[First appeared in the Topos Institute blog, March 6th, 2023]
This year we’re having the 7th Women in Logic (WiL) Workshop in Rome, associated with FSCD and CADE. Considering that we never had grants to help us defray costs of the workshop, I think getting to our seventh anniversary is a big milestone. Everyone who works for Women in Logic does it for free and because they find the cause important. You may be wondering, “what is Women in Logic?”
Women, like some other demographics groups, are very badly represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. While on paper we have the right to be part of our STEM communities, in reality the obstacles are very strong and sometimes even insurmountable for women participation in Academia. The infamous “glass ceiling” is still very much with us and many of our colleagues do not notice it. (ha, this is why it’s called a “glass” ceiling, right?) Even the colleagues that are notionally aware of the issues, many times do not see them, when they happen in their own lives. The sexism in STEM is systemic and entrenched, it affects both men and women. And it is not a small action like WiL that will defeat it, but WiL does help, a little, to shed some light on some of the issues.
Women in Logic (WiL) started for me in 2013, when Orna Kupferman, who was the Program Chair of LICS that year, presented her LICS chair findings and showed this slide:
Until then, while I knew about all the prevalent sexism in society, (it’s hard to ignore the many manifestations, from murdered women to silenced ones) I thought that my community was a bit better than most. My colleagues seemed to me more helpful and more enlightened. Thus when I saw the numbers, it was a shock: how come there were no awards for women? How come there were no women on the advisory board(*)? how come only 3.7% of the submissions in 2013 were by women? It all did seem TERRIBLE!
Much more disturbing was the discovery that, despite many efforts, things were not getting better, they were even getting worse! A representative graph was provided by the AAUW (American Association of University Women) in their report entitled “Solving the Equation”, 159 pages of dismaying facts. As you can see below, while the numbers of women in Mathematics and Computer Science improved from 1960 till around 1990, from then on they dropped, being in 2013 lower than they were in 1960! Engineering, traditionally considered one of the worst areas for women, at least has increasing numbers, but from 9% in 1990 to 12% in 2013. This is a minuscule improvement, leading to, in general, the prediction that at the current rate of progress, the pay gap will not close until 2111.
So I started to think about how to do something about this sad state of affairs. Three years later, at LICS2016, Nat Shankar asked me if I wanted to say a few words about LICS and I said I’d love to, but he might not be pleased with what I had to say. Having talked about how bad things were in the LICS community, I decided to organize the first Women in Logic Workshop, which happened as an associated workshop to LICS in Reykjavik, Iceland the next year. It was easy to find several friends who wanted to do this too, so our collective was formed.
Since then the Workshop has occurred in Oxford 2018 (UK), Vancouver 2019 (CA), Paris 2020 (online), Rome 2021 (online) and Haifa, 2022 (Israel). By most accounts the workshops have been very successful. The invited speakers, so far always two in each workshop, have been excellent and they showcased many different facets of logic in computing, mathematics and philosophy: from Software Engineering to Automated Reasoning to Computational Biology and Artificial Intelligence.
We have received some small grants from the Special Interest Group of the ACM for Logic (SIGLOG), the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA), the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam (ILLC).These allowed us to help students and young researchers attend our workshop. We also had some donations to help us to organize dinners after the workshop in Oxford and Haifa, from Prof Ursula Martin (EPSRC and Wadham College) and from Microsoft Outreach, via Nikolaj Bjorner, to whom we’re also very grateful.
Most recently we have also received important clerical support from the Topos Institute, to process these smaller grants. More substantial effort from the Topos Institute came in the shape of the help to establish a Women in Logic website. Producing this website has been an important step to consolidate the several activities of the collective. Many thanks are due to, especially Juliet Szatko and Tim Hosgood, for all the help provided!
After the worst (we hope) of the COVID19 pandemic, we are now in the process of restructuring and rethinking how to make the collective Women in Logic more efficient. We have several social media channels, managed by several members of the original group. So we are present on the web (Women in Logic), on Facebook (Women on Logic group), on Twitter ([@WomeninLogic1](https://twitter.com/WomenInLogic1)) and on Slack (wilcrew.slack.com). We also have our blog (womeninlogic.blogspot.com) and a YouTube channel, which we haven’t, as yet, populated much. Instead we have, so far, collected already recorded talks by women in logic and posted them on our GitHub (womeninlogic.github.io/RecordedTalks/).
But much remains to be done and we want to count on all of you, women in STEM and allies, to help change the terrible state that we still find ourselves in. Because as we know is not
Nature or nurture? No, it’s bias
Research shows that there is no inherent difference in math and science capability between girls and boys. It’s also a myth that girls aren’t interested in science: In elementary, middle, and high school, girls and boys take math and science courses in roughly equal numbers, except in engineering and AP computer science, according to the National Science Foundation. One study found that the apparent gender gap in mathematics is smaller in countries with greater gender equality, suggesting that gender differences in math are largely due to cultural and environmental factors, not ability.
— The STEM Gap, Why it Matters?
So join us, let us make a difference together!
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