Open Stack

On 09/01/2015 08:53 AM, Amy Marrich wrote:
> I had sent this to a smaller section of the group but it deals with how
> the University of California asks the gender question and also includes
> sexual orientation.
> 
> http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/07/28/university-california-offers-six-choices-for-gender-identity/
> 
> We may be able to get a hold of their survey as a possible guideline.

At the beginning of 2014[1], the OpenStack Foundations started asking
its members to specify their gender. The intention was to start
measuring that aspect of diversity in order to improve it. Since the
gender issue is extremely new to society, there are lots of acronyms and
constant fluxes of differences among the non-binary genders. We decided,
after long debate and research, to use an open text form to specify
gender because that's the most flexible one. Any other system we found,
including the one from UC above, had criticism because the debate even
among scholars is not set.

You may have noticed that the form to subscribe to the Summit for
example asks gender offering 4 options:

- male
- female
- let me tell you
   > open form

(I noticed now it's missing the very valuable 4th option "prefer not to
say", which I think may be useful to have even if the response is itself
optional)

Has anybody looked at the historic data about gender from the members
database?

/stef

[1] A summary of that conversation is on my blog
http://maffulli.net/2014/02/05/tracking-gender-diversity-in-the-openstack-developer-community/