IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2020 - 6

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

IEEE and RAS Diversity and
Inclusion Initiatives
By Seth Hutchinson

I

n my September 2020 " President's
Message, " I wrote about personal
responsibility for social justice in the
context of our professional lives as
roboticists, engineers, and scientists,
focusing on the issues of diversity and
inclusion. In this column, I focus on
organization-level initiatives for
diversity and inclusion at the IEEE
and Society levels.
In 2019, under the direction of then
IEEE President José Moura, IEEE created the ad hoc
Committee on
The 2020 Fellow class Di--versity, Inclusion, and Profesrecorded the highest
sional Ethics
(CDIE), whose
number of women
charge included
ever, selected from
developing and
im--plementing
a pool of nominees
mechanisms to
that also included
improve diversity and incluthe highest number
sion across the
of women ever.
entirety of IEEE.
The CDIE held
discussions with
IEEE organizational units about their
diversity and inclusion efforts, developed
a mechanism for collecting and evaluating diversity data (including a new
Diversity Dashboard), solicited recommendations from stakeholders, and
proposed an action plan to the IEEE
Board of Directors. In addition, the
CDIE has formulated an IEEE diversity statement and is preparing a comDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2020.3031777
Date of current version: 9 December 2020

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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prehensive report that will
include new policies and
initiatives, best practices,
and comprehensive diversity data.
Significantly, it was ac--
knowledged that the work of the
CDIE was not that of a single year but
requires an ongoing commitment by
IEEE to embed these values into the
culture of the organization. As a first
step in this continual commitment,
Toshio Fukuda (2020 IEEE president
and roboticist) renewed the CDIE, and
it is likely that one forthcoming recommendation will be the creation of a
standing, permanent IEEE Committee
on Diversity and Inclusion.
The IEEE Technical Activities
Board-the part of IEEE that includes
most IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society (RAS) activities-has created its
own standing Committee on Diversity
and Inclusion (Table 401), whose
charge includes
●● 
developing strategies to increase the
engagement of underrepresented
groups
●● 
ensuring inclusive recognition of
achievements within IEEE
●● identifying processes that are barriers
to representation and inclusion
●● continually suggesting improvements
to existing policies and procedures.
Specific procedural changes have
already been adopted, including mandatory training to recognize implicit
bias for members of various award
selection committees, revised guidelines
to ensure diversity in award selection
committees, and the adoption of a

DECEMBER 2020

diversity statement for the
IEEE Awards Program. Even
in its early stages, progress
can be seen; for example, the
2020 Fellow class recorded
the highest number of women
ever, selected from a pool of nominees that also included the highest
number of women ever.
The CDIE and Table 401 have also
identified a set of best practices for Societies to promote diversity and inclusion,
leveraging experience and insight from
a broad collection of technical communities and synthesizing these into a set
of actionable principles on matters such
as Society governance, membership,
awards, and conferences. This includes
dozens of specific recommendations,
ranging from high-level guidance (e.g.,
encourage a diverse pool of candidates
for governance positions and attempt
gender and geographical balance on all
technical committees) to specific, pragmatic advice (e.g., offer childcare at
conferences, hold unconscious bias
train--ings and awareness panels, and
appoint a diversity and inclusion chair
for each conference).
Within the RAS, a subcommittee of
our Member Activities Board has spent
the last year collecting data to evaluate
our own progress toward diversity and
inclusion. A preliminary version of its
findings will be presented to our governing boards and to the RAS Administrative Committee during our Society
Meeting Series held in conjunction with
the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems. The goal is to educate our
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2020

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