FiveThirtyEightScience continues the study of gender diversity with their article, “In Science, It Matters That Women Come Last“. The author, Emma Pierson, downloaded and statistically analyzed 938,301 scientific papers from the arXiv, a website where physicists, mathematicians and other scientists often post their papers and inferred the authors’ gender from their first names. The good news is that women’s’ contributions have increased over the past 23 years. The news is mixed from a further analysis that notes when a female scientist writes a paper, she is more likely to be first author than the average author on that paper. But she is less likely to be last author, writes far fewer papers and is especially unlikely to publish papers on her own.The end result is fewer publications resulting in greater isolation in the network of scientists, with additional consequences for her career. Computer Science, namely Information Theory, appears to be unusual in that women appear to be equally likely to be first authors but only 25% as likely as a man to be last author.
Source: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/in-science-it-matters-that-women-come-last/
Additional information:
- The SC14 Women in HPC call for papers to attract more women to technology careers.
- Google recently kicked off a $50M “Made with Code” effort.
- NVIDIA has a “Women Who CUDA” effort and website.
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