Female ASA presidents

I recently received an e-mail from the American Statistical Association (ASA) about the Helen Walker Society. The e-mail listed the 14 “distinguished women leaders who have held the office of ASA president” going back to Helen Walker in 1944.

Really? Fourteen? All the way back to 1944? Wow.

I thought it would be interesting to visualize the percentage of female ASA presidents over time. I found a spreadsheet of past ASA presidents online and used the data to create a timeline. (R script shown.)

# download file
library(XLConnect) 
url <- "http://www.amstat.org/about/pdfs/History_of_ASA Presidents-JSMs.xlsx" 
local <- tempfile() 
download.file(url, local, mode='wb') 
wb <- loadWorkbook(local) 
dat1 <- readWorksheet(wb, sheet=1)

# keep first three columns and valid rows
dat2 <- dat1[, 1:3]
names(dat2) <- c("Year", "Number", "President")
dat2$Year <- as.numeric(dat2$Year)
dat2 <- dat2[!is.na(dat2$Year), ]

# fill in empty rows
library(zoo)
dat2 <- na.locf(dat2, fromLast=TRUE)

# add sex
dat2$Sex <- ifelse(dat2$Year %in% c(1944, 1952, 1956, 1980, 1987, 
  1989, 1992, 1996, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2016), 
  "Female", "Male")

Most recent 10 years of ASA presidents.

Year	Number	President	Sex
2017	112th	Nussbaum, Barry	Male
2016	111th	Utts, Jessica	Female
2015	110th	Morganstein, David	Male
2014	109th	Schenker, Nathaniel	Male
2013	108th	Davidian, Marie	Female
2012	107th	Rodriguez, Robert N.	Male
2011	106th	Geller, Nancy	Female
2010	105th	Pantula, Sastry	Male
2009	104th	Morton, Sally C.	Female
2008	103rd	Lachenbruch, Peter A.	Male

I then calculated the rolling 10-year percentage of ASA presidents that were female and plotted the results.

# 10-year rolling mean
mean10 <- 100*rollmean(dat2$Sex=="Female", 10, align="left", fill=NA)

# plot timeline
# par(mar=c(4, 4, 3, 1), las=1)
# plot(dat2$Year, mean10, type="n", xlab="Year", ylab="Females  (%)", 
#   main="Rolling 10-Year Percentage of Female ASA Presidents")
# abline(h=50, lty=2)
# points(dat2$Year, mean10, type="o", pch=16, col="orange")

There were three female ASA presidents between 1944 and 1956, followed by a 23-year period during which all the presidents were male (1957-1979). Since then, the percentage of female ASA presidents has risen, reaching 50% for the first time during the 10-year period from 2004 to 2013. Excellent.