Monday, August 19, 2019

Round Table Women in Logic at EBL (Encontro Brasileiro de Logica)

Guest blog post by Gisele Secco (https://ufsm.academia.edu/gdsecco), pictures taken by Marcia Falcao, chosen by Valeria Paiva.


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 Groupwhich 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




Monday, June 17, 2019

By-Laws for Women in Logic: what and why

This is a preliminary proposal for discussion, suggested by Brigitte Pientka, Amy Felty, Alexandra Silva, and Valeria de Paiva. The proposal consists of bylaws and an initial description of how to organize Women in Logic.
The bylaws are inspired by PPDP(Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming
which is a SIGPLAN affiliated event.
The goals of the Workshop are inspired by the ones from Women in Machine Learning,
 simplifying a little their existing mission statement.

The next steps would be:
- Feedback and Discussion
- Invite everyone to the SC
- Discuss possible PC / GC chairs for WiL in 2020
- Discuss a possible location for WiL 2020
- Discuss possible format (if necessary)
---------------------------------------------

Women in Logic (WIL)
OVERVIEW

WiL aims to provide a forum that brings together women working on logical foundations of computer science.
Our goal is to enhance the experience of women in logic and closely related areas, making achievements of women
in logic known to the community, and thereby increasing the number of women in logic. 
Our flagship event is the annual WiL Workshop.

WiL Symposium Bylaws

    WiL is an annual workshop.
    WiL is scheduled by a Steering Committee (SC) whose composition and function are specified in the next section.
    Each symposium has a Program Committee (PC) that is responsible for the scientific content of the program.
    Each symposium has a PC Chair that is responsible for the PC composition and cannot submit any paper.
    Each symposium has a General Chair that is responsible for the local organization, finances, publicity, and liaison 
with sponsors.
    WiL requests annually for in-cooperation status with the ACM SIGLOG.
    Modifications of these bylaws are submitted to the SC Chair and require the approval of the SC.

WiL Steering Committee (SC)

    The purpose of the SC is to ensure the long-term success of the WiL.
    The SC selects the location, date, PC and General Chairs of each symposium.
    PC and General Chair are just a useful fiction for co-chairs, who divide the work the best way they can.
    The SC consists of the PC and General Chairs of the last 3 symposia and one member of the SIGLOG 
executive committee.
    The SIGLOG representative is appointed by the chair of SIGLOG, subject to approval by the chair of the WiL 
steering committee, and ensures coordination between SIGLOG and other SIGLOG affiliated events; 
once every three years when the SIGLOG executive committee changes, the SIGLOG representative changes.
    The SC elects its own chair shortly after the end of each workshop.
    The decisions of the SC require at least 50% of the votes and a simple majority.


Initial Composition:

- Valeria de Paiva (Past WiL Chair)    (appointed until 2022)
- Amy Felty (Past WiL Chair)           (appointed until 2022)
- Alexandra Silva (SIGLOG Rep. and LMW liaison) (appointed until 2022)
- Catuscia Palamidessi                  (appointed until 2020)
- Claudia Nalon                         (appointed until 2020)
- Perdita Stevens                       (appointed until 2021)
- Brigitte Pientka                      (appointed until 2021)



Saturday, May 4, 2019

Round Table Women in Logic (in Brazil)


Next week is the Encontro Brasileiro de Logic (Brazilian Logic Meeting) in Joao Pessoa, Paraiba, Brazil (https://ebl2019.ci.ufpb.br/) and a group of us (Gisele Secco, Elaine Pimental, Claudia Nalon and I) proposed a round table to discuss "Women in Logic (in Brazil)". I don't know if I will be able (via Skype) to talk at the roundtable or not, but this seems a good reason to collect some links here.

First the ones on Women in Logic, the workshop, now in its third edition in 2019.

How did it come to be?

Well, in 2013, Orna Kupferman was the program chair for LiCS, Logic in Computer Science in New Orleans, USA. Orna  talked at the business meeting about the dire straits of the situation of women in the LiCS community and I felt that only I heard her talking. The guys were drinking beer and not paying much attention (to be honest this is what people do, at most conferences' business meetings) but this was different, as Orna was explaining that not only was LiCS as bad as any other Computer Science conference,  actually it was much worse, as she could show using her numbers below.














I was incensed, but took a while to react. The first post in Women in Logic the Facebook group went up only on July 8, 2015. (So the facebook group  will be completing 4 years soon!)  Then at LiCS 2016 Shankar asked me to say a few words about the history of LiCS. Between lunch and the time of the conversation, I put together some slides, describing the issues as I saw them. The slides are in slideshare and here. In the slides I mentioned that maybe we should have a workshop Women in Logic at FLoC2018.

In fact we've managed to have the first Women in Logic workshop at LiCS 2017 in Iceland. The meeting was really nice! The talks were high quality and understandable. The presenters had put an extra effort to make themselves clear to people with different backgrounds. There was a palpable feeling  of companionship in the room, which I think the picture captures.


So we were set for Women in Logic 2018, in Oxford. This was, for me, a bit more confused, as I was supposed to be in three  workshops at the same time. Not possible, as everyone knows. But not even possible to fake it, in a reasonable way, as I discovered.

We had a very intense discussion of issues in "Priorities for Diversity in Computer Science Logic", that Prof Ursula Martin had the very hard job of organizing. She did it masterly. And then we had an extremely nice supper at Wadham College on Parks Road, Oxford. A picture at the beginning of the meeting below and one before the supper closes this blog post. A report on the meeting was published by SIGLOG, the official version is in the ACM digital library. The preprint version is a Google doc.
Now we are preparing for Women in Logic 2019 in Vancouver. The program for WiL 2019 should be coming up soon. And we have two impressive speakers lined up, Anne Condon (UBC) and  Zena Ariola (Univ. of Oregon).