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Gender Diversity and Participation Survey Report

ICANN is committed to promoting greater diversity and supporting broad, inclusive participation. To gather meaningful data to support ongoing community discussions on diversity, the ICANN organization conducted the Gender Diversity and Participation Survey with the ICANN community from 9 June – 8 July 2017. A total of 584 individuals participated in the survey.

The survey findings offer insights into current perceptions of gender diversity in the community, potential and perceived barriers to participation, and the community's support for initiatives to enhance gender diversity.

The report provides a question-by-question analysis of the survey data and gives proposed data-driven recommendations for the community to consider. The one-page visual overview presents a quick snapshot of the survey results.

The report and the visual overview are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Please email any feedback or questions to gendersurvey@icann.org.

Complete Report:

One-Page Visual Overview:

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."