ACM-W Connections – October 2018
Welcome from the ACM-W Chair
The new year is off to a fast start for the Student Chapters project. This month’s report introduces six recently chartered chapters – welcome to ACM-W! Student Chapters chair Z Sweedyk, committee member Rachel Chesley, ACM-W member Melanie Williamson and I were pleased to meet many of our student chapter leaders and advisors while staffing our booth at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston. Those who visited the booth had the opportunity to pick up samples of the chapter’s stickers with an expanded array of images (see Chapter’s report below) and to learn about the new ACM-W Student Chapter Slack channel, which will help all of our student chapters worldwide connect with each other and share their stories. My thanks to Z and Rachel for their hard work in support of our Student Chapters!
Other ACM-W News
- womENcourage 2018, this year’s first ACM Celebration of Women in Computing, was held on October 3-5 in Belgrade, Serbia. ACM-W Europe provides a report from the event. For a complete list of 2018-2019 Celebration events visit https://women.acm.org/2018-2019-celebrations/.
- Aruquia Peixoto, ACM Council member, reports on SIGGRAPH CARES.
Reminder: Participate in the Global Survey project
It is important that the Computer Science community have a strong representation in the global survey being conducted by the project A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathmatical, Computing, and Natural Sciences (https://icsugendergapinscience.org) . The goal is to collect responses from 45,000 scientists worldwide. Participation is not limited by gender and all undergraduate students, graduate students and professionals who have worked in computing are encouraged to respond. The survey will take approximately 15 minutes of your time to complete and can be accessed in one of seven languages, by visiting http://statisticalresearchcenter.org/global18. Please encourage your colleagues and peers to do the same.
Thanks for standing with us as we work to fulfill our mission.
Jodi Tims
ACM-W Chair
News from ACM-W Student Chapters
Welcome to our new student chapters at North Carolina State University, Lewis & Clark College, University of Kentucky, University of South Florida, Georgia State University, and James Madison University.
Thanks to Rachel Chesley, we have some new ACM-W stickers. We will be making these available to our student chapters for their own use and as swag for chapter events. We’ll write to chapters soon to tell you how to order sticker. We also will soon be sending out invites to join our new ACMWStudent slack channel.
ACM SIGGRAPH CARES
ACM SIGGRAPH, following the lead of SIGARCH and SIGMICRO, has launched a new committee – ACM SIGGRAPH CARES. The goal of this new committee is to give support to all members of SIGGRAPH, regardless of gender, background, ethnicity or any other characteristic. The committee will address concerns of SIGGRAPH members who have had an unpleasant experience within the community. SIGGRAPH CARES is not an official intermediary in the ACM ethics process, but seeks to ensure that all SIGGRAPH members are treated with respect in all SIG-related activities. The members of the committee are committed members of SIGGRAPH community that are respected, trusted and approachable. Alain Chesnais, long-time ACM and SIGGRAPH volunteer and past-president of ACM, is the chair of ACM SIGGRAPH CARES.
ACM-W applauds this effort and is pleased that ACM Council member Aruquia Peixoto, SIG Liaison, is a member of SIGGRAPH CARES.
News from ACM-W Europe: womENcourage 2018, Belgrade, 3-5 October, 2018
“Brilliant experience, fun and inspiring” sums up womENcourage 2018. womENcourage 2018 excelled at our goals with 94% of respondents clearly were inspired and encouraged by the keynote speeches, workshops, panels, posters and the role models. WomENcourage 2018 attracted a diverse group from 23 different countries who are working in different industries and are different age groups. Serbia has the largest delegation at 29.3%, followed by the UK with 22.3% of attendees. Fifty-seven percent of attendees were young people from 17 to 30 and we have topped our gender diversity attendance from all other years, with 11.3% male attendees. We, as attendees, came from different careers which included academia, media, multinational technology companies and the private sector.