Tuesday, August 8, 2017

The Googlescreed Incident



So, it is all over the social media.
Gizmodo published Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber, a software engineer’s manifesto or a 10-page screed against Google’s diversity initiatives. And everyone is joining in in the "fun".

The Guardian has Google staffer's hostility to affirmative action sparks furious backlash | World news | The Guardian and Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech | Technology | The Guardian.
The Atlantic joined in with  A Googler's Anti-Diversity Screed Reveals Tech's Rotten Core - The Atlantic  and the Washington Post replied with A Google engineer who bemoaned racial diversity has sparked anger in Silicon Valley - The Washington Post.

Yonatan Zunger took the opportunity to pen

So, about this Googler’s manifesto

and tell everyone he has left Google.

The author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he writes, going on to argue that Google’s educational programs for young women may be misguided. oh well, I have heard this kind of argument so much recently, it's even not funny.



Quick and easy debunking in Neuro Nonsense  and How ‘Neurosexism’ Feeds Stereotypes About Male and Female Brains - Motherboard . But if you have more popular and easy to read debunking articles I'm very interested to hear about it. 

If one wants to do serious reading, maybe follow up in the references mentioned in 
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
a debate between two Harvard professors on the science of "gender science".

Monday, June 26, 2017

Back from Iceland: Women in Logic 2017

The workshop Women in Logic was a big success. Here we are at the end of the day of talks.


Ursula Martin took the picture and one or two might be missing from it, but the workshop really worked well. The talks were all well-presented and the material was very interesting. It helped that (at least) four of the ten presenters were just about finishing their phds, so plenty of new research to be discussing. 

The two invited speakers Catuscia Palamidessi and Claudia Nalon  were great and attracted extra attendance from the other workshops. Thanks for stepping in, girls! 

Also thanks to all speakers, participants and  the ones far away but cheering for us!

Now, we're hoping to do Women in Logic 2018 too. How can we improve on this year's workshop? Let us know of your suggestions!

Friday, June 9, 2017

Women in Logic: The Workshop!

So the first Workshop for Women in Logic is about to happen in Iceland! The program is looking great and we hope to see many of you there!

Preliminary Program:

9:00-10:00 

Catuscia Palamidessi, Director of Research, INRIA  and Leader of the equipe Comète 
 
10:00-10:30 Ilina Stoilkovska, A Framework for Automated Verification of Synchronous Fault-Tolerant Distributed Algorithms

10:30-11:00 coffee 

11:00-11:30 Silvia Steila, A combinatorial bound for a restricted form of the Termination Theorem 
11:30-12:00 Yuting (Kino) Zhao, A model theoretic discussion of statistical learning 
12:00-12:30 Rehana Patel, Computability of algebraic and definable closure 
12:30-13:00 Alice  Pavaux. Inductive and Functional Types in Ludics

13:00-14:00 lunch 

14:00-15:00 Claudia Nalon, Professor at University of Brasilia, Brazil

15:00-15:30 Andrea Aler Tubella, Subatomic Proof Systems
15:30-16:00 Madalina Erascu. Computational Logic and Quantifier Elimination Techniques for Optimal Numerical Algorithms

16:00-16:30 coffee 

16:30-17:00 Giselle Reis, Translations from Resolution to Sequent Calculus 
17:00-17:30 Line Line Jakubiec-Jamet, Natural Language Processing and Coq: a case-study 
17:30-18:00 Maria Emilia Descotte,  Axiomatizations for Downward XPath 
18:00-onwards celebration!!!

Monday, March 20, 2017

2017 ASL Annual Meeting

Two posts in two days: making up for lost time!

The 2017 ASL Annual Meeting is starting today at Boise State University. Let's see how they're doing on gender representation. (The number in parentheses after each summary is the percentage of women in the group.)

  1. Who selected the invited speakers?

    Program committee: 2 men, 3 women (60%)

    Impressive! I don't have any information on hand about this right now. Is this the first time a Program Committee for an Annual Meeting has been more than 50% female?

  2. Who are the invited speakers?

    Gödel lecturer: 1 man (0%)

    Plenary speakers: 5 men, 2 women (28.6%)

    Tutorial: 1 woman (100%)

    This is towards the high end of recent proportions: the plenary speaker percentage is higher than it has been all but twice since 1989. The tutorial percentage is also noteworthy, though the small sample size there renders this less impressive.

  3. What about the Special Sessions? For each one, I'll give the breakdown of the organizers by gender followed by the breakdown of the speakers by gender.

    Computable Structures: 2 male organizers (0%); 5 men, 1 woman (16.7%)

    Computer-Aided Proofs: 2 male organizers (0%); 4 men, 0 women (0%)

    Continuous Model Theory: 2 male organizers (0%); 6 men, 0 women (0%)

    Proofs in Mathematical Practice: 1 male and 1 female organizer (50%); 3 men, 3 women (50%)

    Set Theory and its Applications to Analysis and Topology: 2 male organizers (0%); 4 men, 2 women (33.3%)

    Only one of the ten Special Session organizers is female, and only 22.2% of the speakers in Special Sessions are female. But the biggest question for me is this: why do we have two all-male sessions in 2017?

  4. Who is giving contributed talks?

    Contributed talks: 9 men, 1 woman (10%)

    This is actually a tricky one since one man is giving two talks. It seemed fair to count him twice because we're considering how many talks are given by men and how many by women, not how many distinct speakers there are.

