EVENT REPORT

Women and Disparities in Leadership and Wages
Nazli Goharian
IR Lab, Georgetown University
nazli@ir.cs.georgetown.edu

Xin MaMicrosoft Research Asia
xinma@microsoft.com

Suzan Verberne
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden Universitys.verberne@liacs.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract
The SIGIR’20 Women in IR event, co-organized by SIGIR WIR co-chairs, Nazli Goharianand Suzan Verberne, and local co-chair of SIGIR’20 WIR, Xin Ma, took place on July 27-29
and was attended by ∼150 participants from different parts of the earth. Due to Covid-19,
SIGIR’20 was held online. To accommodate all the time zones, we organized two sessions(A and B) on the same topics of discussion with two disjoint sets of panelists1 , each group
covering one of two sessions, totaling 19 panelists (17 female and 2 male) from academia andindustry. This year we raised two questions for our panellists to discuss, followed by Q&A
by the audience. First we discussed the women’s status as to holding key leadership roles
both in the academia and industry. The second topic was gender inequity in pay, which we
had already raised for the first time in our community in SIGIR’19 and was summarized in
the WIR at SIGIR’19 Forum2 .

1Women and key leadership roles

We opened the discussion by first presenting some statistics from Catalyst3 , Pew Research Center4 , Center for American Progress [Warner et al., 2018], and American Council on Education[Howard and Gagliardi, 2018] on the distribution of women and men in holding leadership roles
such as college presidents (20-30% women), CEO ( 6% women), CFO ( 12% women) and the governing boards ( 22% women) of fortune-500 companies. The reports of various sources indicatedunbalanced distribution favoring males in these positions. The selection decisions on college presidents are reported to be influenced by businesses, the state, alumni, board of regents/trustee, andcurrent internal powers. We also presented the distribution of women in the key leadership rolesof our community of SIGIR, and reported 13%, 28%, 28%, 22%, 10%, 33% distribution of women1

http://sigir.org/women-in-ir/sigir2020.html
http://sigir.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/december/p044.pdf
3
Women In Academia: Quick Take (2020); https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-academia
4The Data on Women Leaders (2018); https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/the-data-on-wom
en-leaders/
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in holding general chairs, program chairs of long-short papers, from 2016 to 2021, respectively,
expecting conscious decision making within the SIGIR organization in the future. After providing these statistics, panelists were asked their points of view and how to address this issue andwhether they find some variation of quota systems can be a solution among other solutions suchas providing opportunities and support for women. The topic clearly was somewhat controversial,and various points of views and solutions were proposed. We summarize the sentiment of thesessions.
It was stated by the panelists that we are facing a ‘leaky-pipeline’ problem, namely the higher
up in the organizational hierarchy, the smaller is the proportion of women; several solutions wereaddressed. Most prominently, the benefits and hindrances of quota systems were discussed. The
negative sentiment was mainly based on the notion that quota-based hiring may disadvantage
women by being regarded as not-merit based hiring. The opposing argument was that quotabased hiring must not be introspect to merit; examples are weighted quota where from a poolof qualified applicants the priority can be given to female candidates; other example is allocatedhiring lines to hire women. When quotas are not allowed, alternatives are tie breakers based ongender, or group hires with diversity. Hence, neither of these are in contradiction with meritbased hiring, despite of being portrayed as such, at times. Among other solutions were theneed for objective selection criteria for higher positions, and sponsorships for women; mentorshipis important but does not replace sponsorship. Establishing prestigious awards for women wassuggested as one of the actions to explicitly attribute accomplishments to women, who in turn canplay as role models. It was expressed that lack of society’s support in many countries for womenby not offering sufficient maternity leave, child care support, elderly parent care, in addition to
the existing hiring reluctance and bias against women are significant barriers for women in theirprofessional advancement, many times forcing them to choose between personal and professional
aspirations. Organizations should recognize the efforts of their employees in their efforts to expand
diversity and reward them for doing such. Women in leading roles can and should be role models
and advocates for other women in a pipeline that will increase the number of women in theleading roles. Establishing short term-limits of the key leadership roles in institutions can provide
opportunity for female hires for those male dominant positions. At the end of the day it is not
only the responsibility of women in this fight for equality but men too, when they make hiringdecisions.

2Gender pay inequity

On the topic of gender inequity in pay, the statistics from Catalyst5 , Hired6 , Forbes [Tarr, 2018],
Inside Higher Ed [Seltzer, 2017], Eurostat7 , The Harvard Crimson [Berger and McCafferty, 2019],
The Daily Orange [Muller, 2019], The Chronicle of Higher Education [Hatch, 2017], and Pew
Research [Graf et al., 2019] were presented indicating that female faculty receive ∼10-20% lessthan their male counterparts; female programmers receive ∼12% less than their male counterparts;
5Women’s Earnings - The Pay Gap: Quick Take (2020); https://www.catalyst.org/research/womens-ear
nings-the-pay-gap/
6
The State of Wage Inequality in the Work (2018); https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report-2018
7
Gender Pay Gap Statistics (2020); https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/G
ender pay gap statistics

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2Vol. 54 No. 2 December 2020and female administrators at higher education are paid ∼20% less than their male counterparts.
This was also somewhat of a controversial topic, and some raised doubts about the existenceof this disparity. It was pointed out that promotion velocity is among the contributing factors
to the wage gap. Among other factors, the initial salary at the time of the hiring was named,demanding the necessity of communities such as ours, SIGIR, to organize hiring workshops toprovide female job seekers the salary scales and the art of negotiation, for those who these may
be beneficial. The employers should be prohibited from asking for prior salary history of theapplicants. The consensus was that as long as there is a lack of salary transparency, both theeducational institutions and companies have easier time to continue with this pay inequity, hence,
there should be a push for salary transparency.

References
Jonah S. Berger and Molly C. McCafferty. Female tenured harvard profs paid on average 92.5
cents on the dollar compared to men, survey shows. The Harvard Crimson, April 2019. URL
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/24/fas-pay-gap-2019/.
Nikki Graf, Anna Brown, and Eileen Patten. The narrowing, but persistent, gender gap in pay.
Pew Research, March 2019. URL https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/22/g
ender-pay-gap-facts/.
Joshua Hatch. Gender pay gap persists across faculty ranks. The Chronicle of Higher Education,March 2017. URL https://www.chronicle.com/article/gender-pay-gap-persists-across-faculty-ranks/.
Elizabeth Howard and Jonathan Gagliardi. Leading the way to parity: Preparation, persistence,and the role of women presidents. American Council on Education, 2018. URL https://www.
acenet.edu/Documents/Leading-the-Way-to-Parity.pdf.
Jordan Muller. Unsurprised - faculty react to report showing women professors earn less on averagethan men at syracuse university. The Daily Orange, 2019. URL http://dailyorange.com/20
18/02/unsurprised-faculty-react-report-showing-women-professors-earn-less-average-men-syracuse-university/.
Rick Seltzer. 80 cents on the dollar. Inside Higher Ed, February 2017. URL https://www.insi
dehighered.com/news/2017/02/15/gender-pay-gap-persists-higher-education-admini
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Tanya Tarr. By the numbers: What pay inequality looks like for women in tech. Forbes, 2018.
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