Women in AI

Women in AI
Researched and written by Dale Strok
Staff Editor, IEEE Expert

This article appeared in IEEE Expert, Vol. 7, No. 4, August 1992. Copyright 1992 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. It is being distributed electronically by permission.

Recently, a woman whose article had been accepted for IEEE Expert asked us to use her initials rather than her first name in her byline. She believed that if the readers knew a woman had done the research, they would question the validity of the work.

We were surprised. Although we were aware of recent studies that showed how much women are underrepresented and sometimes undervalued in science and engineering, we had thought that AI - as a relatively young subfield of computer science - might be an exception.

After looking at the proportion of women authors in IEEE Expert over the last four years (about 13 percent), we decided to take a closer look at the field.

Most of us acknowledge a perceived underrepresentation of women in science and engineering, whether or not we agree a problem really exists. Ellen Spertus started her 1991 report ``Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?'' with these statistics:

``In the most recent years for which statistics are available, women received a third of the bachelor's degrees in computer science, 27 percent of master's degrees, and 13 percent of PhDs. Not only do women make up just 7.8 percent of computer science and computer engineering faculties, only 2.7 percent of tenured professors are female. Even worse, these numbers seem to be improving only very slowly or even dropping.''

Other publications have also reported discrepancies in the treatment of women and men in computer science and engineering:

Women scientists earn less than men at every stage of their careers, and the disparity grows at the highest levels of experience.
Starting salaries are the same for men and women engineers, but the gap widens after about six years.
Women's colleges produce four times as many female research scientists and scholars as do coeducational institutions, and their graduates are twice as likely to earn PhDs.

The Computing Research Association's 1989 Taulbee Survey found that the percentage of female computer scientists decreases rapidly from high-school level to undergraduate, to graduate, to professorships, and that 13 percent of computer scientists are women and minorities. Only 4 percent of full professors and 10 percent of assistant and associate professors in computer science are women. Some schools have much higher percentages; at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for example, women account for 18 percent of the full professors.

We decided to see how women are doing in AI, a relatively young field. We were deluged with offers by both senior and junior AI women to talk about their problems and successes, but while everyone was happy to talk openly about their interests and achievements, no one wanted to be quoted about gender-related obstacles they've met. A few said they'd lose their jobs if they spoke on the record; the discussion of individual problems is therefore anonymous. However, we also highlight the work of a handful of the dozens of scientists interviewed, who communicate their excitement about the future, their commitment to quality work, and their desire to encourage more women to choose AI as a career.

Next: Is AI Different?

ellens@ai.mit.edu
Wed Apr 6 14:30:07 EDT 1994