In response to this poll and its own research undertaken with Deloitte, the Institute of Coding (IoC), a consortium of universities and employers whose mission is to develop the next generation of digital talent, has launched a new campaign CTRL Your Future. The campaign aims to shift the dial on diversity and inclusion in digital across the UK.

Events, inspiring panel workshops and short films will be rolled out over the next several months, promoting the diverse face of the industry, showing the creative opportunities that exist through emerging tech and calling for more young people to get involved.

CTRL Your Future will first partner with DIGI-GXL. Led by Cat Taylor, DIGI-GXL is an inclusive community supporting women, trans and non-binary people looking to reshape the world of 3D design and animation – seen through recent collaborations with Selfridges and Nike x Trippin.

Other partners will include London Gaymers, the UK’s biggest LGBTQ+ gamer community providing a safe and inclusive space for gamers and the STEMettes, the social enterprise inspiring young women to pursue a career in STEM, founded by Anne-Marie Imafidon.

Find out more about CTRL Your Future campaign and the background to the campaign launch.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03784-x

Last month, top scientific journal Nature made a commitment within its code of conduct to make its conferences more inclusive, as part of a wider move across the journal to promote diversity. This follows studies within Nature which have shown that women, for example, are underrepresented within Nature authors and referees. New policies within the code include having equal numbers of men and women as invited speakers and no all-male panels, or ‘manels’. 

“The code commits us to having no male-only organizing committees for Nature Conferences planned from this point. We will invite equal numbers of women and men as speakers, whether we’re selecting for keynote presentations or from abstract submissions. We also commit to having no manels at our events, and to monitor and report progress against these goals at the end of each calendar year.”

Nature also aims to support diversity more broadly and change its code of conduct over time to do this explicitly.

This conference will be held in Central London to promote women in STEM subjects. The welcome address is by Dr Hayaatun Silem, CEO, Royal Academy of Engineering. The full program is available here.

From the conference website:

The Women in STEM Conference 2020 will offer a leading platform to assess the next steps for employers and education providers to support the recruitment, retention and advancement of Women in STEM.

N2Women just announced their list for 2019 Stars in Networking and communications:

• Elisa Bertino, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, USA https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/bertino/
• Melike Erol-Kantarci, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Ottawa, Canada http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~merolka2/
• Sonia Fahmy, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, USA https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/fahmy/
• Hyesook Lim, Professor of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Ewha Womans University, South Korea http://home.ewha.ac.kr/~hlim/profile.htm
• Chiara Petrioli, Professor of Computer Science at University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy http://senseslab.di.uniroma1.it/team
• Sylvia Ratnasamy, Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, USA https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sylvia/
• Mihaela van der Schaar, Professor at University of Cambridge, UK http://www.vanderschaar-lab.com/
• Haitao(Heather) Zheng, Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago, USA. https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~htzheng/

N2Women (Networking Networking Women) is a discipline-specific community of researchers in the fields of networking and communications.  N2Women encourages diversity and aims at fostering connections among under-represented women in this computing sub-field.

Founded by Tracy Camp and Wendi Heinzelman, N2Women organized its first meeting at the ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc) on May 24th, 2006 in Florence, Italy. Camp and Heinzelman led the community for over 10 years, during which time it grew to over 1,400 members. N2Women organizes events at major conferences of the field where members or non-members can meet and get introduced to the research community.

More details and signing up: https://n2women.comsoc.org/

In the years ahead, we are likely to see the transformative power of AI affect society in ways that we can only imagine today. For this technology to impact positively on how we live, it is essential that those developing it are representative of the population as a whole, however evidence suggests that our digital world is not being created, nor cared for, by a diverse workforce.

Take female participation in the field of AI for example. According to a Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2018, women are currently under-represented in the field compared to men by a margin of three to one. As AI systems are at risk of inadvertently replicating the biases of the people who create them, this level of under-representation of any group threatens to limit the AI industry’s potential for good.

Leading British artificial intelligence company DeepMind recognises the need for proactive measures to prevent a deepening of the gender gap. It has given a significant donation to the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary in support of female graduate students studying AI at the university.  The donation is being used to establish a new scholarship programme to encourage women to pursue postgraduate education in AI and the School was delighted to award four full scholarships this academic year 2019/2020.

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO, DeepMind, said: “DeepMind is proud to be working with Queen Mary to help address the gender imbalance in our field.”

You can read more about these scholarships on the Queen Mary website.

The winners of the 2019 WISE Awards were announced during a truly inspiring evening ceremony on 7 November 2019 at 8 Northumberland Avenue, London.

Winners, finalists and guests had a fantastic night recognising individuals and organisations who are actively working to promote those who are working to achieve gender balance in STEM in the UK.

Women in STEM are shaping the future with incredible tech, engineering and scientific discoveries says WISE as it announces its 2019 Award winners…

Follow the link to learn more about the winners.

Following initial sessions with the Institute of Applied Data Science and Careers & Enterprise with IBM UK, Queen Mary is hosting a university conference featuring women in technology.

The conference will have the theme #BalanceforBetter from this year’s International Women’s Day, and will be held on 10th June, Mile End campus.

The organisers are now looking for expressions of interest from Queen Mary female researchers in technology (in the broadest definition of technology) to present their work at the conference, for 10min or 30min (other formats will be considered).

If you are interested please see further details at this announcement.

Queen Mary is proud to announce a new event that is set to champion, encourage and inspire women to bring their skills to the technology sector.

More information at:

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2019/pr/championing-women-in-tech-at-queen-mary-university-of-london.html

From the Queen Mary cs4fn team:

It’s not quite like getting your face on £50, but we hope this is a good way to say thank you…

As part of our work for the Institute of Coding, the Queen Mary cs4fn team have created a set of posters for universities, colleges and schools to celebrate diversity in computer science.

All too often celebrating diversity involves finding one or two ‘star’ people who have contributed to the field of computing. This seems to spotlight the few, rather than shine a broad beam on the many to show computer science really is for all.

We therefore created dozens of posters which normalise the presence of a wide range of people of all ages, from different ethnicities and gender, from the past and present who are making a difference to our world through their work in computer science.

If you have contact with local schools or colleges or friends at other universities, please share the posters with them. If you have people you would like to be included in the poster set please tweet #CSDiversity @QMEECS ‏@csf4n @IoCoding ‏with your nomination.

https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/celebrating-diversity-in-computing/