Editorial: Women in signal processing

Abstract

One of the turn-points in my life was in the mid-90th, during the yearly major conference of the Signal Processing community, the IEEE international conference on acoustic, speech and signal processing (ICASSP). Women were always minorities in these meetings, and if one of them joined a chat in a social gathering, she were naturally considered as the wife of one of the men around. Being young and naïve then, I never saw it as an issue. However, at that specific meeting on 1995 I decided to join, for the first time, a social event, entitled “lunch for women in signal processing.” I found there a small but very diverse group of about 50 women from all around the world, and when each introduced herself, I had a very strong emotional reaction of a sisterhood. For the first time I felt at home in my professional community, and at that very specific moment I became active in the advancement of women in science and engineering, and in particular in my field, i.e., signal processing. An essential question rises is about the quantity and the visibility of women in signal processing today. Such data is hard to trace, but fortunately, the IEEE keeps and publishes statistical records. These records show that while the overall share of women in the IEEE (including students) is still around 10%, in the signal processing society it is a bit but not much better, about 2,300 out of 19,000 (~12%). However, Figure 1 shows a promising trend over the last decade: while the total number of women (non-students) in the IEEE signal processing society has increased by 45%, the number of women in higher-level grades (senior member and fellow) has doubled. Moreover, women take leadership positions in the IEEE signal processing society with the current president Athina P. Petropulu and 11 out of its 23 board members being women. OPEN ACCESS