Diversity on The Carpentries

Valerie Aurora to Keynote at CarpentryCon 2018

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Carpentries are excited to announce that Valerie Aurora will be one of four keynote speakers at this May’s CarpentryCon in Dublin.

Valerie is a software engineer turned diversity and inclusion consultant.

We want CarpentryCon 2018 to be a truly global, diverse and inclusive event, which is why we are so happy that Valerie has accepted our offer to speak there.

Standing for Inclusivity

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our goal as Software and Data Carpentry is to build a community teaching digital research skills. We teach essential computing skills to thousands of researchers in academia and industry each year. As an international organization we rely on the volunteer efforts of hundreds of researchers and professionals from around the world. Our volunteers come from diverse backgrounds, countries of origin, and beliefs. These individuals generously donate their time with the goal of helping to speed the discovery of new knowledge and the creation of new technology.

Improving the Balance

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Jennifer Martin's recent article "Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance" reminded me that while we've been reporting the number of workshops we've run, and the number of people who've attended, we haven't reported the gender balance among our instructors in a while. I did a quick check, and the result was sobering. From a high of almost 30% eighteen months ago, our instructor pool is now only 18% female. It seems that as we grow, we are regressing to computing's unfortunate mean: from a higher of 38% in the early 1980s, the proportion of computer science degrees awarded to women has dropped to 15-18%, and CS is the only STEM discipline where the gender balance has actually been getting worse over the past few decades.