Re: Usenix board

["Richard C. Dempsey" <dempsey@Kodak.COM>]

This would make sense if the USENIX board were randomly sampled from
the entire USENIX membership.  I trust NomComm not to pick names from
a very large hat, nor to use some other thought-less mechanism.  By
all accounts, a great deal of thought went into choosing board nominees
from an apparently rather recalcitrant crowd.

This is not a random (neither planetary nor statistical) alignment.
This is a lot of people failing to understand the benefits, to themselves,
to their companies, or to SAGE, of being on the USENIX board.

Why did you do it, Elizabeth, Greg?  Why did you sit on the USENIX board?
What do you think made a difference?  How much work and how much travel
were involved?

Rich

At 01:46 PM 1/13/00 -0700, Elizabeth Zwicky wrote:
>
>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.
> [...]
>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.


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