[Imc] Preliminary Report on Gender Representation in Note-taking

[David Young]

I was spurred by Sandra's e-mail to create some statistics on the gender
of meeting minutes-takers, using e-mails drawn from all the e-mails I
have received from mailing lists `imc,' `imc-print,' and `imc-tech.' (I
do not subscribe to any other IMC lists.)

I produced a sample of e-mails to study in this way: first, I included
every IMC e-mail in the sample. Then I eliminated from my sample
every IMC e-mail whose subject line did not contain the word `note' or
`minute.' That did not eliminate some e-mails which were not actually
meeting minutes; I eliminated many of those when I read their subject. If
I could not tell by its subject whether an e-mail was meeting minutes,
I decided whether to eliminate it by reading its body.

Here are a few caveats about my sample: By eliminating messages that did
not contain `note' or `minute' in their subject, I may have eliminated
e-mails that actually were meeting minutes.  I did not check carefully
that no e-mail was duplicated in my sample, but I am pretty confident
that did not happen. It is possible that over the months, I have deleted
relevant IMC e-mails by mistake. Sometimes an IMC e-mail may have never
been delivered to me. I am not certain that I have been subscribed to
the `imc' mailing list since its inception; I may be missing notes from
early meetings.

In my sample of e-mails containing meeting notes, I counted the number
of times each sender's name occurred. My results follow, in tabular
form. The table may not make sense if you read it in a font whose m's
are wider than its n's are wider than its i's, et cetera. Sorry I did
not break things down by working group.  Obviously my sample of e-mails
could be very incomplete or over-inclusive (see the caveats above),
so these results are very tentative.

    Number of times each participant took meeting notes, frequent
    note-takers first, women before men in ties for note-taking frequency,
    in alphabetical order otherwise
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    Men                     |   Women
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
                            |
                            |   Nancy Dietrich      9
    Paul Riismandel     6   |
                            |   Sarah Kanouse       5
    Peter Miller        5   |
                            |   Ellen Knutson       4
    Sascha Meinrath     4   |
    Mark Enslin         3   |
    James Jacobs        3   |
    Mike Brunelle       2   |
    Brent McDonald      2   |
    Omar Ricks          2   |
                            |   Sandra Ahten        1
                            |   Pauline Bartolone   1
                            |   Danielle Chynoweth  1
    Paul Kotheimer      1   |
                            |

I will not interpret these numbers, but I make these observations:

There are 6 women in the sample. A woman took minutes 21 times.

There are 9 men in the sample. A man took minutes 28 times.

On average, a man or woman in the sample took minutes 3.3 times (standard
deviation 2.3). About half the men and women took notes more than 3 times,
and about half took notes fewer than 3 times.

On average, a woman in the sample took minutes 3.5 times (standard
deviation 3.2). Half the women took notes 4 or more times, and half took
notes 1 time.

On average, a man in the sample took minutes 3.1 times (standard deviation
1.6). About half of the men took notes 3 or more times, and about half
took notes 2 or fewer times.

Dave

On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 09:50:40PM -0500, Sandra Ahten wrote:
> Just a quick observation. I have only attended the "print" meetings
> and have not actually gathered data- but a quick observation tells me
> that the job of note taker - formerly called secretary has been dominated
> by females.  Also from my observation- this is not because women are just
> chomping at the bit to be notetakers, rather, like much of "women's work"
> it is done by women, because it needs to be done.
> 
> don't just call yourself feminist. be one. take notes.
> 
> you can do it. i know you can.
> 
> sandra
> 
> 

-- 
David Young                   On the Job Consulting
dyoung at onthejob.net     Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933