Ursula Martin, University of Cambridge
Mateja Jamnik, University of Cambridge
The
purpose of the network is to put in place a positive action program for women
in computing research, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary research,
leadership and enterprise. We seek
support to initiate a programme of career development activities including
regional and national workshops, mentoring, networking and summer schools, with
a long term goal of:
·
stimulating new research
by bringing diverse viewpoints and expertise to bear, and ensuring that women are well placed to play an early
leadership role in new and emerging research areas, especially interdisciplinary ones,
·
increasing the recruitment and retention of women
in computing research careers, by
offering support to women researchers in computing and related disciplines;
·
increasing women’s
understanding of, and participation in, entrepreneurial ventures and
commercialization;
·
increasing public
engagement in, and changing public perceptions of, computer science, by
providing spokespersons who will contribute to changing the image of computer
science.
The programme builds on successful regional and local activities, for example the annual Scottish Hoppers meeting for women in computing, and women’s leadership and entrepreneurship activities at the University of Cambridge
The
proposal is led by the University of Cambridge, where Professor Ursula Martin
holds a part-time position to lead activities for women in computer science,
the women@CL project, and Dr Mateja Jamnik holds
a lectureship and an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship. The steering committee
consists of 7 female senior academics in 7 UK Universities, together with 5
senior women in other bodies: they will be supported by around 20 further
senior women network members. Activities will be open to targeted groups of
women in universities and industry, in computing research and related areas
(mathematics, electronic engineering, biosciences etc.), to potential
researchers at undergraduate or masters level, and to others, female or male,
as appropriate.
The
network will be supported in cash and kind by:
·
British Computer Society
(BCS) who will support events throughout the lifetime of the project, and will
provide a framework through a new Forum for women, and web, mailing list and
other infrastructure support, for sustainability after the end of the project.
BCS women is a complementary body to our own providing support for women in
industry.
·
University of Cambridge
Equal Opportunities Office, who have a long running program of positive action
for women in science, including Springboard and women’s leadership programmes,
and the recent appointment of staff to encourage applications from women
· Cambridge Enterprise, part of the University of Cambridge providing training and other support for technology transfer and for entrepreneurs at all stages.
This network is
particularly concerned with interdisciplinary research as a vehicle for
recruitment, retention and early leadership development of women in computing
research, and we have initially identified three broad areas of focus, to be
refined as our activities develop:
·
Computing and the
mathematical and natural sciences Computer
science has transformed these disciplines through the use of computation to
model and predict the physical world, and has in turn stimulated new work in
the underlying sciences – for example in algorithms, statistical techniques or
modes of reasoning. New paradigms like nanotechnology, quantum or optical computing require
not just tackling fundamental problems in physics, chemistry or
materials science to obtain the computational primitives, but also developing
new computer science to compose them into computational engines
·
Computing and
medicine; New information technologies
have the potential to dramatically improve health care: for example to help
ensure that health-related information and services are available anytime and
anywhere, permit health care practitioners to access patient information
wherever it may be located, and help researchers better understand the human
body, share information, and ultimately develop more beneficial treatments.
Computer science is fundamental for bioinformatics research, not only in
providing essential tools but also, by viewing biological processes as
computational phenomena, in providing new models for understanding, explanation
and prediction.
·
Computing,
interaction and creativity Ubiquitous
computing – computational devices embedded in the very fabric of everything
around us–brings with it enormous opportunities to transform every aspect of
how people interact with eth world and each other. This covers areas such as: understanding the complex
interactions of information technologies with people and society; the nature
and dynamics of IT impacts on organization, business, education,
communications, entertainment, and in the home; and development of innovative
models for IT education and IT applications for learning. It complements
computing research with work in psychology, linguistics, economics, cognitive
and social sciences, arts, film and music, and contributions from artists and
designers
Women
in computing research Despite a
few striking exceptions, the number of women in academic or entrepreneurial
leadership roles in technology is small, women are under-represented at all
stages in UK computing research, and the situation gets worse throughout the
research pipeline, with the proportion of women declining at each career
milestone: undergraduate to postgraduate, postgraduate to research assistant
(RA) and RA into academic and industrial careers.[1]
For example, in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise 1460 academic staff were
submitted as research active under Unit of Assessment 25, Computer Science: of
these 190, or 13%, were female. This is despite many years of well-intentioned
activities – for example “gender blind” appointment criteria.
