SIGPLAN Diversity Policy

SIGPLAN values diversity in the composition of the program and organizing committees for its meetings, recognizing that there is a large pool of people qualified to serve on the committees. Each year, meeting organizers must choose a subset of these qualified people to serve on program committees. People chosen to serve on such committees are seen as leaders in the community, and hence we must take pains to ensure that they are chosen fairly and represent the breadth of the community. Diversity should also be considered with respect to the composition of previous program committees to ensure fair representation over time.

Factors that organizers should consider when forming program committees from the pool of qualified candidates include:

  1. Coverage of meeting topics
  2. Turnover: each year’s committee should be substantially distinct from previous years’. Some overlap to promote continuity is permissible.
  3. Diversity of institution: there should be no more than two people from a given institution. (Multiple sites for the same organization count as the same “institution”. For large PCs, this may be relaxed to “no more than 10%, rounded to the nearest integer, from a given institution”.)
  4. Type of institution: Industry, Academia, Government Laboratory, etc.
  5. Years of experience: committees should be a mix of junior, mid-level, and senior members of the community. (Workshop PCs may include at most one PhD student in their final year; please include a comment detailing their qualifications. Conference PC members should all have PhDs, or other appropriate qualifications, by the submission deadline.)
  6. Geographic distribution: members should come from all parts of the world active in the given research area.
  7. Gender.
  8. Ethnic background.

In addition, the PC Chair should strive to avoid the appearance of favoring current and former students, postdocs, colleagues, or collaborators for membership on the PC or ERC.

Meeting organizers are required to submit their organizing and program committees to the SIGPLAN Vice Chair for approval by the Executive Committee, in the form of a PC proposal spreadsheet.