Excerpt from "Achieving Gender Equity at Conferences," posted on Extramural News, July 2019.
In 2015, an international conference on quantum chemistry drew a fierce backlash from scientists when it featured only male speakers and chairs. About 1,700 scientists signed a petition on Change.org to change the makeup of the speakers. The result? Conference organizers added 6 female speakers to the agenda (read the coverage).
This was not an isolated case. The lack of gender equity at scientific conferences persists across the board. There have been several papers written about the imbalance; there is even a website, BiasWatchNeuro, that tracks the speaker composition at neuroscience conferences.
Inviting women to speak at conferences matters for many reasons – it’s a matter of fairness; it gives eminently qualified women a level playing field; it is just the right thing to do.
And it is important to have diversity across many dimensions, including representation of individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, from a variety of regions and institutions, career stages, and with disabilities.
In essence, it’s about changing the fundamental culture of the biomedical research enterprise to allow full participation from people of all backgrounds.
For the full text, see here.
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