Statistics of Applicants
Christine Schweitzer, 25 April 2005
Program Director
The following statistics have been prepared on the basis of the masterlist of applicants who applied to become a member of the Sri Lanka field team in winter 2004/2005, kept by the St. Paul office. This list was analysed solely regarding the country of origin and the gender of the applicants. Other information which also may have been interesting to look at (like age, experience) would have demanded looking at the original applications, something for which there was no time. There are some reservations to be made regarding the results, however, I believe that these are not so grave as to distort the results signifantly:
- In that list, the countries from where applicants wrote were noted, not their citizenship. There have been for example a few people with European/US names applying from Aisan countries.
- The list did not contain information about gender, and in a number of cases, it was not possible to guess it on the basis of the name. (This explains the discrepancies between the total number of the applicants and the count of men and women.) However, I believe an analysis is possible here because it is likely that the unknown cases are distributed between both genders.
- There have been 12 applications without a country given in the list.
- There have been a few doubles (same applicant listed twice in the list). When I noticed it, I counted them only once, but may have overlooked one or the other.
Results and Discussion
The total number of applicants was 255.
The results show a fairly balanced picture of applications from Africa, Asia, North America and Europe. However, there are a few disappointments: There is only a very small number of applications from Central and South America and from Australia/Pacific. Also North East Asia is clearly underrepresented, as is Eastern Europe.
There is no information about the question from which source the applicants received the advert. Striking is that there seems to be no direct link to the presence or absence of a regional coordinator, if you compared for example Africa (without a co-ordinator) with Latin America. There is also no clear link to the presence of a generally active member organisation in the countries or regions where a number of applications was received from -just for example, not to point a finger at- seeing the relatively high number of applications from Iran (where there is no member to my knowledge) compared to Japan which has a very active group.
Regarding gender, keeping in mind the considerable number of people whose gender could not be recognised in the address list analysed, most striking is the fact that in all continents, including the Northern hemisphere, more men than women applied, although there is much more balance between the genders in the Northern countries (North America and Europe) than in the Southern hemisphere where applications by men clearly prevailed.
