Gender in 30 Years of IEEE Visualization

Abstract

We present an exploratory analysis of gender representation among the authors, committee members, and award winners at the IEEE Visualization (VIS) conference over the last 30 years. Our goal is to provide descriptive data on which diversity discussions and efforts in the community can build. We look in particular at the gender of VIS authors as a proxy for the community at large. We consider measures of overall gender representation among authors, differences in careers, positions in author lists, and collaborations. We found that the proportion of female authors has increased from 9% in the first five years to 22% in the last five years of the conference. Over the years, we found the same representation of women in program committees and slightly more women in organizing committees. Women are less likely to appear in the last author position, but more in the middle positions. In terms of collaboration patterns, female authors tend to collaborate more than expected with other women in the community. All non-gender related data is available on https://osf.io/ydfj4/ and the gender-author matching can be accessed through https://nyu.databrary.org/volume/1301.

Gender Differences in Collaboration Patterns in Computer Science

“…However, this property can vary across CS fields, necessitating more nuanced analysis. For example, in the field of data visualization, women collaborated with substantially more women than men [29].…”

Thirty-Two Years of IEEE VIS: Authors, Fields of Study and Citations

“…Self-reflection was not only done by the organizing body but also by researchers in the community. Publication metadata [18], subject matter [43], figures and tables [6], author genders [34,30], publication exploration systems [35,42], and keywords [19] have been the foci of these endeavors. We now have a dataset containing past VIS papers DOIs [18], and a repository of all figures and tables in past publications [6].…”

“…We now have a dataset containing past VIS papers DOIs [18], and a repository of all figures and tables in past publications [6]. We now know that female participation in VIS has been rising [34,30], that geospatial analysis is an important subject matter in recent VIS papers [43], and how keywords in VIS publications evolved and interacted [19].…”

“…), and where can we see its influences (e.g., Which papers cite VIS papers?)? Apart from the position of VIS in science, we also know little about our authors beyond their genders [34,30]. In the introduction to VIS 2022 and 2021, the official conference website mentioned that "The conference will convene an international community of researchers and practitioners from universities, government, and industry to exchange recent findings ...".…”

“…In sum, the contributions of our study are as follows. First, we offer insights into the role VIS is playing in today's scientific landscape and also analyze VIS authors from different perspectives than previous studies [34,30]. In addition, our dataset complements those of [18] and [34,30], helping make more complete data for future scientometric analyses of VIS publications.…”