Gabriele Abermann

Title: Why Diversity Matters

Abstract: This talk provides an overview on relevant research on the role of diversity for team performance. It will demonstrate how perception and unconscious biases impact our communication and conflict resolution styles and which strategies can increase awareness for this issue. Building trust and developing empathy are seen as essential factors to positively influence team productivity.

Bio: Dr. Abermann is a recently retired Senior Lecturer for social skills and intercultural communication at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences in the degree programme Information Technology and Systems Management. She has served as Director of International Relations and Vice Rector for teaching and internationalization. Dr. Abermann has extensive teaching experience in Austria and abroad and has coordinated the university-enterprise cooperation project, SKILL2E, which aimed at enhancing the intercultural competence acquisition of students on transnational placements and intensifying the dialogue between universities and enterprises. As one of the Austrian national experts for the Bologna Reform / European Higher Education Area since 2009, she is a member of the national Bologna Follow-up Group and has advised universities across all sectors on the implementation of Bologna Reform issues such as student-centered learning or internationalization.

Reyyan Ayfer

Title: Gender Gap: Whose Problem?

Abstract: We all agree that the very obvious “Gender Gap” is a problem. Research results clearly show the importance of diversity for the success of the projects and organizations. All the efforts of organizations, ongoing projects and initiatives to find the reasons of the problem help to raise awareness and give hope for the future. Now we feel that there is a consensus about the problems like the shrinking pipeline, conscious and unconscious bias, glass ceiling, gender pay gap and many more. It is time to ask “Whose problem is this?” and to focus to solutions.

Bio: After working for various organizations as a computer engineer for more than a decade and noting the increasing demand for expertise in programming, Reyyan decided to pursue a role in the field of education. In 1988 she began working at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and held a multitude of titles including: Department Chair of Computer Technology and Programming and Vice Chair of Computer and Instructional Technology Teacher Education, and the Director of the Institutional Relations and History Unit and Coordinator of BETS Bilkent Educational Technology Services. She also contributed her time to international committees, most notably as a council member of ACM Europe and as the Founding Chair of ACM Women in Computing Europe Committee as well as leading a community of students who have formed the first international ACM-W Student Chapter. She is now serving for women in computing as the Vice Chair of ACM-W. She had received the Anita Borg Change Agent Award in 2008 after serving as the ACM-W Ambassador.

Anna Nilsson-Ehle

Title: We know what we need - time for action!

Abstract: A hundred years ago, 1917, the first Swedish female engineer graduated from Chalmers University of Technology.

Since then, women have slowly worked their way into more and more engineering and research domains in interaction with other societal changes. This century of progress show some common patterns of both successful strategies and pitfalls. Recently, an improved gender balance has been scientifically proven beneficial to companies, research groups and individuals.

The rapid creation of new knowledge and disruptive emerging technologies, especially in the field of software engineering and AI, will transform our society.

We create ever more complex systems that no single human mind can grasp; complex system design requires an integration of many perspectives. Thus, the ability to form gender balanced and diverse design teams and organizations is more crucial than ever.

Fortunately, experience gained through efforts in other sectors can be re-used and inspire to powerful joint commitments within the software community.

Bio: Anna Nilsson-Ehle, MSc in Engineering Physics from Chalmers, started her career as development engineer. She joined Volvo in 1979 as a safety analyst. Dr Nilsson-Ehle has held many different managerial positions during her twenty years in the automotive industry. As head of the 240 company she became Volvos first female product manager. From 1999 she led the start-up of the national science discovery centre Universeum and served as its CEO for seven years. From 2006 to 2016, she was Director for SAFER – the Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers. Since 2017 she is chairperson of Vinnova, the Swedish innovation agency and chairperson of Lindholmen Science Park. She has a broad experience of board work in both public companies, authorities and research and innovation programmes. Dr Nilsson-Ehle is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, she has been awarded the Gustaf Dalén memorial medal and the Chalmers medal. She is a Doctor of Science, h.c. at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH.

Strategies to improve gender equality and raise the number of women in engineering discipines has engaged Anna Nilsson-Ehle through-out her career.

Philip B. Stark

Title: Separating Signal from Noise: Measuring Gender Bias in Student Evaluations of Teaching

Abstract: Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in academic personnel decisions as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Is that what SET primarily measure? Are gender biases and other factors large enough to matter? Does relying on SET for employment decisions have disparate impact on women and other protected groups? These questions cannot be answered by merely comparing SET across female and male instructors: experimental design matters, as does the statistical methodology. The question is not "do men and women receive similar ratings?" but rather "does instructor gender affect ratings?" Using nonparametric tests applied to data from a controlled, randomized experiment and a large natural experiment, we find:

• SET are biased against women by an amount that is large and statistically significant.
• The bias affects how students rate even "objective" aspects of teaching, such as how promptly assignments are graded.
• SET are more sensitive to gender bias and grade expectations than they are to teaching effectiveness.
• Gender biases can be large enough to cause more effective instructors to get lower SET than less effective instructors.

Joint work with Anne Boring, Richard Freishtat, and Kellie Ottoboni.

Bio: Philip B. Stark's research centers on inference (inverse) problems, especially confidence procedures tailored for specific goals. Applications include the Big Bang, causal inference, the U.S. census, climate modeling, earthquake prediction and seismic hazard analysis, election auditing, endangered species stressors, evaluating and improving teaching and educational technology, food web models, health effects of sodium, the geomagnetic field, geriatric hearing loss, information retrieval, Internet content filters, nonparametrics (constrained confidence sets for functions and probability densities, permutation methods), risk assessment, the seismic structure of Sun and Earth, spectroscopy, spectrum estimation, and uncertainty quantification for computational models of complex systems. Philip has published some software. He is also interested in nutrition, food equity, and sustainability. He is studying whether urban foraging could contribute meaningfully to nutrition, especially in "food deserts," starting by investigating the occupancy, nutritional value, and possible toxicity of wild foods in the East Bay; see the Berkeley Open Source Food Project.