Anecdotally, crypto conferences have noticeably more women than other areas of computer science.
From the data, women are better represented in virtually all fields of science, from molecular biology to astronomy to pure mathematics, than they are in computer science. Computer science and physics are the two worst STEM fields for gender parity.
My guess (that's all it is) is that cryptography is an intersection between CS and mathematics, and the mathematics draws more women into the field.
Re:The History of Alice and Bob
by JoachimSchipper on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @02:55PM
(#14806852)
My personal impression is that you're right: there's quite a lot of women cryptographers (thinking of "attendees of crypto conferences", but of "top figures in the field"), but these women are disproportionally from a mathematics background.
Re:The History of Alice and Bob
by Ar-Curunir on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @08:18AM
(#14803733)
I don't think that quote is very true in the context of crypto; in my experience the theoretical crypto community is very open and friendly to all.
Security is another matter; there's lots of politics there, but the crypto community is generally free of that kind of stuff.
This is probably true, but cryptography/theoretical computer science might be one area where women have better representation than in other subfields of hard sciences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafi_Goldwasser, who invented a huge portion of modern crypto (zero-knowledge, set lower bound, doubly-efficient proofs, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irit_Dinur, who basically invented property testing as well as a novel proof of the PCP theorem that wasn't hundreds of pages long
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~danama/, also known for her work on the PCP theorem (wife of Scott Aaronson)
http://elaineshi.com/, several papers on making ORAM and secure multiparty computation practical
Probably notable that the first three listed are all from/at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.