Representation of Women in High-Performance Computing Conferences

EasyChair Preprint 2799, version 1

Abstract

Women are severely underrepresented in the HPC workforce. Following the aphorism "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it," this paper aims to provide tangible and reproducible data on this gender gap. Specifically, this paper provides statistics on women's representation in HPC conferences, focusing mainly on authors of peer-reviewed papers, who serve as the keystone for future advances in the field.

To this end, we analyzed participant data from nine HPC and HPC-related peer-reviewed conferences from a single year. In addition to examining gender distributions, we looked at other demographic factors, such as the authors' countries and sectors, and at post-publication statistics of the papers.

Our main finding is that women represent only about 10% of all HPC paper authors, with some geographical variations. Representation of women is particularly low among industry researchers and at higher experience levels.

Keyphrases: HPC conferences, gender representation, peer review

@booklet{EasyChair:2799,
  author    = {Eitan Frachtenberg and Rhody Kaner},
  title     = {Representation of Women in High-Performance Computing Conferences},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 2799},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2020}}