Who Are the Women Authors in NIME? – Improving Gender Balance in NIME Research by Anna Xambó
In recent years, there has been an increase awareness of the misrepresentation of women in the sound and music computing fields. NIME is not an exception, with still a number of open questions around the issue. In this paper, we study the presence and evolution over time of women authors in NIME since the beginning of the conference in 2001 until 2017. We discuss the results of gender imbalance and potential solutions by summarizing the actions taken by a number of worldwide initiatives that put an effort into making women's work visible in our field, with a particular emphasis on Women in Music Tech, a student-led organization that aims to encourage more women to join music technology, as a case study. We conclude with the hope of an improvement in the forthcoming years of the representation of women in NIME by presenting WiNIME, a public online database that details who are the women authors in NIME.
