Diversity’s Role in TechnologyThought Leadership

• Diverse teams

• Patenting

• Conference papers

• Open source software

NCWIT tracks women’s participation in technology thought leadership. Here’s what we know so far about…

Innovation Benefits from Diversity

• groups with greater diversity solve complex problems better and faster than do homogenous groups.

• teams with 50:50 gender membership are more experimental and more efficient.

Diversity of thought contributes to innovation. Research shows that …

NCWIT Supervising-in-a-Box Serieswww.ncwit.org/supervising

Female U.S. IT Patenting Low, but Improving with Time

Female Patenting Increased WhileWomen in Computing Decreased

• Read the research on women’s tech patenting www.ncwit.org/patentreport

• Implement learning communitiesin your departmentwww.ncwit.org/patentinglearning

Women Make Disproportionately High Contributions to Computing Conferences

Women and Computing Conference Publications

• Among 64 long-standing ACM conferences, most had 20%-25% women authors

• Most men and women published on topics of design and theory

• Women were more likelyto publish on human factors and less likely to publishon algorithms

• Call conference organizers’ attention to diversity of speakers and presenters.

• Encourage more women to submit work for publication.

• Use a double-blind review processin reviews.

Open Source Lacks Gender Diversity

• Only 1.5% of all Open Source Software (OSS) developers are women.

• Anecdotal evidence suggests that the open source community is less than welcoming to women.

• Do your part to ensure open source forums welcome diverse contributors. Encourage others to follow suit.

• Read more about research on diversityin open source.www.ncwit.org/cultureos

• Mentoring-in-a-Box:Technical Women at Workwww.ncwit.org/imentor

• Recognize bias in the workplacewww.ncwit.org/overtsexism

More to Learn

• NCWIT continues to follow indicators of thought leadership in computing communities, to gauge women’s inclusion (or lack thereof) and its effect on innovation.