Academia is also where the next generation of tech workers is taught.

“This definitely affects the field as a whole,” said Lucy Lu Wang, a researcher with the Allen Institute. “When there is a lack of leadership in computer science departments, it affects the number of women students who are trained and the number that enter the computer science industry.”

The study also indicated that men are growing less likely to collaborate with female researchers — a particularly worrying trend in a field where women have long felt unwelcome and because studies have shown that diverse teams can produce better research.



Compiled by Ms. Lu and several other researchers at the Allen Institute, the study is in line with similar research published by academics in Australia and Canada. While gender parity is relatively near in many of the life sciences, these studies showed, it remains at least a century away in physics and mathematics.

“We were hoping for a positive result, because we all had the sense that the number of women authors was growing,” said Oren Etzioni, the former University of Washington professor who oversees the Allen Institute. “But the results were, frankly, shocking.”

Other research has shown that women are less likely to enter computer science — and stick with it — if they don’t have female role models, mentors and collaborators.

“There is a problem with retention,” said Jamie Lundine, a researcher at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. “Even when women are choosing computer science, they can end up in school and work environments that are inhospitable.”

Many artificial intelligence technologies, like face-recognition services and conversational systems, are designed to learn from large amounts of data, such as thousands of photos of faces. The biases of researchers can easily be introduced into the technology, reinforcing the importance of diversity among the people working on it.