Gender diversity in tech - a promise

It doesn't take much to realize that the gender ratio in technology is severely out of balance. Whether you look at employees at tech companies, computer science faculty members, graduates in computer and information sciences, user surveys on StackOverflow, you find almost the same picture anywhere.

From personal experience, it seems to me that the situation is considerably worse in Europe than in the US, but I don't have any data to back this up.

If there is any good news, it's that the problem is increasingly recognized - not nearly enough, but at least it's going in the right direction. The problem is complex and there is a lot of debate about how to solve it most effectively. This post is not about going into this debate, but rather to make a simple observation, and a promise.

The simple observation is that I think a lot of it has to do with role models. We can do whatever we want, if a particular group is overwhelmingly composed of one specific phenotype, we have a problem, because anyone who is not of that phenotype is more likely to feel "out of place" than they would otherwise, no matter how welcoming that group is. 

The problem is that for existing groups, progress may be slow because adding new people to the group to increase diversity may initially be difficult, for many different reasons. Having a research group that is mostly male, I am painfully aware of the issues. 

For new groups, however, progress can be faster, because it is often easier to prevent a problem than to fix one. And this is where the promise comes in. Last year, I became the academic director of a new online school at EPFL (the EPFL Extension School, which will focus on continued technology education). This sounds more glorious than it should, because at the time, this new school was simply an idea in my head, and the team was literally just me. But I made a promise to myself, namely that I would not build a technology program and have practically no women teaching on screen. No matter how well they would do it, if the teachers were predominantly male, we would be sending once again, without ill intent, the subtle signal that technology is something for guys.

Today, I want to make this promise publicly. At the EPFL Extension School, we will have gender parity for on-screen instructors. I can't guarantee that we will achieve this at all times, because we are not (yet) a large operation, and I also recognize that at any point in time we may be out of balance, hopefully in both directions, due to the fact that people come and people go. But it will be part of the school's DNA, and if we're off balance, we know what we have to do, and the excuse that it's a hard problem once you have it won't be acceptable.