Equalities @ EECS

The University of Cambridge is hosting the 7th annual Oxbridge Women in Computer Science conference on the 12th March 2020. This event is free and open to anyone in STEM, regardless of gender identity or career stage, and will have a keynote from Dr Hatice Gunes and an evening social dinner. There will also be contributed talks and a poster session, for which the abstract submission deadline is the 6th February 2020.

From the event page:

“The Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference is an annual conference that brings together junior and senior female computer scientists at Oxford and Cambridge*, encourages collaboration through formal and informal discussion, and provides a perfect opportunity for young researchers to present their research and get valuable feedback in an open, friendly and informal environment.”

*but is open to all UK universities.

For further details, please see the event page here.

The second annual conference of the Institute of Coding (IoC) will take place on 24-25 February 2020.

The conference will have a packed programme of sessions from employers and educators and the IoC is particularly pleased to share that one of the keynote speakers will be founder and CEO of the Stemettes, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE, who will be discussing the importance of diversity in tech.

The title of the 2020 conference is ‘Thinking Differently’ and the theme is lifelong learning. The question that will be asked at the conference is how a new focus on lifelong learning would change the United Kingdom.

The IoC has announced the conference sessions will look at:

• Diversity of participation (diversity and inclusion)
• Diversity of delivery (place-based learning and personalisation)
• Diversity of destination (different outcomes for a wider variety of learners)

Full conference programme

Designed for a diverse audience, including policy makers, employers, educators and learners, the objectives of the conference are to:

1. Bring together high-profile speakers to find collaborative ways to address and respond to topics of national interest, including the digital skills gap and the need for better diversity and inclusion.
2. Create spaces and opportunities for debate in order to disrupt the traditional approach to digital skills higher education provision in the UK.
3. Share information and showcase the IoC’s recent work by providing concrete examples of our innovative delivery.

300 delegates attended the Institute’s inaugural conference last year. You can find out about some of the great work that the IoC and the consortium is doing via the videos, podcasts and presentations from the 2019 conference and via the school website.

Computer Weekly as created a round up of women in tech stories in 2019. Computer Weekly writes,

Despite efforts to increase the diversity in the technology industry, little progress has been made over the past decade. The percentage of women in the tech sector remains low at 16%, with many women still feeling a glass ceiling stands in the way of their tech industry success. While the annual Computer Weekly and Mortimer Spinks diversity in technology event focused on achieving inclusion to attract and retain diverse talent in firms, other advice for shifting towards a more diverse sector included building diversity into a firm from the top down, and ensuring those in the majority are acting as advocates and allies for others.

Read the full article: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252475444/Top-10-women-in-tech-and-diversity-in-tech-stories-of-2019

Application deadline: 27 January 2020. Application page: https://www.forwomeninscience.com/en/fellowships/563719035

The awards have been designed to provide flexible and practical financial support to ensure these women further their research and careers. With the flexible grant, winners may choose to spend their fellowship on buying scientific equipment, paying for childcare, travel costs or indeed whatever they need to continue their research. In addition to financial support, each year past and present fellows receive training and networking opportunities supported by L’Oréal.

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.