IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2021 - 126

WOMEN IN ENGINEERING
Gender Diversity
of Conference Leadership
By Laura Graesser, Aleksandra Faust, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Lydia Tapia, and Risa Ulinski
R
obotics research is shaped by
the people who hold leading
roles in robotics conferences.
Individuals who hold these
roles select organizing committees,
choose speakers, and make final
decisions on paper publication. The
leaders in these roles are highly
visible-they are the researchers
that the robotics community sees as
important. Consequently, who is re -
presented in these positions matters.
The IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society Women in Engineering (RAS
WIE) Committee set out to understand
one aspect of representation: that of
women in the primary conference leadership
and speaker roles at RAS-supported
conferences. We found that 1)
despite recent improvement, the representation
of women remains low (about
20%); 2) a small pool of women tends to
hold these roles; and 3) there is a correlation
between increased gender diversity
in the leadership roles and a woman
appointed as general chair.
Data Collection Methodology
We collected data from June to December
2019 for the conference years spanning
2002-2018. The data for this
report include the archived webpages
for 11 RAS conferences including
the following 10 fully RAS-sponsored
conferences:
●
●
IEEE International Conference on
Automation Science and Engineering
(CASE)
●
Joint EuroHaptics Conference and
Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for
Virtual Environment and Teleoperator
Systems/World Haptics Conference
(Haptics/WHC)
●
●
●
IEEE RAS International Conference
on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)
International Conference on Robotics
and Automation (ICRA)
IEEE International Symposium on
Assembly and Task Planning/International
Symposium on Assembly
and Manufacturing (ISATP/ISAM)
●
IEEE International Conference on
Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems
(MEMS)
●
●
IEEE International Conference on
Soft Robotics (Robosoft)
IEEE International Conference on
Simulation, Modeling, and Programming
for Autonomous Robots
(SIMPAR)
●
IEEE International Symposium on
Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics
(SSRR).
We also included the partially supported
IEEE/RSJ International Conference
on Intelligent Robots and Systems
(IROS).
For each year and conference, we
IEEE International Workshop on
Advanced Robotics and its Social
Impacts (ARSO)
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2021.3071897
Date of current version: 11 June 2021
126 * IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE * JUNE 2021
recorded the number of people on the
organizing committee and senior program
committee (when available) along
with their perceived gender. Furthermore,
we recorded the names and perceived
gender of all plenary and keynote
speakers, general chairs, program
chairs, and workshop chairs. We classified
an individual's gender based on first
names; pronouns (if available) in bios or
articles; and images, mainly from personal
websites. When we were unsure
(three individuals), we left the gender
unspecified.
We note two potential sources of
errors from this approach to gender categorization.
https://www.ieeeras.org/women-in-engineering/ https://www.ieeeras.org/women-in-engineering/
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