During
the 19th Brazilian Logic Conference, held in João Pessoa, 6-10 May 2019, the
Brazilian Logic Society (EBL in the Brazilian acronym) opened a space for
discussions about the presence of women and the variety of challenges they face
in Logic, especially in Brazil.
Valeria de Paiva (who wrote briefly about the talk here), Elaine Pimentel, Claudia Nalon and I
participated in a round table entitled “Women in Logic (in Brazil)”, in a room
full of curious faces – mostly young researchers gladly open to what we had to
say.
In
the first few minutes I’ve talked about the context and the main motivations
for the round table: the low presence of women in STEM and, in particular, in
the field of logic, some barriers like the “inclusion by segregation” and, of
course, the idea that we can act to change this unfortunate state of things.
Since the audience was not composed solely by philosophers, I first gave some
information about how only recently the Brazilian philosophical community awoke
from its long dogmatic slumber regarding the women questions. My main point,
though, was to present some ideas on how to break the “cycle of antilogic
expectations” surrounding logic in the context of philosophy education in
Brazil – involving High Schools and Undergraduate courses. Given some time
limitations, my talk was divided into two parts, and Valeria started her participation by a video call.
Valeria
started speaking about her personal experience, as a student and a researcher,
and then presented the data gathered by Orna Kupferman on the presence of women
in the field of Logic in Computer Science. After showing also some data
collected by Claudia Bauzer and Celina Figueiredo on the decreasing presence of
women in computer science, as well as the distribution of CNPq scholarships
amongst women and men, Valeria presented some initiatives aiming to change this
reality. As you readers know, Valeria heads of the project Women in Logic – a Workshop (the third edition was then about to happen in Canada), this blog and a Facebook Group, which she described with enthusiasm,
especially regarding the positive consequences of the project. On the other
hand, the end of Valeria’s contribution
contained a grain of (in my view healthy) skepticism, since she proposed a
series of challenges we still need to face in order to create a gender-balanced
environment for women in the field of logic. Her list included the proposition
of a template for letters to be sent to organizing committees reminding them of
inviting women keynote speakers, the need for an update on our lists of women
in the field around the world, the “Wikipedia problem” (the fact that Wikipedia
does not list many women logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers that we
actually know about), the lack of collective memory about women in the field in
general (I would like to add: we still don’t have a good history of women
logicians!), the need for articulation
with similar groups in other fields and also the urgency of research collecting
data about ourselves.
The
third contribution to the round table was made by Elaine Pimentel, whose focus
was the presence of women in Mathematics in Brazil and how to fight the
disparities in the field. She started by presenting the data on the
distribution of CNPq scholarships, and then presented the project “Girls in Mathematics”,
which recently received a grant from CNPq. The main objective of the project is
to stimulate girls from High Schools to know better and more mathematics,
including the presence of women in its history and current practice, in order
to increase their participation in the area. – We all hope that the project
flourishes, Elaine! Before finishing her talk, Elaine also listed some
initiatives by the mathematical Brazilian community, such as the Brazilian Meeting of Women
Mathematicians
and the platform (and related actions) Mathematics: feminine noun.
Claudia
Nalon was the next to talk about women in Artificial Intelligence, especially
Automated Deduction, the important junction to logic.
In
order to conclude our presentation, I talked about the need to rethink our
strategies for teaching logic as one of the main ways to show that women can do
logic as well as men and, consequently,
have equal rights to living and working in the world of logic. I then
made a very brief description of two experiences of “logical empowering” of
High School female students (some former philosophy students of mine) realized
in Porto Alegre, a couple of years ago and, finally, presented some questions
we had elaborated together to start a conversation with the audience, which was
great:
-
How
do we call for more participation of female colleagues in our cause?
-
How
to instigate more research on the pedagogical aspects of logic?
-
How
to stimulate the production of more interesting pedagogical materials?
-
How
do deal with the lack of sensibility for gender problems in our field (with
colleagues that don’t even know their actions are problematic, to say the
least)?
-
How
to convince colleagues to reshape their syllabi in order to include the work of
women logicians in them, showing original results of women logicians and
consequently serving as role models for students?
-
How
to convince organizing committees to pay attention to gender disparities?
It
is worth noticing that our proposal of a round table on the issue was
immediately accepted by the President of the EBL, Cezar Mortari, a few months
before the Conference. We were glad for this opportunity and we firmly believe in the continuity of this support in our future endeavours.
Guest
post by Gisele Secco, Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Federal de
Santa Maria (UFSM), Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
