ICANN creates female-heavy anti-harassment team

ICANN’s board of directors has created a new team to look at issues of harassment in the community.
The new Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment has eight members, six of whom are women.
In fact, all six female members of the board, including non-voting liaisons, have been appointed to the group.
The members are Becky Burr, Chris Disspain, Avri Doria, Lito Ibarra, Manal Ismail, Merike Kaeo and Tripti Sinha. It will be chaired by Sarah Deutsch.
The board said “a focused group of Board members can be part of a group that is trying to help create an environment where the ICANN community is free to focus on the mission and not on behaviors that should not be a part of the working environment.”
Harassment, particularly sexual harassment, has been a simmering topic in the community for a few years, ever since the infamous Cheesesandwichgate affair.
In response, ICANN created its first anti-harassment policy, to complement its longstanding Expected Rules of Behavior.
At ICANN 63 in Barcelona last October, I noticed several unavoidably prominent warnings — billboards the height of a man person — warning attendees against harassing their fellow participants, citing the policy.
In late 2017, an unscientific survey of ICANN community members found that one in three women had experienced or witnessed sexism while participating.
But ICANN’s Ombudsman told DI at the time that no complaints had been filed under the harassment policy in the first eight months it was in effect, even as the #MeToo movement took off.
Critics say that women are reluctant to report incidents to the Ombudsman because he is a man. I expect this is something the new board working group will look at.
In March last year, a group of female community members wrote to ICANN with a set of stories about how they had been harassed at ICANN meetings.
While stopping short of any serious criminal allegations, the stories depicted a working environment that can sometimes be very hostile to women, particularly when alcohol is involved.

One in three women say they have seen sexism at ICANN

Almost a third of female members of the ICANN community say they have witnessed sexism in the community, according to the results of a recent survey.
Asked “Have you ever experienced or witnessed what you perceive to be sexism or gender bias within the ICANN community?”, 30% of women respondents said “Yes”.
Only 17% of men answered in the affirmative. Overall, 75% of respondents said they had not seen such biases in action.
The broad survey into gender balance at ICANN was carried out over a month in June and July with a web-based tool and got 584 responses.
Participants were self-selecting, and there were slightly more female respondents than male (going against the grain of usual participation data), so the results should probably not be considered completely scientific.
The survey did not offer its own definition of sexism, so respondents were able to use their own judgement.
Of those who said they’d seen sexism in the community, most said they’d seen it at ICANN’s regular public meetings. Over a third said they’d witnessed it on mailing lists.
The older the participant, the more likely it was that they had seen behavior they considered sexist.
ICANN suggests that this could be because behaviors have changed as ICANN has matured, or that younger people have different definitions of sexism than their older peers.
Of those who said they had witnessed sexism, only four people chose to report it through ICANN channels such as the Ombudsman. Three of those people were men.
Almost half said they “chose” not to report the behavior, while 41% said they were unsure how to go about reporting it.
Some people who chose to add additional color to their responses said that they had only heard about the reportable incident second-hand.
The survey also found that almost 60% of respondents believe that there are barriers to participating in the ICANN community.
Those people were given the opportunity to rank factors that could act as barriers. Cost came out in a strong lead, but gender was found to be just as much a barrier as language.
That may be not so much a critique of the community itself, but rather of the backwards attitudes to women in some of the countries in which ICANN hosts its meetings.
Only 9% of women respondents said they have personally experienced a gender-related barrier to participation. Cost, lack of time, knowledge and geography all came out ahead.
When it came to solutions, the survey found that almost three quarters of respondents supported voluntary targets to promote gender balance in the community.
However, fewer than half of respondents — still a rather high 41% — said there should be “mandatory” quotas of women.
Unsurprisingly, support for affirmative action along mandatory lines was much higher among women than men, and much higher among the younger crowd than the old-timers.
The full report and a rather pretty infographic can be downloaded in the UN language of your choosing from here.

Ombudsman reports on ICANN 43 “girls” scandal

ICANN Ombudsman Chris LaHatte has delivered his official report on the ICANN 43 sexism controversy.
As you may recall, during the ICANN 43 meeting in Costa Rica last month, domain name lawyer John Berryhill complained to LaHatte about a booth operated by Czech ccTLD operator CZ.nic.
Marketing ICANN 44, which CZ.nic is hosting in Prague this June, the booth offered cartoon postcards advertising “girls” as one of several reasons — alongside “beer”, “culture” etc — to attend the meeting.
Berryhill complained that the cards objectified women and were inappropriate for an ICANN meeting.
LaHatte writes:

The complainant says the use of the postcard was demeaning to women and an unnecessary objectification of them.
…
After some discussion, they [CZ.nic] understood the way in which this was seen, from another perspective, and quickly agreed to remove the postcards as an option in the kiosk display. What they saw as a light-hearted tribute to attractive woman in the Czech Republic, they then were able to see as offensive to others. Because they were so ready to perceive and accept the alternative view, it was not necessary to take any further action

A presentation by CZ.nic later in the week at the Costa Rica meeting eschewed any mention of the cards in question.
In the interests of disclosure, since first reporting this story I’ve discovered that Berryhill discovered the postcards via one of my own tweets, so I’m probably partly responsible for creating my own controversy here.