Elizabeth