Young Female Researchers Mentoring (YFRM) at IEEE ASRU 2019

The existence of gender imbalance in STEM fields continues to this day. UNESCO, in 2015, reported worldwide under-representation of women in STEM fields with only 30% women researchers in various fields. The key reasons of this disparity are lack of encouragement, guidance and resources.

In an effort to reduce this disparity, IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2019) organized a mentoring event for young female researchers, called Young Female Researcher Mentoring (YFRM), during ASRU 2019 (14-18 December 2019) at Singapore. YFRM@ ASRU is a mentoring event for young female researchers, that include undergraduate, masters and PhD students as well as fresh PhD graduates, who are currently working in speech science and technology. YFRM @ ASRU event aims to provide an opportunity and a warm environment for the young researchers to discuss various career aspects, such as academia vs industry, women in science, stress management, and professional development with experts in the field.

The event consisted of two parts; Gender Diversity talk, followed by a private lunch with mentors and registered female researchers. Odette Scharenborg (TU Delft, Netherlands) was invited to give a talk, entitled ' Gender diversity in speech science and technology – Statistics, research findings, and my perspective'. All ASRU participants were invited to this talk, and it was an enlightening 45 minutes for everyone! The mentoring lunch was organized into round tables, where each table will be assigned an expert (either from academia or industry), 1-2 fresh PhD graduates, 6-8 students, and given a topic.

The registration portal for ASRU had also an option for students and young researchers to register and request for grant for attending YFRM. ASRU chairs and YFRM organizing committee selected the awardees. Through YFRM @ ASRU, many young female researchers had a chance to engage with established scientists of the field of speech science and technology. As the organizers of YFRM @ ASRU, we are very glad to see the good impact of our event, and we hope that this can be a motivating example to the future conferences of speech science and technology.
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YFRM @ ASRU Organizer Berrak Sisman