[NCUC-DISCUSS] NomCom February Report Card

[William Drake]

Hi

> On Feb 16, 2017, at 19:21, avri doria <avri at apc.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I think most people know it is not worth the effort to go before an all
> male committee and hope they will choose a woman.

I would hope they don’t ‘know’ this because it’s not true.  The 2016 NC had one female member and appointed 2 woman and 5 men, which was well short of balance but not hopeless. I argued the point all year to the point of annoying colleagues, and believe that in light of the outcomes and pending Board turnover the 2017 NC—which also has only one female member---feels particular pressure to appoint a woman to the Board this time around; we shall see.  Looking further back, the 2015 NC had 5 female members and appointed 4 woman and 6 men, better.  But in contrast, the 2014 NC also had 5 female members and appointed just one woman and five men. So it’s not obvious there’s a direct causal connection between NC composition and appointee composition; there are a lot of other considerations in play in each case, e.g. the number of female candidates in the applicant pools per position, skill sets and needs identified by the respective sub communities, the specific people up for (re)appointment, etc.  On could carry the exercise back to the beginning and add in applicant pools to get a global assessment of the pattern over time, and I would hope that the current NomCom Review Committee would do this.  Either way, I most certainly would not be telling female candidates not to apply based on the above facts.  We need to encourage applicants, not deter them, please.

As to NC composition, I have suggested to colleagues that the appointing SOACs should really try to follow a rotation principle, rather than continually appointing men to the NC.  Some parts of the community systematically have more trouble doing this than others; NCUC and ALAC appear to have been the best, and I hope that my replacement as of Abu Dhabi will be consistent with this principle. I also hope that the current external NomCom Review will make a recommendation to this end; perhaps our representatives on it can update as to whether consideration is being given to the matter.

Best

Bill






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William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
william.drake at uzh.ch (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
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