ResearcHers list is a forum for women computer science researchers from industry and government labs and academia. The list is international, with members from six continents. The list is limited to researchers (no students or managers). Susan Landau is Her ResearcHers-Keeper.
Women computer science researchers are “the survivors, the ‘only’s’, the one out of twelve” [1].Tillie Olsen was describing women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century when she penned those words, but she easily could have been writing about women computer science researchers of the early twenty-first century instead. In the United States, women now receive over forty percent of the PhDs in the life sciences [2]. Forty years ago, the situation in mathematics was much like computer science is today, but in the U.S., women today attain a healthy thirty percent of PhDs granted [3].
In the United States, women receive 18% of the PhDs in computer science — closer to one of six than one of twelve [4]. but still quite far off from one of two. The situation for women computer science researchers is little better in the rest of the world. For example, according to the 2001 U.K. Research Assessment exercise, in the United Kingdom, only 13% of the active researchers in computer science were female [5]. A 1995 article about computer science in India states that “the computer science research roster in India has a very small number of women.” (The article goes on to say that IIT Madras has two women faculty in the computer science department, while IISc and IIT Bombay each have one.)
When ResearcHers was begun in 2004, fifty years after Grace Murray Hopper developed the compiler, no woman had won the Turing Award; now that barrier has been broken by Fran Allen (in 2007). In 2004, fewer than six percent of the computer science members of the National Academy of Engineering were women; now those numbers are up slightly, but are still less than nine percent. The percentage of women ACM Fellows continues to remain similarly low. Except for the Grace Hopper meeting, women keynote speakers remain the exception, not the rule.
There are any number of complex reasons for the lack of women in the highest reaches of computer science. But one clear problem has been invisibility and isolation; when a researcher is one in twelve or one in six, she is an isolated token. ResearcHers seeks to unite the women computer science community by a providing a communications forum for women in computer science research.
We are building on the work already done by Systers. Started in 1987, Systers grew from a small list of women in systems research to a vibrant community of twenty-eight hundred women in IT, spanning fifty-eight countries and numerous subdisciplines of computer science. So why ResearcHers?
Systers engages women across IT, from many subdisciplines and diverse career paths. Systers does not focus on women in computer science research. ResearcHers does. ResearcHers provides a space for communication and networking, breaking the isolation of women computer science researchers in industry, government labs, and academia. ResearcHers furthers the efforts of Systers, CRA-W, and ACM-W, but it also has different aims than these groups. ResearcHers’s purpose is to provide a forum for women computer science researchers to discuss any and whatever issues relating to themselves as women and computer science researchers.
(Because ResearcHers is so narrowly focussed, the list is not open to students, even those doing research. ResearcHers is also not open to developers or managers.)
ResearcHers hope that women computer science researchers will one day be one in two or one in three (the proportion needed in a larger group for a minority group member to no longer be viewed as the “token” minority). In the interim, ResearcHers is a forum for the “only’s” to connect, communicate, and improve the world of computer science research.
References
1. Tillie Olsen, Silences , Delacorte Press, New York, 1978, p. 39. The “only’s” comes from the 1950’s Civil Rights movement. Returning from a trip, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, told his Birmingham congregation, “I go to Seattle and they tell me, `Brother, you got to meet so and so, why he’s the only Negro Federal Circuit Judge in the Northwest’; I go to Chicago and they tell me, `Brother, you got to meet so and so, why he’s the only full black professor of Sociology there is’; I go to Albany and they tell me, `Brother, you got to meet so and so, why he’s the only black senator in the state legislature . . .’ . . . WE DON’T WANT NO ONLY’S.”(Olsen, p. 39) [ back ]
2. National Research Council, From Scarcity to Visibility: Gender Differences in the Careers of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C, 2001, p. 2. [ back ]
3. Ellen Kirkman, James Maxwell, and Colleen Rose, “2003 Annual Survey of the Mathematical Sciences,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 2004, p. 223. [ back ]
4. CRA Taulbee Trends: Women Students and Faculty . [ back ]
5. See EPSRC Network for Women in Computing Research , Ursula Martin and Mateja Jamnik. The data is from the Higher Education and Research Opportunities in the United Kingdom Research Assessment Exercise 2001 , Ursula Martin [private communication] [ back ].