Two years ago, the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) set up the Women in High Performance Computing to address the gender imbalance in High Performance Computing (HPC).  Women in HPC is a network that supports collaboration and networking by bringing together female HPC scientists, researchers, developers, users and technicians from across Europe.

The Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) Network works to raise the professional profile of Women in HPC by:

• Bringing together female HPC scientists, researchers, developers, users and technicians;
• Raising the professional profile of women working in HPC;
• Increasing the participation of women in outreach activities;
• Assessing the influence of equality initiatives on the HPC community.

To encourage women to participate in HPC Women in HPC aims to:

• Increase the visibility of experienced female role models in HPC;
• Provide opportunities for networking amongst women in HPC, both peer-to-peer and peer-to-role model;
• Raise awareness that gender-balancing of research groups improves scientific output.

This initiative encourages women working with HPC to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models. Its activities are complemented by providing opportunities for networking amongst women in HPC, both peer-to-peer and peer-to-role model and raise awareness that gender-balancing of research groups improves scientific output.

Gender inequality is a key problem across all scientific disciplines, both in academia and industry. The European Commission report on gender inequality (published in 2012, but using figures from 2009-2010) shows that, across the 27 countries in the EU, there is a significant gender gap in science education and beyond (Laroche 2013). These figures indicate that women educated to tertiary level were more likely to have a technical or professional job than men with a similar level of education. Despite this, women were found to be less likely to be scientists or engineers than men and were less likely to use a science-based PhD in a research career than men.

HPC is a discipline that spans multiple traditional science subjects and relies on leading-edge scientific research. It would be plausible that the gender inequality issue, which has been identified and quantified across many fields of science and scientific research, is overcome by the broad range of traditional subjects that contribute towards HPC. However, research by

Women in HPC has found that women make up between 5% and 17% of HPC users, researchers and conference attendees. For example at the largest supercomputing conference in the world in 2014, SC14, only 11% of the attendees were female, at EASC 2015 the proportion of women was 15%, but for the more specialist conference PGAS 2013, only 5.1% of the attendees were women. The numbers improve slightly when considering participants in HPC: of the registered users of the UK national HPC facility, ARCHER, 17% are female.

Despite an apparently low starting point, the supercomputing community has an opportunity to take advantage of its multi-disciplinary roots and encourage women from diverse backgrounds into the field of HPC. To motivate action, we must measure and publicise the magnitude of the problem we face. To be effective, we must understand why women do not pursue careers in HPC so that our efforts can be appropriately targeted.

Women in HPC run annual events at the two largest HPC conferences in the world: ISC, SC. In addition we run one UK workshop as well as training in HPC specifically for women. In July 2015 we signed our first international agreement, welcoming Compute Canada as our first international chapter. In collaboration with PRACE Women in HPC has run a training and networking event at the PRACEDays 2015 conference in Dublin, Ireland and we have jointly published a ‘Women in HPC’ magazine highlighting the impact of the work done by women using European HPC facilities. However, with no more than 17% of HPC users being female, the HPC community and the work done by Women in HPC still has a long way to go.

The next upcoming event will be the third international Women in HPC workshop at Supercomputing 2015 on November 20th in Austin, Texas. The workshop aims to address gender issues in HPC research and innovation, the challenges facing women and how gender inequality can impact efficacy of the scientific method and research quality. It will include talks from female early career researchers panel discussions on how to improve diversity in HPC as well as an invited talk by researchers working on addressing the gender imbalance in HPC
There are some opportunities to foster a relationship between ACM-W and Women in HPC.

Come to the ACM Volunteer workshop to know more or approach to the poster session in ACM womENcourage 2015!

References:

Women in HPC: http://www.womeninhpc.org.uk/
Laroche, Gilles et al. She Figures 2012 – Gender in Research and Innovation. European Commission, Germany: European Union, 2013.
Williams Woolley, Anita, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science 330, no. 6004 (10 2010): 686-688.
Supercomputing 2014, http://sc14.supercomputing.org,
3rd Annual Exascale and Applications Software Conference, EASC 2014, http://www.easc2015.ed.ac.uk, EPCC, University of Edinburgh
7th international conference on PGAS programming models, PGAS2013, http://www.pgas2013.org.uk/home, EPCC, University of Edinburgh
ARCHER, http://www.archer.ac.uk/, EPSRC and EPCC, University of Edinburgh
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), http://www.prace-ri.eu/