The Association of Computational Learning Only Invites Men to Speak at their Annual Meetings 2004-2015.

I have been pointed to a meeting series by a colleague.  The meeting is the “Conference on Learning Theory” brought to use by the The Association of Computational Learning.

Since 2004 they have had 31 Invited Speakers at their annual meeting.  30 of which have been men.  That comes to 97% men.  3% women.  Worst I have ever seen I think.

UPDATE 2:45 PM.  Note – I am not trying to target the speakers here.  They were not the ones who planned these meetings.  They were just the invited speakers who, over the years, happened to be almost all men.  It is the organizers of the meeting who need to be questioned about this …  Some of these speakers may very well be dead against having a series with so few female speakers.

The list of Sponsors for their most recent meeting includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo.  Time to pressure those companies and the other sponsors to drop sponsorship for this organization and their meeting.

UPDATE #2 4:00 PM.  I have been told that there are active efforts underway by some members of the community to fix the underrepresentation of women as invited speakers in this meeting series. Stay tuned.  
Here is the breakdown of speakers over the years.

Invited Speakers for 2015

• Tim Roughgarden 
• Daniel Spielman
• Cedric Villani

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen