Gender Gap in the Critical Infrastructure Research Community

A significant gender gap persists in STEM fields across many developed countries, despite encouraging policies. To develop effective solutions that narrow the gender gap in these fields, a deeper understanding of the root causes is essential. Quantifying the disparity is a crucial first step in any analysis. Specifically, we focus on the critical infrastructure sector. Our research delves into the participation of women in this domain by examining articles and conference proceedings published between 2006 and 2022 in the CRITIS conference. We meticulously analyzed the presence of women and their roles in these events to gain insights into gender representation, dynamics, and contribution within this field. To perform an automated gender identification based on names, we used a software called Cerbero-Lite. This takes names from dblp (developed at University of Trier in 1993) as input, extracts the first names, and, then, uses the Harvard Dataset to predict their genders. Subsequently, we performed a gendered assessment of the community by means of advanced social network analysis techniques. The research shows that, while a significant gender gap in favor of males exists in terms of participation, it does not reflect a difference in the ability of females to contribute to the development of the field.