EVENT REPORT

Report on the SIGIR 2022 Session on
Women in IR (WIR)
Nazli Goharian

Faegheh Hasibi

Maria MaistroGeorgetown UniversityUSA

Radboud University
Netherlands

University of Copenhagen
Denmarknazli@ir.cs.georgetown.edu

f.hasibi@cs.ru.nl

mm@di.ku.dk

Suzan Verberne
Leiden University
Netherlandss.verberne@liacs.leidenuniv.nl

Abstract
The SIGIR 2022 Women in IR event, organized by SIGIR WIR,1 took place on July 12 in
Madrid, Spain and was attended by close to 100 participants, mostly in-person. This year’s
theme was “Women in Leadership Roles”, motivated by an interest in our community.
Four speakers, covering academia, industry, and entrepreneurship were invited, who shared
their experiences.
Date: 12 July, 2022.
Website: https://sigir.org/women-in-ir/sigir2022.html.

1Introduction

The session was opened by Nazli Goharian (SIGIR WIR and the Organizing Committee Chair),by giving an introduction to the topic of this year’s (2022) event and introducing the new WIR
event organization. She addressed that one of the topics covered in the SIGIR WIR 2020 event[Goharian et al.] was participation of “Women in Leadership Roles,” where the statistics havenot been favorable, motivating a need for improvement. She explained that in the SIGIR WIR
2021 event [Goharian and Bast], WIR ran a survey in the IR community mainly on gender pay
inequity and also asked the community about their interest in having leadership workshops. As
the result of positive feedback, the plan for WIR 2022 was set to focus on the topic of women in
leadership roles by inviting a set of speakers from academia and industry. Nazli announced thatstarting 2022, WIR events are governed by an Organizing Committee. Current members wereintroduced: Maria Maistro (Session Chair), Faegheh Hasibi, and Suzan Verberne. Furthermore
an acknowledgment was given to Microsoft Research (MSR) for providing funding for female
student and faculty registration.
1

https://sigir.org/women-in-ir/

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1Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

The session Chair, Maria Maistro, introduced the speakers and ran the session. Each speaker
was very well received and followed by the engaging audience and their comments and questions.
The speakers representing academic leadership were: Diane Kelly (Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs,
University of Tennessee) and Gabriella Pasi (Head of Department of Informatics, Systems, andCommunication & Vice-Rector for International Relations, University of Milano-Bicocca). To
represent industrial leadership, Jaime Teevan (Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow, MicrosoftResearch) provided her experience and lessons learned. Luz Rello (Founder of Change Dyslexia &Faculty of IE Business School) shared her entrepreneurship motivation, experiences, and lessons
learned.
The talks were well received and were targeted not only at female colleagues but the general audience (irrespective of their gender). The covered topics include, but not limited to, thebeneficial impact of IR research on leadership roles, the importance of reading books, promoting achievements of one’s team in leadership roles, having supportive people around, balancing
between family and work, and when needed making informed decisions to sacrifice and compromise in order to achieve career goals. The audience found the talks inspirational, reflected by thepositive feedback we received from the in-person audience and also on social media.

References
Nazli Goharian and Hannah Bast. Report on women in ir (wir 2021) at sigir 2021: Community
engagement and influence. SIGIR FORUM, volume = 55, number = 2, pages = 1–3, year =2021. URL https://sigir.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/p09.pdf.
Nazli Goharian, Xin Ma, and Suzan Verberne. Women and Disparities in Leadership and Wages.
SIGIR FORUM, volume = 54, number = 2, pages = 1–3, year = 2020. URL https://sigir.
org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/p12.pdf.

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