M. Suriya’s research interest in the area of women in computing centers around three different perspectives. First is related to the evaluation of the publications brought out in this area to identify the issues being confronted by women involved in the area of computing across the globe. ‘Thematic mapping of the publications on women in computing using scientometric analysis’ is one of the thrust areas of research. Another area of her research is concerned with reviewing the status of women in the various IT sectors like software industries, web and multimedia based industries through national and international surveys. Suriya has completed a national level survey involving 610 software engineers (both male and female) working in the National Informatics Centre at New Delhi, India. This survey was undertaken by her as a part of the National Information Task Force activities of the Government of India during 1998.

Suriya has also conducted surveys among the international workers in the web and multimedia sector in Canada and Germany last year. She reviewed the level of participation of men and women in these areas of work and tried to find out whether these upcoming sector opens up wide employment potentials for women. The results of these conferences are published in the WEBNET2001 and ICEWS 12 2002 conferences. She has also been involved in the database construction of women in computing by collecting the publications from the multi-disciplinary journals, conference proceedings and web sites etc.

Currently, Suriya is involved in a collaborative project on ‘Cross cultural comparison of the situation of women on computer and information science courses and in the IT labor market is going on at the moment. She has also been working on a book-project related to the subject ‘women in computing: an international perspective’ at the moment which will be completed within three months. Annamalai University publication committed has accepted to bring out this work as the university publication. A workshop-cum seminar on women in computing is proposed to be organized at Annamalai University shortly