Abstract

Computer science (CS) and engineering research both have large and well documented gender diversity gaps. In fact, previous studies have reported that the overall CS Female Author Ratio (FAR) is only in the range of 16-26% and varies significantly between CS subfields ranging from as high as 42% in CS Education to as low as 8% in Theory and Algorithms. While recent work has shown that the diversity in conference leadership has increased substantially over recent years, and that the state of gender diversity in marine robotics ranges from 7% to 44% across various countries in Europe, there has not been a comprehensive study analyzing the current state of gender diversity across the broader overall field of robotics. To begin to address this gap we recently collected and analyzed the gender of paper authors from all IEEE RAS fully sponsored conferences (ARSO, CASE, HAPTICS, Humanoids, ICRA, ISAM, MEMS, RoboSoft, SIMPAR, SSRR) as well as IROS from 2019-2021. As many ICRA and IROS papers were dual submitted to RA-L during this timeframe, we also added all papers published in RA-L over that same timeframe to our analysis. Overall, we find that robotics has a long way to go to reach gender parity, with an overall FAR of only 11-12%. We hope this analysis helps the robotics community to continue to emphasize the importance of working to improve our diversity.