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).