FROM THE CHAIR
Greetings SIGIR members and friends,
This issue of SIGIR Forum contains an abundance of information about the future of SIGIR,
including a report from the organizers of the third Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval inLorne (SWIRL), which sets an agenda for the next few years of IR research, as well as reports
describing the SIGIR Community Member Survey that was conducted earlier this year about
preprints and ACM artifact review and badging.
Since our annual conference last year in Tokyo, the SIGIR Executive Committee and volunteers havecontinued efforts to grow the community. Many of our efforts have focused on cultivating newmembers, including students, and addressing diversity and inclusion:• Over the years, our student travel grant program has helped thousands of students attend
SIGIR, CHIIR, ICTIR, CIKM, JCDL and WSDM.
• The SIGIR Student Lunch and SIGIR Student Party have been going strong for several years,and create opportunities for students to get to know one another as well as senior members ofSIGIR.
• The SIGIR Student Affairs Chair, Laura Dietz, introduced the SIGIR Student Liaison
Program, which creates leadership roles for students within SIGIR.
• The Friends of SIGIR program supports geographically disperse IR-related events.
• Two new chapters of SIGIR have been created: SIGIR Tokyo and SIGIR China. We are
grateful to the teams who founded these chapters as we believe they will increase impact andreach, and also international membership.
• At last year’s SIGIR conference, we held the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Lunch. The
purpose of this new annual event is to provide an open forum for the SIGIR community toexplore and discuss diversity and inclusion, and to help set an agenda for future activities andinitiatives.
• We co-sponsored the CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop, which we have done for several years,to connect with female computing students and promote SIGIR.
• We identified a way to lower conference registration fees while maintaining fiscalresponsibility. Conference fees for SIGIR, ICTIR and CHIIR were between $500-600 USD
in the past year, which is much less expensive than peer conferences. Our hope is these lower
fees will allow more people to attend these conferences, especially those who do not havelarge travel budgets.
• This year’s SIGIR Conference organizers experimented with a new track structure in an effort
to attract more submissions and increase conference participation.
• Finally, at this year’s SIGIR Conference, we will announce a new event in collaboration withSIGKDD to address geographic diversity and inclusion. This event arose, in part, from ideas
generated at last year’s Diversity and Inclusion Lunch.
Thus, many efforts are being made on many fronts to increase membership and participation inSIGIR. Recently, ACM made available data showing the current membership of all SIGs, as well as
the breakdown of those who identify as “male,” “female,” or who declined to categorize themselvesusing one of these labels (Figure 1). This membership snapshot was taken in March 2018. As Figure
1 shows, SIGGRAPH, is the biggest SIG, with 7,209 members, while SIGDOC is the smallest with126. The median number of members is 418. It is important to note that not all members of ACM

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are associated with SIGs, so one should not infer that Figure 1 represents all ACM membership. It isalso the case that one person can belong to multiple SIGs.

Figure 1: ACM SIG membership as of March 2018.
To better examine the data in the middle of the distribution, Figure 2 focuses on SIGs withmembership numbers that are between 400 and 1,800. SIGIR has 881 members; 551 of thesemembers describe themselves as “Male,” while 113 describe themselves as “Female.” Two-hundred
seventeen did not provide an answer. SIGKDD, one of our closest peers, has 1,339 members, while
SIGWEB has 294.

Figure 2. Membership of ACM SIGs with 400 to 1,800 members.
As these figures show, the overwhelming majority of SIG members identify as male. Of the 36,418(non-unique) members represented, only 13% identified as female. Figure 3 shows the SIGs
organized according to percentage of female members. Thirteen percent of SIGIR members
identified as female, which is slightly above the median for all SIGs (10%). Some of our closest peer
SIGs have similar percentages of self-identified females (KDD: 14%; WEB: 15%). SIGs with thegreatest percentages of self-identified females are DOC (39%), ACCESS (37%) and UCCS (35%).
These SIGs are on the smaller-side with respect to overall membership numbers: 126, 228 and 359,

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respectively. CSE and CHI are the largest SIGs at the front-end of the figure with 2724 and 3471
members, respectively, and 25% of members identifying as female. The SIG with the smallest
percentage of self-identified females is SIGADA, which has 166 members (3% self-identifiedfemales).

Figure 3: ACM SIGs organized according to percent of members identifying as female.
What can we conclude from these figures? Our conclusions will likely be based on answers to otherquestions: How big do we want SIGIR to be? How big can we expect it to be? Is 13% female
membership good or bad? What should this value be? From my perspective, I think we can, andshould, do much better with respect to female participation in SIGIR. I also think we can do betterwith overall membership.
These figures do not show representation across other diversity characteristics such as geography andrace. We are in the process of gathering historical data from the ACM about SIGIR membership as
well as other related SIGs to better understand membership and conference participation trends, aswell as membership diversity. Such data are useful if we want to understand whether SIGIR has
grown or shrank, and whether our programming, including that which is intended to increase
diversity, is effective.
In the meantime, if you are a member of SIGIR, thank you for making all the programming describedearlier in this letter possible. And, if you are not a member of SIGIR, please join. We encourage you
to not just think about what being a member of SIGIR or ACM can do for you, but to think about
how your membership helps others, and maintains the strength of the IR community. What can beaccomplished when we are part of a professional community is much greater than what we canaccomplish on our own.
Please feel free to send us any issues you’d like us to consider, or any feedback you have about ourinitiatives and accomplishments. We hope to see you at this year’s SIGIR Conference in Ann Arbor,Michigan.
Diane Kelly
Chair of SIGIR Executive Committee
chair_SIGIR@acm.org

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