I wish I could be bringing better news.
I have been counting LICS committees again. All the numbers below come from two places, both public. The committees from 1986 to 2025 are on the LICS committee archive page, which lists every program committee, organising committee, advisory board and steering committee since the first meeting in 1986. The 2026 committee is not on that page yet, so I took it from the LICS 2026 call for papers. Forty-one conferences in total.
These are rough first calculations. I counted by hand, and gender is inferred from names and from knowing who these people are, so some entries are judgement rather than data. The earliest committees are listed by initial only, which makes 1986, 1988 and 1989 the least reliable rows. I will be revisiting these numbers and I would be glad of corrections.
Where I give an aggregate it is weighted by committee size: total women's seats over total seats in the period, not the average of the yearly percentages. Committees have grown a great deal over forty years, and averaging percentages would let a committee of fourteen count for as much as a committee of forty-nine.
The whole run - 41 years - in one picture, but other pictures help to see it.
The first twenty-five years
From the first meeting in 1986 until 2011, LICS program committees ran from thirteen to twenty-six people, and the number of women on them ran from zero to four. Seven of those twenty-six years had none at all: 1986, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1994, 2001 and 2004. Pooling the seats rather than averaging the years, women held 7 of 153 in the first decade and 13 of 192 in the second, which is 4.6 and 6.8 per cent. Across the period the figure does not climb so much as wander — a year with two, a year with none, a year with one — in a field perfectly capable of naming women who worked on these topics.
New Orleans 2013
In 2013 Figure 1 shows the share reaches 34.3 per cent, twelve women on a committee of thirty-five. That is still the highest figure in the whole run, and it comes straight after 24 per cent in 2012.
2013 is the year Orna Kupferman chaired LICS, the first woman ever to do so, twenty-eight years in. It is also the year she stood up at the business meeting and put the numbers on a screen. I have written about that evening before: people were drinking beer and not paying much attention, which is what people do at business meetings, and I had the feeling I was the only one listening. What the slide showed was that no awards had gone to women, that there were no women on the advisory board, and that women had written only 3.7 per cent of that year's submissions.
What I took away from it, sitting there, was that LICS was not merely as bad as any other computer science conference but a good deal worse. I should say plainly that this was my conclusion not hers. Orna showed the numbers. The reaction is mine, and so is everything I did afterwards. Her slide is in that post. It is worth looking at again.
What the last fifteen years actually look like
The trouble is what happens inside that better average. (which is not good, let me note!)
The year after Orna's committee, in 2014, the share fell from 34.3 per cent to 14.3 per cent. Twenty points in a single year. 2013 stands alone: the year before it was 24 per cent and the year after it was 14.3, and nothing about the conference in between had changed except who was assembling the list. It climbed back to 25 in 2015 and 33.3 in 2016. It held between 25 and 33 for several years. Then 2023 was 20 per cent, and 2024 was 15 per cent, six women on a committee of forty, the biggest committee LICS had assembled up to that point and the lowest share since 2010. Then 21.6 per cent in 2025, and 32.7 per cent in 2026, sixteen women out of forty-nine.
Since 2012 the average year-on-year change is seven percentage points, in one direction or the other. The distance between the worst recent year and the best is more than half the whole range the conference has ever occupied.
That is the finding. Not decline and not progress. Volatility.
I want to be exact about 2026, because it is a good year and it would be dishonest to bury it. The story I could tell you would be a great deal cleaner if I had stopped counting in 2025: a decade of hard-won gains, thrown away in three years, a scandal. That version was written and then I decided to look at 2026 and had to start again. This is the difference between counting and campaigning, and it is why I keep doing the counting.
32.7 per cent puts 2026 among the strongest committees in the history of the conference, sixteen women out of forty-nine, the largest LICS has ever assembled. It is below 2013 and it does not reach the level of the best years we have had, but it is close to them, and it is far better than 2024. Close enough that I should say how small these numbers really are. One appointment is worth 2.9 percentage points on the 2013 committee of thirty-five and 2.0 points on the 2026 committee of forty-nine, so the distance between 2026 and the best year on record is less than a single person on either committee. Counted by heads rather than by share, 2026 has sixteen women and no other year has more than twelve. At these sizes a percentage is not a precise instrument, and neither an improvement nor a decline of a couple of points means very much on its own. That applies to my counting as much as to the committees: I am reading gender off names and off knowing people, and one name I have wrong moves this figure by two points.
