I’m appreciating this exchange. I wonder if part of the problem stems from the word welcoming*, especially as selection bias naturally tends to neglect those who didn’t feel welcome. This could especially be a problem for assessing how welcome women feel, if what’s happening is that many quickly don’t feel welcome and simply leave.
One way to overcome this would be to set up a contact list for a group of male and female people attending an intro event. Even 10 of each (and 5 others) could be useful, not for statistical significance but for an initial assessment at low cost in time and effort. This could be via email but better would be via phone also. You could follow up after the first activity, at the end of the session, a month later and a year later. It could be repeated on a small scale at several intro events, which might give more initial info than a large sample at one event, which might not be representative.
The most powerful tool might be telephoned “semi-structured interviews” which is a well-established social science and participatory appraisal method. Again you wouldn’t be looking for statistical significance but more for hypothesis generation, which could then be used in a follow up. eg if a lot of women were saying something like “I just didn’t feel comfortable” or “it was too ….” that could suggest a more specific follow up study, or even lead directly to thoughts about a way to redesign intros.
It helps if such a survey wasn’t conducted by someone seen as an organiser, and perhaps ideally a woman?
I’m appreciating this exchange. I wonder if part of the problem stems from the word welcoming*, especially as selection bias naturally tends to neglect those who didn’t feel welcome. This could especially be a problem for assessing how welcome women feel, if what’s happening is that many quickly don’t feel welcome and simply leave.
One way to overcome this would be to set up a contact list for a group of male and female people attending an intro event. Even 10 of each (and 5 others) could be useful, not for statistical significance but for an initial assessment at low cost in time and effort. This could be via email but better would be via phone also. You could follow up after the first activity, at the end of the session, a month later and a year later. It could be repeated on a small scale at several intro events, which might give more initial info than a large sample at one event, which might not be representative.
The most powerful tool might be telephoned “semi-structured interviews” which is a well-established social science and participatory appraisal method. Again you wouldn’t be looking for statistical significance but more for hypothesis generation, which could then be used in a follow up. eg if a lot of women were saying something like “I just didn’t feel comfortable” or “it was too ….” that could suggest a more specific follow up study, or even lead directly to thoughts about a way to redesign intros.
It helps if such a survey wasn’t conducted by someone seen as an organiser, and perhaps ideally a woman?
an alternative might be “satisfaction” ?