I just got an email about this meeting: CSH Asia 2016 Conference on Microbial Communities in the Environment: Emerging Technologies and New Frontiers:
So the first thing I did was to look at the gender ratio of speakers. I dug into each person listed here as much as a I could and attempted to infer what their gender is. I realize this is fraught with problems and have written about this previously. So as much as possible I looked for what pronouns were used to describe these people before infer their possible gender. I was unable to get any clear gendered pronouns for one person but the others I think I got enough evidence to make a hypothesis. I colored those I inferred to be male in yellow and those I inferred to be female in green.
Organizers
- Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France
- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA
- Nan Qin, Zhejiang University, China
- Ting Zhu, Tsinghua University, China
Keynote Speakers:
- Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France
- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA
Invited Speakers:
- Christopher Carr , Massachusetts Institute of Technology , USA
- Yehuda Cohen , Nanyang Technological University , SINGAPORE
- Alana Firl , University of California, Davis , USA
- Andrew Holmes , University of Sydney , AUSTRALIA
- George Kowalchuk , Utrecht University , NETHERLANDS
- Shuangjiang Liu , Institute of Microbiology, CAS , CHINA
- Nan Qin , Zhejiang University , CHINA
- Jacques Ravel , University of Maryland , USA
- Peter Turnbaugh , University of California, San Francisco , USA
- George Weinstock , Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine , USA
- Paul Wilmes , University of Luxembourg , LUXEMBOURG
- Gary Wu , University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine , USA
- Ruifu Yang, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, CHINA
- Yunsheng Yang , Chinese PLA General Hospital , CHINA
- Jun Yu , The Chinese University of Hong Kong , CHINA
- Yu-Zhong Zhang , Shandong University , CHINA
- Liping Zhao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CHINA
- Jizhong Zhou , University of Oklahoma, USA
- Ting Zhu , Tsinghua University , CHINA
Thus of the speakers (keynotes and invited) I infer a ratio of 18 men to 2 women (and one unknown). So that is 10% women. Not remotely representative of the gender in the general area of microbial communities.
And sadly this is not the first time I have seen such skewed ratios in meetings from Cold Spring Harbor. See for example: Yet another mostly male meeting (YAMMM) from Cold Spring Harbor and
Cold Spring Harbor presents the men’s only view on the evolution of sequencing and Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) – Programming for Biology
I note – this whole thing saddens me even more because one of the invited female speakers is Alana Firl, who is a post doc at UC Davis jointly working in my lab and Sundar’s lab. She is completely awesome and brilliant. But this meeting? Well, it is a manel (a panel of mostly men). A YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting). And a disappointment.
So I decided to see if maybe it was just this meeting in the CSHL Asia series and if others were all OK. So I went to their list of past meetings and looked at just the keynote speakers.
Precision Cancer Biology and Medicine: 3 keynotes. All male.
Membrane Proteins: Structure and Function. 1 keynote. Male.
Lipid Metabolism and Human Metabolic Disorders. 3 keynotes. All male.
Frontiers of Plant Biology: Epigenetics & Development. 2 keynotes. Both male.
Novel Insights into Glia Function & Dysfunction. 3 keynotes. All male.
Francis Crick Symposium: Advances in Neuroscience. 2 keynotes. One male. One female.
Molecular Basis of Aging and Disease. 4 keynotes. 3 male.
Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy. 2 keynotes. Both male.
And I went to their list of future meetings and looked at a few (in fields I knew a bit about)
Frontiers in Single Cell Genomics: three keynotes – all male
Telomere and Telomerase: one keynote – male
Synthetic Biology: one keynote – male
Chromatin, Epigenetics and Transcription: three keynotes -all male
DNA Metabolism, Genomic Stability and Diseases: two keynotes – one male and one female
Latest Advances in Plant Development & Environmental Response/AWAJI,JAPAN: two keynotes – both male
Systems Biology of Gene Regulation and Genome Editing: no keynotes yet
So in these meetings it is 29:3 male to female for the keynote talks. Less than 10% female. Great. CSH Asia meetings. Where men get to speak about all the stuff they know.
Share this:
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 