Who Are the Women Authors in NIME?-Improving Gender Balance in NIME Research

In recent years, there has been an increase in awareness of the underrepresentation of women in the sound and music computing fields. The New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference is not an exception, with a number of open questions remaining around the issue. In the present 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 such a gender imbalance and potential solutions by summarizing the actions taken by a number of worldwide initiatives that have put an effort into making women’s work visible in our field, with a particular emphasis on Women in Music Tech (WiMT), a student-led organization that aims to encourage more women to join music technology, as a case study. We conclude with a hope for an improvement in the representation of women in NIME by presenting WiNIME, a public online database that details who are the women authors in NIME.