Home

Gender disparity in technological fields has been a recurrent theme in the recent trends of social awareness in workplaces. Most STEM disciplines have seen a perceivable difference in the participating numbers of women and men, with male technologists usually outnumbering their women colleagues.

As NLP expands into a predominantly computer science and mathematics discipline, we decided to explore whether the gender disparity carries over here as well. We recorded the participation statistics of women through successive years of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing in India and discovered that the number of male NLP researchers is roughly double that of the women.

To address the disparate proportions represented in these statistics, we are organising a half-day event as a parallel event of the ICON-2016. The workshop would serve as a platform for upcoming women scientists to network with senior women NLP researchers through poster-presentations, demonstrations and informal interactions. Through the course of the workshop, we also hope to encourage the participation of women researchers from regions of understudied and resource-poor languages.