Gender Diversity of Conference Leadership [Women in Engineering]

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. The improvements in gender diversity are encouraging, but there is more work to do. To make further progress, RAS WIE has made the following recommendations to the RAS Administrative Committee with support from several other RAS subcommittees on several points. To reach these recommendations, we asked ourselves two questions when considering what we need to do as a community. We hope they are useful and inspire you to think about even more ways to improve representation.