Computer Science Communities: Who is Speaking, and Who is Listening to the Women? Using an Ethics of Care to Promote Diverse Voices

Abstract: Those working on policy, digital ethics and governance often refer to issues in `computer science', that includes, but is not limited to, common subfields of AI, Computer Science (CS) Computer Security (InfoSec), Computer Vision (CV), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Systems, (IS), Machine Learning (ML), NLP and Systems Architecture. Within this framework, this paper is a preliminary exploration of two hypotheses, namely 1) Each community has differing inclusion of minoritised groups (using women as our test case); and 2) Even where women exist in a community, they are not published representatively. Using data from 20,000 research records, totalling 503,318 names, preliminary data supported our hypothesis. We argue that ACM has an ethical duty of care to its community to increase these ratios, and to hold individual computing communities to account in order to do so, by providing incentives and a regular reporting system, in order to uphold its own Code.