Gender and computing conference papers

Abstract

72 CommuniCations of th e aC m | au g uST 2 0 1 1 | vo l . 5 4 | n o. 8 contributed articlesIllustratIoN by NaNet te hoo gsl ag sch Olars Kn Ow t h at diversity of thought produces better and faster solutions to complex problems. 20 For this reason, as well as other practical and ethical reasons, the computing disciplines strive to improve women's representation in the field. 5 These efforts often concentrate on piquing the interest of young girls and college students but less often on women's engagement as leaders and problem solvers. Here, we address an aspect of women's leadership by measuring trends and influences on women's authorship of computing-conference papers. Our findings contribute to knowledge about the conditions that promote gender diversity in this important aspect of the intellectual life of the field.Analyzing data from ACM-affiliated conferences reveals several trends: ˲ ˲ Women's authorship increased from 7% in 1967 to 27% in 2009; ˲ ˲ Relative to their representation in the likely pool of ACM conferencepaper authors, women were especially productive, with each potential woman author writing on average one more paper per year than the potential men authors; ˲ ˲ The increase in women's share of papers was due in part to their increased numbers in the community of potential authors, as well as general trends in academic publishing 13 ; and ˲ ˲ Women's share of papers at various conferences in any given year varied by conference topic, and to a much lesser extent by paper-acceptance rates; conference size had no notable effect on women's authorship.We collected and mined data from more than 3,000 ACM-affiliated conferences, workshops, symposia, and forums, 1966-2009, providing evidence of women's increased contribution to this form of professional engagement and contribution to computing. Using custom software called Genderyzer a,15 we identified gender for 90% of the 356,703 authors who published papers for ACM events 1966-2009. b Summary results outlined in Figure 1 show that over the past 43 years, women comprised 22% of all authors whose gender was ascertainable. From 1966 to 2009, women went from a Created by author Kaye while a student at Cornell University and an employee of Nokia; http://genderyzer.com b Details on software accuracy, which we believe to be the first tests of such accuracy, are discussed in the section on methods. key insightsWomen's authorship increased from 7% in 1967 to 27% in 2009.Relative to representation among likely aCm conference-paper authors, women were more productive than men.the increase in women's share of papers was due to their increased numbers among potential authors and to general trends in academic publishing.

Authorship trends in software engineering

“…Articles about authorship in software engineering are not common, with some exceptions like Ren and Taylor (2007) or the annual publication-based assessment of scholars and institutions that is published in the Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) since 1994 (Wong et al 2011). Some of the results of this study differ with respect to the ones reported, for example, by Cohoon et al (2011) that indicate a small increase in the number of articles published by lone authors at ACM-sponsored conferences for the computing domain. They also report that by 2008, 97 % of all conference articles have 2 or more authors, which substantially differs from our results (87.1 %).…”

Evolution in the number of authors of computer science publications

“…Previous recent work by Cavero et al (2014) and Fernandes (2014) has shown that the number of authors per scientific articles is increasing, whenever data for CS in general or software engineering in particular are analysed. In the present article, we extend previous studies on authorship trends (e.g., Gu 2002;Greene 2007;Cohoon et al 2011;Wainer et al 2013;Cavero et al 2014;Fernandes 2014;Garousi and Fernandes 2016) to a significant number of areas within CS, on the basis of a sample of almost 190,000 curated references. As explained in detail in the next section, the sample used in this work follows the framework described by Wainer et al (2013).…”

Study Major, Gender, and Confidence Gap: Effects on Experience, Performance, and Self-Efficacy in Introductory Programming

“…Fewer women are taking CS at the college level [16], [17], which is also reflected by the lower number of female authors on CS conference publications, and the lower number of female role models. There is recent evidence, however, that the number may be rising [18].…”