[Bigbang-dev] Are gender diversity and draft productivity correlated? THE VERDICT

[Sebastian Benthall]

Hmmm.

Web mail archives of the http list at
https://ietf.org/mail-archive/text/http/ only go up to 2012.
Does that make sense to you?

It looks like there are several DNS working groups. Any one in particular
you think would be worth looking at?

Genericizing the code so that it can loop through many groups and compute
results is the next step towards confirmation. Probably worth looking at a
couple other concrete and well-understood examples before doing the big
analysis though.

- S

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 1:52 PM Niels ten Oever <mail at nielstenoever.net>
wrote:

> Very interesting. I'd say the number if drafts and authors in hrpc is too
> low to make a statement about this though. Could we do this for the HTTP
> and/or DNS WGs ?
> On Aug 26, 2020, at 19:30, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm revisiting the question of whether mailing list gender diversity and
>> draft productivity of working groups are correlated.
>>
>> Putting aside for now all the methodological complications, here is how I
>> am operationalizing the question:
>>
>>    - I'm looking specifically at the HRPC working group, with this data:
>>    [image: image.png]
>>    - Gender is being detected based on first name birth records.
>>    "unknown" is used for cases that cannot with the current data set be
>>    determined as either men or women.
>>    - I'm measuring "diversity" on any day as: (women's activity +
>>    unknown's activity) / (men's activity). Because, you know, this is probably
>>    close to what most people probably mean by diversity. (Recall that
>>    non-Western names are more likely to be categorized as "unknown".)
>>    - I'm using a 100 day rolling average on the activity counts.
>>
>> This is the matrix of Pearson correlations between each of these values:
>>
>> women unknown men drafts diversity
>> women 1.000000 0.910922 0.804869 0.008890 0.160833
>> unknown 0.910922 1.000000 0.808168 0.027502 0.245059
>> men 0.804869 0.808168 1.000000 0.015406 -0.141915
>> drafts 0.008890 0.027502 0.015406 1.000000 0.061884
>> diversity 0.160833 0.245059 -0.141915 0.061884 1.000000
>>
>> Things to note:
>>
>>    - The activity of each gender is correlated with the activity of
>>    other genders.
>>    - Diversity is anticorrelated with the number of men. This is
>>    expected based on how it was defined, and a good sanity check.
>>    - Draft output is MORE correlated with diversity than it is with any
>>    individual gender!
>>
>> This last point is quite nice. It resonates with the work of Scott Page
>> on the value of diversity to collective intelligence, for example.
>>
>> These numbers are a bit hard to interpret. How much should we trust them?
>> These are the *p*-values associated with each correlation:
>> women unknown men drafts diversity
>> women 0 0 0 0.6925 0
>> unknown 0 0 0 0.221 0
>> men 0 0 0 0.493 0
>> drafts 0.6925 0.221 0.493 0 0.0059
>> diversity 0 0 0 0.0059 0
>>
>> Generally, *p*-values below .01 are considered "statistically
>> significant", i.e. publishable.
>> This correlation between diversity and draft output makes the cut!!
>>
>> So the verdict is: for HRPC, YES, gender diversity is correlated with
>> draft output.
>>
>> This result is robust to transformations of the activity scores into the
>> log space, which is comforting.
>> Further work is needed to see if this result is robust across other IETF
>> working groups.
>>
>> Nick, what would you say to including a result like this in the paper
>> about IETF and gender?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Seb
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
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>> Bigbang-dev at data-activism.net
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>>
>>
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