Women In Technology - Friday Links - 21/10/2022
WIT is starting a special series of Friday Links where invited guests share their views, opinions and relevant material.
I am Maria Elena Angoletta, an electronics engineer in the SY department and an expert in the Low-Level Radio Frequency (LLRF) field. I will tell you about the Diversity & Inclusion session I organized and co-hosted on Tuesday October 11th as part of the LLRF22 workshop https://indico.psi.ch/event/12911/; this was the 10th in a series of international workshops focused on (guess what?) LLRF.
The workshop was jointly organised by CERN and PSI and was hosted by the FHNW University, located in Brugg, near Zurich.
The LLRF field and the knowledge it requires
LLRF is a fascinating and essential field in the particle accelerators business. LLRF systems control the frequency, amplitude and phase of the RF voltages generated by High-Level RF systems and applied to the particle beam. In doing so, they can accelerate/decelerate the beam and define/control its characteristics.
LLRF systems must be “very smart” as they often implement several parallel feedback loops with rather high bandwidth and varied transfer functions. Typical knowledge required for developing LLRF systems include a) analogue and digital electronics, b) feedback theory and implementation, c) beam dynamics (so that we know the behaviour of what we want to control) and d) real time programming of Field Programmable Data Array (FPGA) or other fast processors.
People working in LLRF are electronics engineers, computer scientists and physicists. So LLRF is really a STEM environment!
Why a D&I session at a LLRF workshop
The LLRF field at CERN is not very diverse. I have been working as an expert and project leader of LLRF systems for over 20 years and I am still the only female in these roles, although female colleagues are now present in the computing and beam dynamics areas. I have attended faithfully most of the LLRF workshops and there too I have witnessed a similar lack of gender diversity.
Since 2021 I was involved in the “25 by ’25” effort and am now DIO for the SY department, hence I have become particularly attentive to D&I-related topics.
Therefore I did not hesitate, a few months ago, to suggest to the workshop scientific committee holding a D&I session; then I organised it, once it was approved.
I began trying to evaluate the diversity level in LLRF workshops by considering only the “gender” diversity dimension in oral contributions. This parameter is easily obtainable and owing to data privacy and lack of information, it was not possible to process data related to the general attendance of each workshop.
It turns out that, over all workshops, female speakers averaged less than 6% of talks. And, I shall add, technical talks I gave in the past count for a good percentage of this 6%.
Indeed, there is room for improvement and a D&I session has his place amongst more technical topics. It should be underlined that, over recent years, D&I sessions have been successfully hosted at technical and physics events, such as IPAC (International Particle Accelerator Conference), ICALEPCS (International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems) and ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics, ICHEP).
Session organization
The session lasted 1 hour and 10 minutes and included presentations from the panel members, a real-time poll and a Q&A part. You can find here https://indico.psi.ch/event/12911/page/2476-diversity-and-inclusion-session the webpage I prepared for the session and here https://indico.psi.ch/event/12911/contributions/38439/ the material that was presented.
It was quite a success, I believe, for both attendance and interest from the LLRF community.
The members of the panel were Melania Coletta (D&I @CERN), Melina Spycher (D&I@PSI), Ruth Schmitt (head of education at the technical university FHNW and representing the FHNW D&I) and myself (as LLRF expert and CERN SY DIO).
PSI and CERN were co-organising the workshop and the FHNW university was hosting it, so having presentations from all three parties did make sense. This also allowed getting input from an international organisation (CERN), a national one (PSI) and a university that feeds their hiring pools.
I was also hoping to get a recorded video about D&I from some US or Asian lab representative, as the diversity they experience is somehow different from ours. I did not succeed, so that's material for a future session! :-)
I was very happy to have secured Larry Doolittle, a LLRF expert from LBNL and long-time friend, as chair of the session. He was in high demand to chair other, more technical sessions but chose to chair this one instead. He was also our "diversity" element in the session that would otherwise have included only four women, which would have given the wrong message, as this is not a “women’s thing”, discussed just by women.
Session overview
The session started with a Mentimeter https://www.mentimeter.com/ online poll that Melania suggested and prepared. The poll consisted on 2 questions that people could answer online and anonymously via a laptop or Smartphone.
The first question was “What is, in your opinion, the most urgent diversity and inclusion challenge in science” The answer to this was predominantly “gender”, which fitted well as the main focus of the following presentations.
The second question was “In your opinion, are gender strategies still a thing in 2022?” and we obtained 36 “yes”, 15 “maybe” and 10 “no”. There was no time to discuss these results during the Q&A part of the session, but it would indeed have been interesting to hear from somebody who voted “no”, in case he/she would be willing to speak.
Then there were four brief presentations.
I started with an introduction to the session showing general concepts as well as the statistical data on speaker gender over all LLRF workshops.
The following presentations showed CERN, PSI and FHNW D&I strategies, focusing on the “gender” dimension. It was quite interesting to see the commonalities in CERN and PSI approaches on gender. The FHNW talk about school development process and educational programs offered a different viewpoint onto the same diversity dimension.
I had prepared an email address where attendees could send questions and topics to be treated at the session or before, but we did not get any. The next time I shall actively announce the availability of this email address earlier on in the workshop rather than just write it on the session webpage! Clearly D&I is a personal topic, more intimate than the choice of ADCs or FPGA programming, so it was clear not all participants were ready to share their feelings or experiences in front of an audience. To account for this, we prepared some slides to trigger the discussion. One of the topics discussed was the “Leaky Pipeline” effect, exemplified through data from my department showing that women are less represented in the “STAFF” category than in others such as fellow, students and associates.
Finally, the discussion session was very lively and could have continued well beyond the allotted time. And I cannot praise enough my D&I colleagues for their professionalism when answering questions and triggering new ones.
After the session, LLRF colleagues from other laboratories thanked me, saying that it was time the topic was approached also in the LLRF community. The general feeling was that this is everybody's business and not just an "HR concern". So I hope there will be similar sessions at future workshops.
Some takeaways from the session
Times and communities are now “mature” for D&I: the same concepts shown 10 years ago would likely not have been so effective nor so well received. There is a strong push towards D&I on many sides, also from the European Commission that now requires a gender equality plan in place by 2022 for all public research organizations seeking funding under Horizon Europe.
Stars are now aligned and we have to take this opportunity and use it as best as we can!
One of the aims for this event was to create networks of similar programs in various institutions, which I think we achieved. We are also going to write a paper on this session that will be publicly available on the workshop website, so we'll have the opportunity to rekindle our links as well as to leave a trace of what was said and done.
I also believe that gender and other diversity dimensions in future workshops should be collected and evaluated, safely and in compliance with current privacy and data protection laws of course, so that we can follow the LLRF community evolution in this respect.
Of course, the session could be felt as incomplete by some participants, as not all diversity dimensions were treated. But the general conclusion is that it’s better to talk about D&I, although in a partial or incomplete manner, than to remain silent.
Conclusions
The D&I session at the LLRF22 workshop turned out to be quite successful. This was also due to the professionalism, enthusiasm and time devoted by our D&I colleagues from CERN (Melania Coletta), PSI (Melina Spycher) and FHNW (Ruth Schmitt), as well as to the session chair Larry Doolittle.
The success of the session was also a consequence of the LLRF community being ready to discuss such an important topic and strongly supporting it.
I hope that our experience and returns of the LLRF22 workshop can encourage future organisers to put together similar sessions in technical or physics conferences/workshops focusing on other fields.
Thanks for reading and cheers for now. Maria Elena