International Women's Day 2024

Today is International Women’s Day, and it’s an important opportunity to celebrate women everywhere. For me, it’s also a moment to reflect on how women continue to be underrepresented in our field. The University of Waterloo has a nice overview of female representation in CS, not just in Waterloo undergrad admissions (24.1% in 2023), but across levels of education, nationally and internationally. It’s a short article and it’s really worth reading, especially the story that the international stats tell and the “leaky pipeline” section at the bottom. I’d encourage all of us to think about the structural and cultural factors that make it challenging for women to succeed in our field to the same level that men do, and about what we can do, individually and directly, to help.But today is also a great time to call out the incredible women in our field who have been so important and influential.

For me, one clear example is Margo Seltzer . Margo is a giant in computer science, and her enormous list of academic and industrial achievements don’t need summarizing here. Instead, let me tell you about a couple of ways that Margo has directly influenced and been a role model for me in my own career. First, when I was an early graduate student I was very introverted and particularly terrified of sharing my own research, especially public speaking. The computer systems community, even relative to other subfields in computer science, was notoriously uninclusive, with a conference culture of very abrasive arguments. I remember coming across a public thread of Margo defending her evaluation of log structured file systems against very sharp criticism. The strength and confidence of her responses stood out to me, and I remember discussing the thread with other grad students in my lab at the time. Shortly after, I gave one of my first conference presentations as a grad student at a workshop called HotOS. The presentation was incredibly stressful to prepare for and my delivery was bumpy. It was Margo’s questions in the Q&A and a conversation with her after that that really encouraged me to continue with the work. It’s easy to take for granted how these small actions — public demonstrations of maturity and composure, or words of encouragement — can be so influential on other people, especially folks who are at earlier stages in their careers.

Flash forward to 2018, the year that Margo decided to leave her role at Harvard and move to Vancouver and take a Professor position at UBC. Coincidentally, this was the same year that I left UBC to join Amazon, which is a thing that I suspect Margo will never actually let me off the hook for. In the six years that she has been at UBC, I’ve not been nearly as involved in the department as I wish I could, but I am still on some lab mailing lists and occasionally talk to students and other faculty. I feel lucky to have had those points of contact, simply to be able to see Margo operate in the institution. She has very intentionally and deliberately created a thriving, supportive, and incredibly diverse systems research lab in the department, with incredible students doing fantastic work. In watching her work with her own students, I’ve learned to be more aware of my own unconscious biases, to be a better ally and advocate for diverse views and backgrounds, and generally to be better at my own job. So while I don’t think I’ve ever said it to her directly, thanks Margo.

Margo is hardly alone as an incredible woman in our field, nor is she alone in having had a very direct personal influence on me. I’ve been lucky, over the years to work with other amazing women in computer science, especially Gail Murphy , Angela Demke Brown (who is in the picture above along with Margo, Garth Gibson , and I), Andrea Bunt , and Rebecca Isaacs . I have comparable stories to the ones above about how each of these women have helped and influenced me, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have made it this far without them.

The Waterloo article observes that “The representation of women in undergraduate computer science is increasing nationally – slowly, but steadily.” Here’s hoping that that trend continues, and let’s all work to figure out how to speed it up.