13th ChileWiC Women in Computing Conference 2025: "Computing is too important to be left solely in the hands of men."

Inspired by Karen Sparck Jones, the renowned British programmer and computer scientist, the 13th Chile WiC 2025 Women in Computing Conferencewill be held on Friday, November 28, 2025, in the Enrique d'Etigny Auditorium at the University of Chile.

"Despite the fact that women have always played a fundamental role in the origins of computing and its historical development, the gender gap in this area remains enormous," points out Valeria Herskovic, director of the Department of Computer Science at the Catholic University and one of the organizers of this event. This is demonstrated by studies carried out in Chile: according to data from the Ministry of Science's Radiografía de Género 2025 (Gender Snapshot 2025), only 35.8% of all researchers in the country, across all fields, are women. The number of women with STEM degrees accounts for 7.8% of all People , and only 12.5% of UNDERGRADUATE computer UNDERGRADUATE students are women.

"These figures tell us something very worrying, as they show that efforts to increase the number of women entering and remaining in these fields are still insufficient, causing us to miss out on the opportunity to benefit from a greater diversity of experiences and perspectives when it comes to science and technology," says Claudia López, an academic at the Federico Santa María University and organizer of the event.

ChileWiC 2025 will feature a student competition, highlighting the work of participants with mini presentations and academic posters, participatory workshops, and plenary talks.

The activity is supported by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the Federico Santa María Technical University, the University of Chile, the University of Santiago de Chile, the University of La Frontera, the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (Cenia), and the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data.

From 35 to 200 People 13 years

ChileWiC is organized every year by a volunteer group of female computer science and information technology academics from different universities across the country. Around 35 academics and students participated in the first edition of ChileWiC, some of whom simply popped their heads in the door out of curiosity. "For us, in 2024, it was quite an achievement to see the room full of students, female professors, and also male professors who are interested in breaking this gender gap," says Claudia López. The 12th edition was held in the Manuel Montt auditorium at Universidad Mayor, with more than 200 participants. The previous edition had been held at the University of Santiago, with more than 150 participants.

Karen Sparck Jones: the pioneer who taught computers to understand human language

Every year, ChileWiC chooses a renowned woman in the world of computing to pay tribute to and raise awareness of her work: the 13th edition pays tribute to Karen Sparck Jones (1935-2007), a British programmer and computer scientist who devised the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), which is fundamental in the field of data mining. Not only was she a pioneer in combining statistics and linguistics, she was also a promoter of women in computing.

Born in 1935 in Huddersfield, England, Spärck Jones studied philosophy and history, but soon felt drawn to a new and challenging field: the interaction between language and machines. At a time when computers were just beginning to be used as research tools, she already imagined that they could become powerful allies for processing and organizing knowledge.

Her most revolutionary contribution came in 1972, when she introduced the concept of IDF (inverse document frequency), a key part of the TF-IDF metric, which aims to measure how important a word is within a document in relation to other documents in the same collection. This metric is fundamental in information retrieval, including the search engines we use every day. Every time we receive relevant results on Google, there is a little bit of Karen Spärck Jones' ingenuity at work behind the scenes.

In addition to her brilliant scientific career, Spärck Jones became an essential voice for gender equality in computing. In a male-dominated world, she strongly advocated for the need for more women to join the field. Her famous quote, "computing is too important to be left to men alone, " remains a relevant call to break down barriers and pave the way forward.

Throughout her career, she received numerous awards: she was elected a member of the British Academy and the Royal Society, received the BCS Lovelace Medal, and, in 2007, the prestigious ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to computer science.

Karen Spärck Jones passed away in 2007, but her legacy lives on in thousands of applications that we use to retrieve information. Her life reminds us that technological innovation requires not only formulas and algorithms, but also an inclusive vision that inspires future generations.