Almost three years ago, I initiated the ‘Women in Logic’ list, intended to serve as source of ideas for conference organizers seeking to improve the gender balance of their conferences,in the spirit of the Gendered Conference Campaign. More generally, it was intended to increase the visibility of women working in an area that is strongly associated with men. The first draft of the list was compiled on the basis of responses to a query I had sent to the Philos-L mailing list, and since then I’ve been updating the list as I continued to receive suggestions of additions.
Now, inspired by Bryce Huebner’s wiki on feminist philosophy and Lisa Shapiro’s list of women working in history of philosophy, I decided to experiment with a new format: a Google docs spreadsheet which can be viewed and edited by anyone, so that everyone can add themselves and others. The aim is for the list to contain much more information than it did before, with names filed by geographical area/continent, information on areas of expertise and topics, webpage and email etc. In this way, it should be a much more useful tool than it has been so far, as well as being a modest attempt at data collection on the number of women working in these areas. See here for instructions on how to add names to the list, and on how to use it at a later stage.
Also, the list is now intended to cover all areas pertaining to logic: philosophy of logic, history of logic, philosophical logic, mathematical logic, computational logic etc. It is thus more inclusive than the original list. The Loriweb page will remain the main portal giving access to the list.
Of course, the most obvious downside of this format is that malicious people may sabotage the list and/or spam it with useless information. Still, I’m willing to give it a try. At any rate, if we quickly achieve a rather extensive list, then I can change the setting and make it unavailable for editing, and then take care of additions myself. (By the way, I’m on my own here, and would much appreciate it if people came forward offering to be involved in the project!)
So PLEASE pass on the info as widely as you can, add yourself to the list if you are a woman working in logic (but only those already having obtained their PhDs), and encourage all your female colleagues and friends who are logicians to add themselves to the list asap! And do let me know if you encounter technical problems while adding names to the list.
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