However
it is not just a matter of small numbers coming through the pipeline – research
as presented in, for example, the recent Office of Science and Technology (OST)
Greenfield Report,[2] has shown
that the greatest obstacles to the progression of women already launched in the
high-tech field are lack of the support mechanisms such as mentoring, role models,
and access to informal networks that give the next hand up the ladder.[3] Recent data presented in the OST Athena
Asset Survey of male and female university scientists showed that women, even
at senior levels, felt disadvantaged in matters such as social inclusion and
access to career development – yet 33% of women, as opposed to 22% of men,
aspired to leadership positions.4 This is confirmed by more detailed
US analysis of the position of women in the computer science pipeline carried
out by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the National Science
Foundation (NSF).[4]
While
these issues arise across engineering and the physical sciences, they are particularly important in computing, both because of
the low numbers of women compared with other sciences, and because of the role
that computing researchers in universities and industry play in shaping new
technologies with enormous commercial and societal implications. Better decisions will be taken if the
nation does not lose the skills and talents of half the workforce in taking
leadership roles to drive forward the knowledge economy. In particular it is important that
women are not excluded from early stage leadership roles in technology, which
is vital in driving agendas for research and commercial development.
Interdisciplinarity
and entrepreneurship are areas of great opportunity for computer science, and
ones where confidence and access to informal networks are particularly
important in getting early competitive advantage. Women are underrepresented in
entrepreneurial activity, and there are marked difference in attitudes to
entrepreneurship between men and women.[5]
By contrast, women have often found interdisciplinary work attractive, and the
proportion of women transferring to computing via masters/conversion courses
from undergraduate degrees in other subjects, like maths or biosciences, has
been relatively high (~25%):1 these women are ideal candidates for
interdisciplinary research careers if mentored in the opportunities it offers.
The
aim of this network is to provide a positive action program for women in
computing research, with a particular focus on interdisciplinarity and
entrepreneurship. The goal of positive action programs is to provide career
development for under-represented groups, particularly through activities such
as role-models, mentoring and access to informal networks. Note that while in
the UK positive discrimination (for example appointing someone to a job just
because they are female) is illegal, positive action is allowed for in
legislation and encouraged by government through various programs of OST and
HEFCE, and taken forward by many Universities as part of their strategies for
equal opportunities and access.
Other
disciplines such as the London Mathematical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry
and Institute of Physics already support such activities. The NSF runs ambitious
programs through its Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)
workforce initiative led by Caroline Wardle, who has kindly agreed to act as an
advisor for our project. Women in computing activities in the UK are
coordinated by a DTI Forum, chaired by Rebecca George of IBM: these include
BCS-women (women in industry), Equalitec (a web initiative), and Women in
Computing (a focus on sociological issues). These provide valuable
complementary activities, but none
organises activities for women in computing research.
The
core of the project will be regular events which, will, we hope have acquired
momentum and sustainability by the end of the project.
·
Interdisciplinary
think-tanks: These meetings, in the
areas described above, will form the core of our activities. They will bring
together women in computing research and women leaders in the complementary
areas, with goals of stimulating new research in these areas, giving early
leadership roles to women researchers, and providing motivation and role models
for, younger women, especially those with interdisciplinary qualifications.
·
Regional meetings: There will be up to four annual one day
regional (Scotland, North, Midlands, London & SE) workshops for women in
computing research (defined broadly), which bring together women at all stages
of their technical careers from final year undergraduate up senior academic or
industrial positions. The aim is to give the opportunity to hear technical and
career planning talks from women in academia and industry, in computer science
and related interdisciplinary fields. This will provide opportunities for
networking, informal mentoring and interaction with role models, and stimulate
discussion of interdisciplinary or entrepreneurial opportunities. The model is
the annual Scottish Hoppers meeting, run since 1999 with ad hoc support from
IEE, SHEFC and NESC.
· Postgraduate students: Intel Research Cambridge (Prof Derek Macauley) want to sponsor an annual event at the EPSRC PREP postgraduate conference for women students, concentrating on industry internships and the potential of interdisciplinary research.
We
have a number of plans for possible one-off pilot events, to be run in
collaboration with various third parties, and subject to careful evaluation to
determine routes for sustainability. If a pilot event is successful, we hope
this can be continued with other means of support.
·
Undergraduate
students: Two day summer school for
women undergraduates concentrating on the excitement and challenges of interdisciplinary research.