The 2026 committee was chaired by Claudia Faggian with Joost-Pieter Katoen, and it introduced Associate Chairs sitting inside the committee, one of whom is Orna Kupferman.
But look at what that number sits on top of. The four years 2023 to 2026 together are 37 women's seats out of 161, which is 23 per cent, against 78 out of 265, or 29.4 per cent, for 2015 to 2022. A single strong committee does not undo two weak ones, and nothing about how these committees are assembled makes the strong one likely to repeat. In 2014 we found out exactly how fast a good year can be followed by a bad one.
My own reading of the weak years is that the committees put together in 2022 and 2023 were drawing on a pipeline the pandemic had damaged. That women's research output took the worst of those years is well established: a meta-analysis in eLife pooling 55 studies found the gender gap in research productivity widened by about 7 per cent relative to where it stood before the pandemic, and a study of 2329 Elsevier journals found women submitting proportionally fewer manuscripts during the first wave, with the deficit sharpest among junior women.
Chairs and boards
Program chairs, since it is the chair who assembles the committee. Across forty-one conferences there have been forty-five chair slots, because several years had two chairs. Six went to women, all of them since 2013: Orna Kupferman in 2013, Catuscia Palamidessi in 2015, Patricia Bouyer in 2019, Christel Baier in 2022, Barbara König in 2025 and Claudia Faggian in 2026. Six out of forty-five is worth recording for its own sake, as a count of who has been trusted with the job, whatever effect it does or does not have on the committee that follows.
The line on the 2013 slide about the advisory board was correct, and the situation was worse than a snapshot of 2013 suggests. The board existed from 1998 until 2015, when it was replaced by the steering committee, and in its entire history it had three women: Mariangiola Dezani and Jeannette Wing from 1998 to 2003, then Ursula Martin from 2004 to 2012. Never two at the same time after 2003. Its last three years had none at all, so the body ended its existence in exactly the state the slide had recorded.
The steering committee that replaced it is a flatter story. Since 2016 the share of women has moved between 21 and 32 per cent with no trend in either direction: 54 seats out of 212 across the eleven years, just over a quarter. The 2026 steering committee has five women out of twenty.
What I take from this
It is not about who chairs. That was my first guess and the numbers do not bear it out. Committees chaired by women come to 63 seats out of 219, or 28.8 per cent, and committees chaired by men since 2012 come to 75 out of 302, or 24.8 per cent. There is a gap, but it is small and almost all of it comes from two particular years. Two of the strongest committees in the whole record were assembled by men, and some of the weaker recent ones were assembled by women. Whatever is moving this number, it is not the gender of the person in the chair.
Organization
What did seem to shift the floor was slower and came later. The sustained stretch starts around 2015 and 2016, which is when a few of us began organising rather than merely being appalled, and it holds for the better part of a decade. The shape is the shape.
Nothing holds it in place. There is no policy at LICS that produces a balanced committee, so a good committee is one chair's good judgement and a weak one is another chair's inattention, and the number swings by twenty points between them. Note that the fall after 2013 needed no shock to explain it, and neither did the fall after 2022. Erosion manages perfectly well on its own, and there is now a great deal of help available to it. When someone tells you the problem is solved because this year looks good, ask them what happened the year after the last good year. In 2014 we found out.
And we can only see any of this because someone counts LICS. This is one conference. It is the one I have paid most attention to, and it is the one with a public archive going back to 1986 that makes an afternoon of arithmetic possible. I do not have these numbers for the other conferences we care about, and neither does anybody else as far as I know (we started collecting them and then gave up). A field that cannot say whether it is at 15 per cent or 33 per cent cannot tell whether anything it does is working.
So we count again, and we should count more widely. If you are chairing anything, count your own committee before the invitations go out rather than after. If you have the patience to do for another conference what I have done here for LICS, please do it and send it to me and we will put it on this blog. And if you find errors in my arithmetic, send those too, because I would rather be corrected than wrong.
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