For these female scientists who grew up in China and found fame in the US, gender equality needs more work
- Female computer scientists are in a minority globally – it is not just a China phenomenon
- Women tend to be under-represented at world-class computer science seminars
Two years ago, Heng Ji, a professor at the computer science department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was invited to be a guest speaker at an academic conference in a Chinese city she had never visited before.
But the host also asked Ji to accompany a male American scholar to the event and suggested she show him around the city. The male academic, who was also on his maiden visit to the city and happened to be a friend of Ji’s, knocked back the proposal immediately saying “I’ll be the one accompanying her.”
Ji, an avowed feminist, feels sexism in science can be more serious in China than in the US because of cultural issues. “To some extent, people still see women as an accessory to their male colleagues no matter how outstanding they might be in their own profession,” said Ji.
Female computer scientists are in a minority globally though – it is not just a China phenomenon. According to a 2019 study by researchers at the University of Washington and Allen Institute for Artificial Inteligence (AI2), who went through nearly 3 million papers in the field of computer science, gender parity is not expected to be reached until at least 2100 even under the most optimistic conditions.
“There is indeed a gap in the field,” said Oren Etzioni, co-author of the study, CEO of AI2 and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, in an email to the Post. “Though authorship among female computer scientists has increased in recent decades, the proportion appears to be levelling off below 30 per cent. This is in contrast to other fields, like psychology or biology, where female representation is much higher.”
My parents never asked me to do housework because I was always studying and reading books. But some relatives didn’t understand this and asked my parents why they were spoiling me
American female computer scientists are proportionally more competitive than their Chinese peers. According to a 2020 Tsinghua University ranking of the world’s 2,000 best artificial intelligence experts based on academic publications, 10.3 per cent of the Americans who made it to the list were women, while the percentage of Chinese females was only 6.9 per cent.
