Diversity’s Role in Technology Thought 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 Series

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

Female Patenting Increased While Women in Computing Decreased

Read the research on women’s tech patenting Implement learning communities in your department

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 likely to publish on human factors and less likely to publish on algorithms

Call conference organizers’ attention to diversity of speakers and presenters. Encourage more women to submit work for publication. Use a double-blind review process in 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 diversity in open source.

Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work Recognize bias in the workplace 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.