Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research

Abstract

The gender gap in computer science (CS) research is a well-studied problem, with an estimated ratio of 15%–30% women researchers. However, far less is known about gender representation in specific fields within CS. Here, we investigate the gender gap in one large field, computer systems. To this end, we collected data from 72 leading peer-reviewed CS conferences, totalling 6,949 accepted papers and 19,829 unique authors (2,946 women, 16,307 men, the rest unknown). We combined these data with external demographic and bibliometric data to evaluate the ratio of women authors and the factors that might affect this ratio. Our main findings are that women represent only about 10% of systems researchers, and that this ratio is not associated with various conference factors such as size, prestige, double-blind reviewing, and inclusivity policies. Author research experience also does not significantly affect this ratio, although author country and work sector do. The 10% ratio of women authors is significantly lower than the 16% in the rest of CS. Our findings suggest that focusing on inclusivity policies alone cannot address this large gap. Increasing women’s participation in systems research will require addressing the systemic causes of their exclusion, which are even more pronounced in systems than in the rest of CS.

Why Are There So Few Women in Computer Systems Research?

“…By extracting the e-mail address associated with each author in our systems papers, we can roughly categorize author with a uniquely identifiable affiliation as either in government, academia, or industry. 2 Of the 13.9% authors with an industry affiliation, 8.8% were women, not much lower than the overall rate of women.…”

“…21 In our dataset, the representation of women varies considerably by country. 2 Even among the top 20 countries (by number of authors), representation varies from 2% in Portugal and Japan to 14% in Sweden (11.4% in the United States, the largest country with 55% of systems authors). We don't have evidence for gender stereotypes or cultural differences that are specific to computer systems, but we could hypothesize that when it comes to systems, some of the preceding hypotheses have the potential to sharpen preexisting cultural biases toward CS and sciences in general, such as the effects on work-life balance.…”

The role of gender in the International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications

“…This number alone bases it in the high end of the reported 10-44% of computer science conferences in Cohoon et al (2011). In comparison to newer studies, average in computer systems was reported to be only around 10% in Frachtenberg and Kaner (2022) and 30-70% in database research reported in late 2021 (Bonifati et al, 2022). The distribution of the number of the PerCom articles over the years is illustrated in Figure 1.…”

“…Various activities have taken place, over the specialized networks such as N2Women and inside the conference committees themselves, especially rising awareness of the female representation in different panels, committees, and reviewer boards, as well as keynote speakers (Martin, 2014). Focusing on the systems research in computer science, Frachtenberg and Kaner (2022) studied the conference factors and their influence on gender diversity: size of the conference, whether the double-blinded review was applied, diversity in conference organizational roles, and different diversity initiatives. However, they concluded none of these factors influenced significantly the gender ratio.…”

“…It is estimated that the partition of the female researchers in computer science is approximately between 15 and 30% (Frachtenberg and Kaner, 2022), which is in one of the worst ratios even among the other STEM fields (Holman et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2021). Some recent bibliographic studies end up even slower numbers, giving only 10% on average for female authorship (Mattauch et al, 2020;Frachtenberg and Kaner, 2021).…”