Help needed with Women in Logic Lists!

A guest post, by Catarina Dutilh-Novaes.

In June 2009, it finally dawned on me that the (typically) absurdly skewed gender balance at conferences in my area of expertise, logic and philosophy of logic, was a real problem. I then decided to create a list with names of women working in the area to be made available on the internet; the goal was to serve as a source of ideas for conference organizers, and more generally to increase the visibility of women working on logic and related areas. I sent a message to Philos-L, asking for people to send me names, and these suggestions were the basis for the first versions of the list. Loriweb then kindly offered to host the list permanently, also so that I could update it regularly. It can be found here.

Some years later, it became clear that the list would serve its purpose even more adequately if, besides names and affiliations, it also listed areas of expertise. This gave me the idea of an online list which everyone could contribute to and update (an open excel sheet), the rationale being that each person is ideally placed to list her own interests and expertise. This can be found here. I had assumed that people would eagerly flock to add themselves to the list, and that in no time the new list would surpass the old list in all respects. In the meantime, the old list would stay online. Unfortunately, this is not what happened; it turns out that people are not that eager to put themselves on lists, and therefore the newer, presumably better list (better because it contains more information) remains rather meager in terms of numbers. This is why the old list remains online.

The ideal scenario would be for the new list to contain all the names on the old list and much more, so that the old list could be taken down. So I urge you all to add yourselves to it, if you are a woman working in logic and related areas. If you are not, then do tell your friends and colleagues fitting this description to add themselves to the list. Such lists are invaluable resources to improve the position of women in the profession, so please do get involved! Although the situation in logic improved since this list came into being more than 4 years ago, it is still far from ideal, as attested for example by a recent conference in Bochum, with 13 male and 0 female speakers. So yes, we are not nearly there yet…

So, gentle readers, please add yourselves to the new list!!