A diversity lens on the last decade of the FIE conference: Role models for the engineering community

Earlier studies have analyzed FIE and the community built around it, e.g. the origin, format, and future direction of the conference. We propose a new lens: that of diversity, with the motivation of identifying potential role models or the lack thereof. What is the evolution of the presence of diverse role models in FIE throughout the last decade? In this paper we analyze data containing the list of participants in the last 11 years of FIE. Since gender is not part of the registration form, we assume the gender of each participant based on the traditional gender assigned to their name. For the same reason, we use the traditional view of gender as binary. The results include the annual number of men and women attending the event, the attendees' roles in the conference divided by gender, the diversity in attendance based on the geographical location of the attendees' affiliations and the intersection with this aspect of the previous categories. We discuss future directions for the improvement of diversity in FIE and present possible expansions of this study.