[kleiba]

I just had a somewhat closer look at the MIT Technology review list of emerging technologies, and in particular the people behind them. I made a rather sad discovery. Please take a look at the following list:

- Jonathan Tilly (stem cell research)

- John A. Rogers, Ralph Nuzzo, George M. Whitesides, Etienne Menard (Semprius founders)

- Ren Ng (light field photography, Lytro founder)

- Nikhil Jaisinghani, Brian Shaad (solar-powered microgrids, Mera Gao Power founders)

- Mark Bohr (3D transistors, head of Intel's process technology)

- Piotr Indyk, Dina Katabi, Eric Price, Haitham Hassanieh (Sparse Fourier transform)

- Gordon Sanghera, Spike Willcocks, Hagan Bayley (DNA sequencing, Oxford Nanopore founders)

- Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler (Kickstarter founders)

- Peter Schultz, Robert Downs, Donald Murphy (Wildcat Discovery Technologies founders)

- Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder)

This is the list of the people behind all of the ten emerging technologies, as listed on http://www.technologyreview.com/tr10/

  Number of people on the list: 23
  Number of women on the list:  1

At least for Intels 3D transistor team and Facebook's timeline, I was not able to dig up the list of people on the team who develop these technologies, so there is still some hope that there are a few more women on these teams at least. The same should hold for the research on egg stem cell research.

[jpeg_hero]

Are you disappointed because women are not contributing to "breakthrough technologies" or do you think there were worthwhile women that were overlooked?

[rhino42]

Highly relevant question. As someone with a signal processing background, the SFT is so huge that without doubt it should be on this list. Knowing MIT's meritocracy, they would have given the award to more women if it were appropriate

[kleiba]

I'm basically just stating the fact, leaving an interpretation open for everyone who's interested.

A while ago, there were a few front page posts about the role of women in IT, and about how they find themselves in their work environments. The MIT list is not restricted to computer science, but perhaps it can be interpolated to the relevant fields here, too?

I think it stands out that women are heavily under-represented on this list, and although explanations for that fact might be manifold, I personally just find it a bit sad to look at that outcome.

[kleiba]

Sorry to be that guy - but why the downvote? I mean, I can understand if people are not interested in this information, and it is certainly only marginally related to the original article - but why would you downvote my comment instead of, say, just ignoring it?