Underrepresentation of Women in Robotics Research [Women in Engineering]

Computer science (CS) and engineering research both have large and well-documented gender diversity gaps [1] , [2] , [3] . In fact, previous studies have reported that the overall CS female author ratio (FAR) is only in the range of 16%–26% [1] , [3] , [4] . As shown in Table 1 , recent evidence shows that this number varies significantly among CS subfields, ranging from as high as 42% in CS education to as low as 8% in theory and algorithms [1] , [4] . Furthermore, while recent work has shown that the diversity in conference leadership has increased substantially over recent years [5] and that the state of gender diversity in marine robotics ranges from 7% to 44% across various countries in Europe [6] , there has not been a comprehensive study analyzing the current state of gender diversity across the broader overall field of robotics.