·
Postdocs and
Early-career women: Leadership and
career planning workshop for early career women, with an emphasis on the nature
of research leadership, choosing an independent research area and building a
team, and juggling work-life balance. This will be based on a program already
run by the University of Cambridge.
·
Entrepreneurs
workshop: This will be for women in
computing research (defined broadly), based on programs currently provided by
Cambridge Enterprise, a division of the University of Cambridge which provides
entrepreneurial training and advice.
Mentoring
is recognised as a key activity for recruitment and retention of women in SET
careers, and the national scale of our activities means we can draw on a wider
pool of mentors, for both informal and formal support. To organise the latter, and to save on
the overhead of setting up our own scheme, we intend to negotiate with two
schemes:
·
MentorSet is a National
“face to face” Mentoring Scheme for Women in SET, run by AWISE the Womens
Engineering Society.
·
EWM, European Women in
Mathematics, run an e-mentoring scheme, based at Oxford Brookes University, http://ewm.brookes.ac.uk and are extending
this to computer science
As
our project takes shape we will identify stories and themes suitable for wider
dissemination, perhaps through media training or other public understanding
efforts, and in collaboratio with other bodies concerned with In particular we expect to:
·
Monitor participation of
women in professional and policy activities, and ensure, for example, that
women apply for fellowship status in BCS/IEE.
·
Maintain a roster of
women speakers, and publicise this to departments.
·
Maintain web pages
including information about careers and role models, data on women in computing
research careers and so on.
·
Report progress and
achievements of women more formally through EPSRC, BCS, IEE and other
mechanisms.
·
In addition, we will
ensure that the wider academic and scientific community is kept apprised of our
activities and their effectiveness in developing the careers of women in
computing research through partnership with the OST Athena project and the
proposed new Working Science Centre.
The beneficiaries are: the
women concerned who we hope will have enhanced career opportunities through
this program; their current and future employers who will have the benefit of
their talents; the wider academic and industrial computing research community
through their enhanced scientific and leadership contribution; and the more
general scientific and academic community through the example that this project
gives in recruitment and retention.
Key
to making this work, so that the activities do not become an additional burden
on those they are meant to serve, is effective administrative support for
maintaining web pages, databases and mailing lists, organising events, and
publicity and dissemination as described below. To this end we have costed on
the basis of a part time administrator who will be based in Cambridge.
We
are aware that many of our potential participants have family responsibilities
and will try to be family friendly in the organisation of our activities: for
example, avoiding overnight stays where possible. In particular we will budget
specifically for a flexible childcare fund, so that participants at meetings
can claim for childcare arrangements.
Network
grants are intended to pump-prime new activity. Sustainability in our context
means two things – of the novel interdisciplinary research activities
stimulated by our activities, and of the positive action program itself. For
the former we will rely on the usual mechanisms that sustain research,
including application for competitive funds,
For
the latter, our aim is to pilot a number of activities, and create robust and
credible models for activities to recruit and retain women which can then be
fairly readily replicated thereafter, with support from individual enthusiasts
committed to carrying forward the activity, Universities through their own
positive action programs, professional communities (such as BCS or ACM SIGs)
and professional organisations such as BCS and IEE. BCS, the British Computer
Society, is the major UK professional organisation for computing science, with
70,000 members in industry and academia. Its current President, Professor Wendy
Hall, has made issues to do with women a top priority of her presidency. BCS
will provide administrative and logistical support through web hosting, email
and distribution lists, and in addition have pledged support for various events
during the lifetime of the project, including a workshop on to be held at the
annual conference of professors of computing at Newcastle in March 2004.
BCS
Forums provide high level strategic leadership for themes of significant
professional or research interest: from 2005 BCS plan a Forum for women in computer
science, which will hold a wide brief for positive action, recruitment and
retention for women in all aspects of the profession, working with the DTI
Forum described above. For women in computing research our network grant will
initiate the program and enable it to achieve rapid impact: the BCS Forum will
be responsible for its long-term development beyond the end of the EPSRC
funding.