I've got no analysis for you since this is only one conference. However, perhaps we can see some things to be pleased with and some things to try to improve on next year.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

The ASL statement on women in logic

Life got in the way of this sequence of blog posts, but now I'm back, and I have the last analysis ready. Today I'm going to consider the ASL's statement on women in logic, which was adopted at the Annual Meeting in 2012:

Logic benefits when it draws from the largest and most diverse possible pool of available talent. We at the ASL would therefore like to add our voice to the growing list of initiatives launched by organizations in the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields aimed at correcting the gender imbalance in those fields.

Female students and young researchers may be concerned about entering logic, where few senior women occupy visible roles. The atmosphere in classes and seminars can feel unwelcoming, and many young women have practical questions about managing a career and personal interests.

The ASL therefore states in the strongest possible terms that it welcomes the participation of women in logic and in particular in the activities of the Association. Accordingly, the ASL Council has adopted a statement urging those responsible for appointments and conference programs to pay attention to gender balance.

It's Women's History Month, and it seems appropriate to ask whether the proportion of women who are invited to speak at ASL meetings has noticeably changed since this statement was issued.

To figure this out, I'm comparing the proportions of female invited speakers in each of the four main conference series in the few years since this statement was issued to the proportions of female invited speakers in the corresponding time span before it.


Annual Meetings Logic Colloquium
Men Women Men Women

2009-2012 29 7 57 9
2013-2016 23 8 43 9


AMS/ASL APA/ASL
Men Women Men Women

2010-2012 17 4 21 1
2014-2016 14 6 19 3

As you can see, I considered different sets of years for my pre- and post-statement counts depending on the conference series. I made these decisions based on whether the speakers for the 2013 meetings would have been invited by the time the statement was issued. The speakers for the 2013 Logic Colloquium and Annual Meeting would have been invited after the 2012 Annual Meeting, so I compared the 2009-2012 and 2013-2016 intervals for these, and the speakers for the 2013 AMS/ASL and APA/ASL meetings might already have been invited by the time of the 2012 Annual Meeting, so I considered the 2010-2012 and 2014-2016 intervals for each of those. In each of the latter two cases, it was easy to sidestep the question of what to do about 2013 itself: the tallies for the AMS/ASL meetings are identical for 2010-2012 and 2011-2013, and there were no invited talks at the 2013 APA/ASL meeting.

I used a chi-square test to determine whether the proportion of female speakers in the few years before the ASL statement was adopted is statistically distinguishable from the proportion of female speakers since then.

When I carried out this analysis, I found that the p-value for the Annual Meetings was 0.7422 and the p-value for the Logic Colloquium was 0.7697. This gives us no statistical evidence suggesting that the ASL's statement has made any difference.

However, there aren't enough female plenary speakers in these time spans to carry out this analysis for the AMS/ASL and APA/ASL meetings. A reliable chi-square analysis can't be done unless there are at least 5 people in each category. Only 4 women gave plenary talks at the AMS/ASL meetings during 2010-2012, while only 1 woman gave an invited talk at the APA/ASL meeting during 2010-2012 and only 3 did during 2014-2016. While these numbers are very low, we should also recall that the time intervals for these series are one year shorter than the intervals for the others. However, the (relatively unreliable) p-values for the AMS/ASL and APA/ASL meetings are 0.6509 and 0.6, respectively, which suggests that adding one year to the pre- and post-statement intervals is unlikely to result in any meaningful statistical difference.

Summary: In the conference series in which enough women have given talks in these time intervals, there is no statistically significant difference in the rates at which women have spoken in the years immediately before and the years after the ASL statement was adopted, suggesting that the statement has not had an effect on speaker selection. However, this analysis is only possible in two of the four series.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Snowbird any one?

Emily Riehl and Friends Invite for the Workshop on Homotopy Type Theory below.













 Dear all,

This is a reminder that from June 4-10, 2017, there will be a workshop
on Homotopy Type Theory, organized as part of the AMS Mathematics
Research Communities program and held in the Snowbird Resort in Utah.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together advanced graduate
students and postdocs having some background in one (or more) areas
such as algebraic topology, category theory, mathematical logic, or
computer science, with the goal of learning how these areas come
together in homotopy type theory, and working together to prove new
results. Basic knowledge of just one of these areas will be sufficient
to be a successful participant. The organizers are particularly
interested in using this workshop as an opportunity to improve the
diversity in the HoTT community in all aspects.

For more information about the workshop, including the list of sample
topics that participants may be working on and the registration
information, please see the website:

http://www.ams.org/programs/research-communities/2017MRC-1

All accepted into the program will receive financial support (room and
board at the Snowbird Resort and up to $650 towards airfare). The
application deadline is *March 1st, 2017.*

The majority of the positions are allocated to U.S. citizens and
people who are affiliated with U.S. institutions, but a smaller number
are also open to international participants.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact any of the organizers.

Dan Christensen, Chris Kapulkin, Dan Licata, Emily Riehl, Mike Shulman

Monday, January 16, 2017

Women in Logic, the workshop June, 19th 2017

The workshop Women in Logic was approved by the LiCS committee. the website is up, has been for at least a month, but I have been very slow, with Christmas and New Year, etc.

So now, please check out and let me know of any issues with the website https://sites.google.com/site/firstwomeninlogicworkshop/home

Also please submit your paper, if you're a woman (or has a female co-author) and the paper is logic-related.
and please talk to your friends interested in Logic and in gender issues about it!

(I was an unbeliever on these kinds of meetings, but seeing the responses that Women in Machine Learning, Women in Computability, Women in Topology, Women in Number Theory, etc, got, it has to be worth trying our own version.)