On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Karen Sue Rolph <karenrolph(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I hope someone with survey design experience will be at this event and
collect data on how many mothers manage to attend this event. We need to
know whether women have adult or young children, and whether they are single
parents, their ethnicity, and professional training. This will provide
truly useful data, if done scientifically. I can help write an instrument
if called upon to do so. Let us not overlook single parent fathers and
alternative parents. My hypothesis is that there will be extremely few of
any of these. Dads (in some ethnicities) get a social 'bonus' for being
parents (increased social status), unlike mothers, so its important to
distinguish clearly who is supporting and raising children, not just having
parented and kids exist in the world kinds of data.
FYI, every event for women in open technology and culture that I have
attended where we asked for this information had a very low rate of
women who were parents - around 5%. At the Ada Initiative, we believe
we must include women with children in our mission. Since one of our
co-founders has a small child, we are aware of at least some of the
challenges involved in having children and participating in open
technology and culture.
This is one of the reasons that the Ada Initiative is providing free
childcare to AdaCamp attendees, although we only had one person apply
in time for the deadline to register for childcare. We plan to
advertise it better in the future. Childcare has turned out to be
fairly easy to provide, and we hope to be able to help other
conferences provide childcare in the future.
-VAL
--
Increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture
http://adainitiative.org