Gender Diversity and CS Conferences
Last week in Barcelona, I had an interesting conversation with Koen De Bosschere, the editor of ACM Transactions on Architecture, Compilers, and Optimization (TACO), about the computer science publication process. His contention is that the CS community's publication process, which treats conferences as the primary and certainly the most prestigious publication venues, is a major cause of gender inequality in the CS academic and research community. Because women are primarily responsible for child care, they quickly realize that regular travel to conferences is incompatible with a family but is necessary for career advancement. Hence many women leave the research field. In addition, conferences put researchers at non-US schools at a disadvantage because of the cost in money and time of attending conference that primarily occur in the US, and because of the airplane travel, is not sustainable. Koen argued for making fast-turnaround journal publication (as he is doing with TACO) th...