Computer

It could take 118 years for female computer scientists to match publishing rates of male colleagues 

By Jeffrey BrainardJun. 21, 2019 , 11:00 AM It could be well into the 21st century before female computer scientists annually publish as many research articles as their male counterparts, an analysis published today concludes. If current trends in publishing continue, women in biomedical research are likely to reach parity sooner, possibly by 2050.  The study, which appears on the preprint service arXiv, used a large data set and statistical methods to estimate the portion of papers published by women in those fields, yielding a measure of progress in efforts to eliminate historical patterns of gender inequality. “Although gender balance is improving, progress is slower than we had hoped,” write Oren Etzioni and co-authors at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. Using a tool called Semantic Scholar, developed by the institute, the researchers examined nearly 3 million journal and conference papers in computer science published between 1970 and 2018. They also analyzed more than 11 million biomedical papers that appeared during that period in the 1000 most-cited journals in the Medline database maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Determining the gender of authors required estimation because some first names, such as “Taylor,” are used by people of all genders. The researchers ran the first name of each author through an online database, Gender API, which predicts the probability that a first name belongs to a man or woman based on known associations between first names and gender in various countries as shown by government data and social media profiles. The researchers applied those probabilities to calculate the share of all papers published each year by women. The analysis counted all authors equally, regardless of what order each was listed. The study’s conclusion—that publishing parity in computer science will be reached only around the year 2137, a few generations from now, and perhaps even later—is an extrapolation from past growth rates. “We hope that these findings will motivate others in the field to … consider ways to improve the status quo,” Etzioni and his colleagues write in their study. They also examined the extent of cross-gender collaborations in authorship of computer science articles, and found reason for pessimism: These collaborations are not increasing as quickly as the data indicate they could, given the growing number of women in the field, they said. “Although both men and women are more likely to collaborate with authors of their own gender, the degree of same-gender preference is declining among female authors but increasing among male authors,” the study found. The findings are consistent with those reached by a similar study published in 2018 in PLOS ONE, which examined many more fields of science, 115 in all. In the large majority—87—women comprised significantly fewer than 45% of authors, according to the analysis by Luke Holman and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia. They found that changes in author gender ratios tended to be slowest in disciplines with large numbers of men, among them computer science and physics. A possible explanation, they said, was that such fields have biases that affect the relative publication rates of men and women.

A study about studies suggests men will still prevail in computer science in 2100 

Today it’s mostly a man’s world in computer science — and a tally of the authors behind nearly 3 million research papers in the field suggests that could be the case for the rest of the 21st century. The findings, reported by researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, point to how far the scientific community still has to go when it comes to gender equality in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. “In computer science and in other STEM fields, this kind of gender disparity has consistently been something that people have pointed to as a problem,” principal author Lucy Lu Wang told GeekWire. “It has definitely shown change and improvement over time. The field has made more of an effort to reach a more balanced gender status. But the data seems to show that even with all the progress, we are still not making the change fast enough.” Wang and her colleagues tracked trends in study authorship as reflected in 2.87 million research papers that were published between 1970 and 2018. The papers were accessed using Semantic Scholar, the academic search engine created at AI2, and analyzed using a software tool called Gender API. Lucy Lu Wang is a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. (AI2 Photo) More The year-by-year trend shows a sharp rise in the proportion of female authors, from around 17 percent in the 1970s to 27 percent in the last year sampled. But when the trend line for the existing data is projected into the future, the rising trend levels off in future decades. “Under our most optimistic projection models, gender parity is forecast to be reached in 2100, and significantly later under more realistic assumptions,” the researchers report. The likeliest scenario is that it will take until around 2137 for female authorship to hit the 45 percent level, which would satisfy the researchers’ definition of parity. As a reality check, the research team also ran the numbers for biomedical researchers, as reflected in 11.63 million papers drawn from the top 1,000 journals indexed by the Medline database. Those numbers tell a better story: The projection pointed to gender parity in 2048. “Our results are very consistent with previous studies,” Wang said. They’re also consistent with real-world assessments of female representation in computer science. The latest figures from the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators estimate that women make up 26 percent of the workforce in computer and mathematical sciences. The numbers are slightly more skewed for the subset focusing on computer and information sciences (24 percent) — but far closer to parity for mathematical sciences (43 percent). And in case you’re wondering, the National Science Board’s survey says the workforce for biological and medical sciences is 53 percent female. There’s an unusual twist to AI2’s analysis: Sometimes it’s hard to tell just by looking at a name whether the author is male or female. Such names include multi-gender monikers such as Taylor or Kelly, as well as foreign-language names. To resolve that issue, the analysis made use of statistical weighting derived from Gender API’s database.

“Taylor,” for instance, would be weighted in the statistics as 55 percent female, 45 percent male.

The researchers acknowledged that gender is not binary, but for the purposes of their large-scale study, they stuck with a male-vs.-female gender classification. Why is it so hard to achieve gender parity in computer science? That question goes beyond the scope of the study, but Wang said her own experience may point to the effect of having fewer women in a field of research. “I come from slightly outside this field,” she said. “I’m trained in biomedical informatics, which is somewhere between biomedicine and computer science. So I’ve interacted with both fields, and as I’ve gone more toward the computer science side, there is a dramatic difference when I attend conferences or interact with people. For a more junior scientist, I think it certainly can be a bit daunting at times.” Story continues Lynne Reynolds, president of the Puget Sound Chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, noted that not all women in computer science publish academic papers. She pointed to her own experience as an IT consultant. “I would estimate that in my 10-year tenure with Covestic, I’ve likely written over 2,000 pages of documentation to support customers and projects. … So as a female author, I’m somewhat prolific, just not in industry ‘research paper’ circles,” she said in an email. Reynolds said there’s “still a pre-existing disparity within tech leadership between men and women,” and that’s likely to contribute to the publishing gap. “It’s a strong women who puts herself forward and really pushes for opportunities like performing analytical research and getting the results published,” she said. “Without strong backing, this likely doesn’t often happen.” Although Reynolds hasn’t run the numbers with scientific rigor, she says women clearly hold their own when it comes to the

computing trade, “I have encountered extraordinary girls within the trade – several ar thought leaders – World Health Organization do often publish and ar celebrated quantities among specific areas of

IT,” she said. “I think of Kieran Snyder at Textio, Erin Anacker at WholeStory and so many others.” For her part, Wang emphasized that the trend line isn’t set in stone. “If we increase the rate of change just by a couple of percentage points, then you’re talking about giving women more of an opportunity to publish, giving women more of a chance to stay in their field,” Wang said. “I think that would be the kind of change that would be more dramatic.” In addition to Wang, the authors of “Gender Trends in Computer Science Authorship” include Gabriel Stanovsky, Luca Weihs and Oren Etzioni. More from GeekWire: