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

[Niels ten Oever]

Httpbis is the one you're looking for :)

DNSops is also a nice big one.

Cheers,

Niels

On Aug 26, 2020, 21:17, at 21:17, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com> wrote:
>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
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> Bigbang-dev mailing list
>>> Bigbang-dev at data-activism.net
>>> https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/bigbang-dev
>>>
>>>
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