Dongmei Zhang, assistant managing director of MSRA, giving a keynote at Ada workshop 2016<\/p><\/div>\n
Panel at Ada workshop 2017: Make a Difference
Panelists (from left to right): Si Liu, researcher of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Hui Qiu, CTO of Youxin Group; Shiqiang Yang, professor of Tsinghua University; Wenxin Li, vice dean of EECS, Peking University; Xin Ma, Outreach Director, MSRA<\/p><\/div>\n
Results of the program are positive.\u00a0 A year into our endeavor, there is a sharp increase in the female ratio of MSRA interns and the feedback from event attendees is positive:<\/p>\n
\u201cThrough the Ada Workshop, I learned that there are so many amazing women leaders that have changed the whole computer science area. Another shocking and new learning to me was that there were so many women in computer science history before 1984. We really should have trust in ourselves and pursue what we really want, no matter what others say.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cBeing a women researcher\/engineer was always mysterious to me. I now know that women can balance work and life well as a researcher\/engineer. I was amazed and inspired by the confidence of the women researchers, engineers and young faculty. I really hope I can become one of them in ten years.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nAda workshop attendees have roundtable discussions with MSRA employees<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cI learned that big companies and academia hold the same bar for male and female talents, and it\u2019s good to know that.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nThe Diversity Workshop Ada workshop @ SOSP 2017<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cI attended three Ada Workshop events in the past year, twice at MSRA, and one at my university. I feel refueled each time! Many speakers told us that women and men may be different, but it\u2019s more like a difference by individual, not by gender. No matter for women or men, we need to find our own strength, fully leverage it, and seize each opportunity without being afraid of failure.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nGroup photo of Ada workshop attendees and speakers<\/p><\/div>\n
Ada workshop attendees took photos in front of the “Ada workshop wall”<\/p><\/div>\n
More importantly, the Ada Workshop program has also raised the awareness of faculty leaders in top universities. Some computer science directors have already started to encourage more first-year college female students to choose computer science as their major, and more faculty are encouraging and recruiting younger females at the high school level.<\/p>\n
In spring of 2018, together with local universities and institutes, MSRA will host Ada Workshop events in Suzhou, Shanghai, Hefei, Xi\u2019an, and Guangzhou. Microsoft is both influencing more female students in universities, and raising the profile of the issue of women in computer science in universities, companies, institutes, and the government in China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In August 2017, Proginn and Juejin, two very popular online communities and agencies for Chinese CS engineers jointly announced a survey report that had over 100,000 Chinese engineers participating. The report highlighted that only 7.38% of participating engineers in the survey were female. Despite the alarming low female ratio and the rising attention to the issue worldwide, in China there are very few events, scholarships or other efforts to improve gender diversity in CS. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37242,"featured_media":476601,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"msr-content-parent":199560,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"class_list":["post-476424","msr-blog-post","type-msr-blog-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_assoc_parent":{"id":199560,"type":"lab"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/476424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-blog-post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37242"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/476424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":476739,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/476424\/revisions\/476739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=476424"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=476424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}