Authors

Gergana Petrova

27

Articles

484

Likes on articles

About the author

Gergana Petrova is the Community Development Manager at RIPE NCC. She helps lead the RIPE NCC's engagement with a broad range of stakeholders, including the RIPE NCC membership, the RIPE community, government, academia, civil society and other Internet stakeholders. Gergana has been working for the RIPE NCC since 2013. Originally from Bulgaria, Gergana studied in Germany before relocating to the Netherlands. Gergana has a Masters in Business Research.

• Reply to Daniel Karrenberg on Shane Kerr: Approaching the RIPE Gender Data Gap by Anastasiya Pak

“Deliberate change requires setting goals, working towards them and checking progress. So what diversity goals should we set ourselves. In gender diversity the popular/simplistic goal has been to reflect world population: classical 50/50 or contemporary with more categories. Shane also voices this in the podcast. But is this the right benchmark? Shouldn't we set goals based on the diversity of groups that are closer to our community? I have seen some organisations setting diversity goals based on current ratios: "We will double the percentage of female graduates in five years time." Others base their goals on statistics of a larger population they serve: "We will have double the percentage of female graduates compared with the average of similar programs in Europe." I strongly believe we should set ourselves realistic goals. I also believe that diversity has other parameters than gender and that our efforts on gender diversity should not lead to a loss of other diversity we have already achieved.”

Hi Daniel. I agree that we should set goals. Among CS graduates, women make up roughly 35% in the RIPE NCC's service region (there is huge variation country to country), while among IT professionals the figure drops to 25%. Shane shows that at RIPE meetings women are about 17%. So I think there is room for improvement and a more realistic target would be 30% among participants, and 25% among speakers (as opposed to 50/50).

Showing 1 comment(s)

Previous
1
Next