Part
time administrator, 2 days a week + overhead
22319
Student
interns (web pages etc)
3x1000
3000
Preparation
of posters, print material etc
3000
Meeting
expenses:
3
x Steering committee
3000
12
x Regional one day meetings: lunch + student travel subsidy
9000
3
x think tanks 7500
3
x pilot activities
7500
Childcare
fund
4681
Total
60000
Ursula
Martin is Professor of Computer
Science at Queen Mary University of London, and a member of the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, and is also a Fellow of
Newnham College. She was Professor of Computer Science at the University of St
Andrews 1992-2002, and in 1999 spent a year at SRI International in California,
funded by a Royal Academy of Engineering Foresight Fellowship. She served on
the 2001 RAE panel in Computer Science, and is on the EPSRC strategic advisory
team for mathematics. She chairs ACM-W, the Committee on Women of the US-based
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery - the world’s largest professional
association for computing with 80,000 members. As Director of women@CL in the
Department of Computer Science in Cambridge her long-term goal is to produce a
simple grass-roots model that is effective, replicable and sustainable across
science and engineering departments in a complex institution. Her current research, a collaboration
with Qinetiq and Intel Research Cambridge, concerns understanding how
computational logic can be applied to engineering: for example avionics or
network monitoring.
Mateja Jamnik has been a University Lecturer at the Computer
Laboratory since January 2003, and is currently on leave to hold the EPSRC
Advanced Research Fellowship “Automating Informal Human Mathematical Reasoning”. Mateja Jamnik
obtained her doctorate at the Department of Artificial Intelligence in the
University of Edinburgh. Her
doctoral thesis, “Automating Diagrammatic Proofs of Arithmetic Arguments” broke
new ground in automated reasoning, and as a result, she was invited by CSLI
Press, Stanford, to write a book about her work -- “Mathematical Reasoning with
Diagrams: From Intuition to Automation” (2001). Dr Jamnik’s main research is on the exploration
of informal human cognitive processes in mathematics. She aims to investigate
and mechanise some of human mathematical reasoning, in particular the use of
diagrams in proofs of mathematical theorems, the exploitation of learning from
examples in order to devise general solutions to problems in mathematics, and
in the use of proof planning to guide automatic theorem proving and to explore
the structure of mathematical proofs. In order to advance automated reasoning
systems, it is important to integrate some of the informal human reasoning
techniques with successful formal techniques, such as different types of logic.
This will not only make the reasoning systems more powerful, but such systems
can then serve as tools to study and explore the nature of human reasoning.
·
Professor Muffy Calder,
University of Glasgow
·
Professor Carole Goble,
University of Manchester
·
Professor Wendy Hall,
University of Southampton, President BCS
·
Dr Felicity Hunt, Equal
Opportunities Office University of Cambridge
·
Dr Mateja Jamnik,
University of Cambridge
·
Professor Marta
Kwiatkowska, University of Birmingham
·
Professor Gillian
Lovegrove, University of Northumbria, Past Chair CPH
·
Professor Ursula Martin,
QMUL/University of Cambridge
·
Dr Laura Meagher, Technology Development Group, Cupar
·
Rosa Michaelson,
Coordinator for women in science, SHEFC
·
Dr Janet Stack, DTI
Equalitec
·
Dr Caroline Wardle, NSF CISE programme for workforce
diversity
·
Professor Maggie Boden,
University of Sussex
·
Professor Hilary Buxton
, University of Sussex
·
Professor Susan Craw,
Robert Gordon University
·
Professor Maria Fox,
University of Strathclyde
·
Professor Rachel
Harrison, University of Reading
·
Professor Elizabeth Hull, University of Ulster
·
Professor Antonia J
Jones, University of Cardiff
·
Professor Hilary Kahn,
University of Manchester
·
Professor Heather
Liddell, QMUL
·
Professor Johanna Moore,
University of Edinburgh
·
Professor Alexandra
Poulovassilis, Birkbeck University of London
·
Professor Anne De Roeck,
Open University
·
Professor Angela Sasse,
UCL
·
Professor Karen
Sparck-Jones, University of Cambridge
·
Professor Susan Stepney,
University of York
·
Professor Marilyn Walker
University of Sheffield
·
Professor Bonnie Webber,
University of Edinburgh
[1] HESA and other data available at http://www.set4women.gov.uk.
[2] Greenfield report, OST, 2003.
[3] What’s holding women back, Wellington et al, Harvard Business Review, June 2003.
[4] The incredible shrinking pipeline, T Camp and D Gurer, see http://www.acm.org/women.
[5] Alternative entrepreneurial images, W A Lucas, MIT Sloan, survey, 2003.