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.

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