By: Michael Feldman

In a year in which a woman has a good chance of becoming the leader of the free world, talk of gender diversity has become pervasive. Even in the secluded confines of the HPC community, discussions of the underrepresentation of women in supercomputing has become a real topic, and at no time has this become more apparent than in the run-up to SC16.

The gender imbalance in tech has existed seemingly forever. Certainly the poor participation rates of women in HPC reflects that of the broader STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workforce. And those numbers are well-documented. According to the National Girls Collaborative Project, women make up just 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce. In the areas of greatest relevance to the HPC community, the numbers are even worse, with just a 25 percent share for women in computer and mathematical science, 15 percent in engineering overall, and an especially abysmal 11 percent in electrical/computer hardware engineering. In general, those figures also reflect the low percentages of woman graduating in those fields, in particular, computer science (18 percent) and engineering (19 percent).  The graphic to the left, from an August 2016 document published by the project, illustrates some of the other demographic disparities of the STEM workforce.

One may be tempted to think that doesn’t necessarily reflect a problem, that it’s just the natural result of the biological and cultural differences between men and woman. To some extent, that might be true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for a better balanced workforce, especially considering the chronically low supply of qualified candidates for positions in HPC. In any case, there seems to be a growing body of evidence that teams work better when they include larger proportions of women.

In an article published here at TOP500 last year, John West, the general chair of SC16, made a case that increased participation by women in HPC will advance the cause of the community and cited some recent research that supports that claim:

It will seem intuitively obvious that we increase our odds of getting the better solutions if we increase the number of good ideas available to choose from, but there is more than intuition here. A study summarized in Harvard Business Review – and others like it, some of which are highlighted in a recent New York Times article – demonstrate that teams with more women produce better results (translating these findings into the construction of more effective teams, and understanding the degree to which other dimensions of diversity are a factor, are areas of ongoing research.

Under West’s chairmanship, SC16 will highlight women’s participation in the community and in the conference itself. As of today, 64 percent of the SC16 leadership is made up of woman. “Our members span across most major industries and professions, and as an organization we are leading by example in the gender diversity arena,” said West in a press release published this week.

Raising the the awareness of this issue has already produced results. In May, the conference announced that seven women who work in IT departments at US research institutions have been tapped to help build and operate SCinet, the high performance conference network that is constructed each year for the event. The announcement came from the Women in IT Networking at SC program, affectionately known as WINS. Although this is not the first time women have worked on the network, WINS put extra effort this year into expanding the diversity of the SCinet team.

One of West’s first initiatives as general chair was to establish a diversity page on the conference website, which is modeled after Google’s version. A fundamental part of this effort was tracking the demographic makeup of the SC16 organization and then publishing the results. According to the diversity page, women represent about two-thirds of the conference leadership members and about one-third of the entire conference committee. The page also notes that 14 percent of SC15 attendees were women, but the conference organizers would like to bump that up to at least 20 percent by 2020.

That’s a long-term project, but one that has already begun under the efforts of the SC16 diversity team headed by Trish Damkroger. Damkroger, who is the Acting Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is looking to attack the problem from a number of different directions. Besides sharing gender demographics about the SC16 organization and calling for others in the industry to do likewise, Damkroger is intent on getting more young women into the STEM education pipeline. In her day job at LLNL’s Computation group, she and her cohorts have started Girls Who Code clubs at the local middle schools and high schools. They are also looking at ways to entice more women into these career paths by offering flexible work schedules, work-at-home arrangements, and professional development opportunities.

At SC16 on Sunday, November 13, Damkroger will be part of an all-day Women in HPC workshop that will "address a variety of issues relevant to both employers and to employees, specifically to identify particular challenges faced by women, outline opportunities and strategies for broadening participation, and share information on the steps being taken to encourage women into the field and retain a diverse workforce." Then on Wednesday, November 16, there will be a one-hour Birds-of-a-Feather session on Intersectionality, where you can here the stories of women that fall into the intersection of two or more underrepresented groups based on gender, race, and sexual orientation. In concert with those activities, the conference has provided a webpage of links case studies that document some of the challenges involved in increasing participation by women and how achieving greater gender diversity improves problem solving and workplace performance.

One of the big challenges is getting employers on board. But given the breadth of vendors, universities, national labs, and research institutes that participate in SC16, the event presents an ideal opportunity to engage these organizations, make them aware of the various diversity strategies, and encourage some self-assessment. 

Of course, issues like these have a habit of being pushed aside during a conference like SC16, which is strongly focused on technology and its commercialization, and very little on socioeconomic issues. On the other hand, the timing of SC16, coming just five days after a US presidential election in which the issue of gender discrimination has figured rather prominently, may provide an opportunity for some interesting discussions at this year’s event. The fact is that regardless of who wins the contest on November 8, there’s going to be plenty of people at SC16 thinking about of how far gender diversity has come, and just how far we need to go.