The gender gap in computer science research won’t reach equality for more than a century, according to new research released this week that showed computer science isn’t just lagging behind, it’s also going in the wrong direction.
An analysis of 2.87 million computer science research papers between 1970 and 2018 shows that “under our most optimistic projection models, gender parity is forecast to be reached by 2100, and significantly later under more realistic assumptions,” researchers wrote.
“In contrast, parity is projected to be reached within two to three decades in the biomedical literature. Finally, our analysis of collaboration trends in Computer Science reveals decreasing rates of collaboration between authors of different genders.”
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2018/03/new-security-conference-takes-on-rsa-after-it-books-just-one-female-keynote-speaker/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/vaxql6d1jsuv1g9hoes1.jpg” title=”New Security Conference Takes On RSA After It Books Just One Female Keynote Speaker” excerpt=”The massive cybersecurity conference RSA is facing criticism for booking just one female keynote speaker this year – Monica Lewinsky, who advocates against online bullying. RSA organisers told USA Today that, overall, the conference expects that 20 per cent of its speakers will be women, a number that they say reflects the overall representation of women in the security industry.”]
The researchers laid out exactly how long of a timeline we’re looking at:
The study, first reported by The New York Times, crystallises a fundamental gender problem in tech. Other fields, such as biomedicine, are in considerably better shape.
The tech industry has a diversity problem that manifests in too many ways to count. For one, groups of disproportionately white and male computer scientists are worse at understanding what how science, products, apps and services might impact the lives of people who aren’t exactly like them: Women, in this case, and people of colour as well. That’s to say nothing of what it means to be a woman in these sometimes hostile workplaces.
The problem has bubbled to the surface at giant tech companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google which are collectively building a tech future that will define the next century. No big deal.
Maybe the most obvious example is the rise of face recognition surveillance, technology powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. In use around the world, here’s what the technology means in the real world:
Earlier this year, MIT researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru highlighted one of the ways face recognition is biased against black people: Darker skinned faces are underrepresented in the datasets used to train them, leaving facial recognition more inaccurate when looking at dark faces. The researchers found that when various face recognition algorithms were tasked with identifying gender, they miscategorised dark-skinned women as men up to a 34.7 per cent of the time. The maximum error rate for light-skinned males, on the other hand, was less than one per cent.
San Francisco recently became the first city to ban the use of face recognition surveillance. Other cities and states in the United States are now looking at the issue.
“Slow rates of growth in the proportion of female scientists in Computer Science continue to challenge women entering the field,” the researchers wrote.
“Female scientists may face more challenges finding collaborators than their male counterparts due to the existing gender distribution of authors and observed co-authorship behaviours. We hope that these findings will motivate others in the field to evaluate their relationship to these gender biases and consider ways to improve the status quo.”