Diversity Resources

Many people at the ACM India event were interested in reading more about the data that supports the Business Case for Diversity. There is really a lot of literature. Here are links to some that are available online:

• The Anita Borg Institute has a number of informative articles posted on their site, many by Dr. Caroline Simard, including
  
  • The Business Case for Gender Diversity (2007)
  • Climbing the Technical Ladder (2008)
  • The Prevalence of Gender Stereotyping and Bias (2009)
  • Senior Technical Women: A Profile of Success (2010)
• From Towson University: Gender Differences in Communication
• From NCWIT: Resources based on their research. For example:
  • Women in IT: The Facts: Report, Executive Summary
• Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, from the Harvard Business Review
• An article in Harvard Business Review, Women in Management: Delusions of Progress, by Nancy Carter and Christine Silva. This shows, among other things, that women fall behind more quickly when they take a break than men do; that they are more likely to lag in salary even at the beginning, and often never recover.
• A very interesting article is an excerpt from a book, "The Hidden Brain", by Shankar Vedantam. In this chapter, he compares the experiences of two Stanford University professors, both in the same department, and both transgender: one from man to woman, one from woman to man. The career trajectory of each thrived as a man and lagged as a woman.
• A widely cited report was published by the McKinsey Group, Moving Women to the Top.
• For India, there are a number of studies.
  • There is a report prepared jointly by Nasscom and Mercer, Gender Inclusivity in India
  • The Society for Human Resource Management has done a study on Global Diversity Trends, which included India
  • Science Career for Indian Women: An examination of Indian women’s access to and retention in scientific careers, by the Indian National Science Academy (2004)
• HBR Report (2008): The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering and Technology
• A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT (1999): This has many interesting findings, including that women are less likely to notice bias early in their career, but that the bias is not readily evident without access to enough data.
• A new article from Technology Review (Team Thinking: Study probes nature of "collective intelligence") describes research that had a surprise result, in which groups with more women had better performance: a result of better collaboration skills.
  

These are certainly not the only resources available, but they do contain a lot of interesting food for thought.

References for the Brain Science part of the ACM India diversity presentation include:

• Empathetic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others, by Tania Singer, Ben Seymour, John P. O’Doherty, Klaas E. Stephan, Raymond J. Dolan & Chris D. Frith; Nature, Letter, 26 January, 2006
• The neuroanatomy of general intelligence: sex matters, by Richard J. Haier, Rex E. Jung, Ronald A. Yeo, Kevin Head, and Michael T. Alkire; Elsevier, 2005
• Sex-Related Differences in Neural Activity during Risk Taking: An fMRI Study, by Tatia M. C. Lee, Chetwyn C. H. Chan, Ada W. S. Leung, Peter T. Fox and Jia-Hong Gao; Cerebral Cortex, 2009.