[Imc] Preliminary Report on Gender Representation in Note-taking
David Young
dyoung at onthejob.net
Wed Aug 8 06:03:06 UTC 2001
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
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