Eisen Lab Blog

Crosspost from #microBEnet: More scary than Halloween: this month in germophobia microbophobia

Crossposting this from the microBEnet blog where I originally posted it 10/31/14:

It seems that any time a holiday comes around in the US, the press starts to ramp up the writing of stories about evil microbes that are lurking all around us. And Halloween appears to be no exception. I am now planning on referring to this attitude as “microbophobia” rather than “germophobia” because to some “germ” implies pathogen and many of these stories fan the flames of fear about any kind of microbe not just pathogens. I note – the term microbophobia comes from some searches I did recently of Google books.

I was thinking of writing up yet another post trying to counter this excessive microbophobia but decided instead to just provide a collection of links to stories over the last month that have a distinctive microbophobia flavor.  Mind you – there are real reasons to be afraid of some of the microbes circulating around these days.  But the links below seem to me to be serious overkill.

These are but a few of the many examples of microbophobia being pushed by the press. Again, there are certainly things to worry about in terms of pathogens in our immediate environment.  Flu season is coming.  Enterovirus might be on the upswing.  Antibiotic resistance is a massive and troubling problem.  And so on.  But please let us not go completely over the top because the more we promote the idea that we should be killing all microbes, the more trouble we are likely to cause, rather than prevent.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

The flawed and offensive logic of "Academic Science Isn’t Sexist" in the @nytimes

OK.  It is Halloween night and I am tired and need to get my kids to sleep.  But someone on Twitter just pointed me to an opinion piece just out in the New York Times: Academic Science Isn’t Sexist – NYTimes.com and after reading it I felt I had to write a quick post.

The opinion piece is by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci and discusses work by them (and coauthors).  In particular they discuss findings in a massive report “Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape” by Stephen J. Ceci, Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy M. Williams in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.  I note – kudos to the authors for making this available freely and under what may be an open license and also apparently for making much of their data available behind their analyses.

The opinion piece and the associated article have a ton of things to discuss and ponder and analyze for anyone interested in the general issue of women in academic science.  I am not in any position at this time to comment on any of the specific claims made by the authors on this topic.  But certainly I have a ton of reading to do and am looking forward to it.

However, I do want to write about one thing – really just one single thing –  that really bothers me about their New York Times article.  I do not know if this was intentional on their part, but regardless I think there is a major flaw in their piece.

First, to set the stage — their article starts off with the following sentences:

Academic science has a gender problem: specifically, the almost daily reports about hostile workplaces, low pay, delayed promotion and even physical aggression against women.  Particularly in math-intensive fields like the physical sciences, computer science and engineering, women make up only 25 to 30 percent of junior faculty, and 7 to 15 percent of senior faculty, leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame.

This then sets the stage for the authors to discuss their analyses which leads them to conclude that in recent times, there are not biases against women in hiring, publishing, tenure, and other areas.  Again, I am not in any position to examine or dispute their claims about these analyses – to either support them or refute them.

But the piece makes what to me appears to be a dangerous and unsupported connection.  They lump together what one could call “career progression” topics (such as pay, promotion, publishing, citation, etc) with workplace topics (hostility and physical aggression against women).  And yet, they only present or discuss data on the career progression issues.  Yet once they claim to find that career progression for women in math heavy fields seems to be going well recently, they imply that the other workplace issues must not be a problem.  This is seen in statements like “While no career is without setbacks and challenges” and “As we found, when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal” and “leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame.”

Whether one agrees with any or all of their analyses (which again, I am not addressing here) I see no justification for their inclusion of any mention of hostile workplaces and physical agression against women.  So – does this mean that a woman who does well in her career cannot experience physical aggression of any kind?  Also – I note – I am unclear I guess in some of their terminology usage – is their use of the term “physical aggression” here meant to discount reports of sexual violence?   This reminds me of the “Why I stayed” stories of domestic violence.  Just because a women’s career is doing OK does not mean that she did not experience workplace hostility or physical or sexual violence.  I hope – I truly hope – that the authors did not intend to imply this.  But whether they did or not, their logic appears to be both flawed and offensive.

UPDATE 1. November 1, 8:30 AM

Building a Storify about this.

UPDATE 2: Nov 3, 2014. Some other posts also criticizing the NY Times piece

UPDATE 3: Nov. 4, 2014.  More posts about the NY Times piece
——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Rediscovering some critical terms of use in microbial discussions: #microbiomania and #microbophobia

Earlier this week I was trying to come up with a short term to use when referring to the “Overselling of the Microbiome” and related hype. And I came up with one I really really like: microbiomania. The term just captures the essence of hype about microbiomes to me I guess.

So – of course – the first thing to do was to see if anyone else used this term.  And the number one thing I looked at was domain names.  Nope.  Microbiomania.Com and Microbiomania.Org are now mine.  And then I started to search the interwebs. And surprsingly there was not much (in English at least).  But some links showed up to books in Google Books with passages from > 100 years ago.  And this is when the digging got to be fun.  Here are some of the things I found.

1. A section from “The Medical Era“

When copying this section of the search results I discovered Google Books has an embed tool for Google Books though not sure how well it works: here is a try

Anyway – the text of this section of the book reads:

The Paris correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in a recent letter says We hear very little now of microbist or anti microbist theories Dr Koch’s so called discovery is regarded with skepticism though not refuted The truth is his assertions are generally held to be not proven Dr Peters the favorite pupil of the great surgeon Dr Trousseau denounces what he calls microbiomania as a social danger and declares that the micro bians doctrine is vain sterile and objectionable in every way as both needlessly alarming and wrongly reassuring 

So I guess there were some folks who did not like the Koch and his silly theories about germs.

2. The Eclectic Medical Journal Volume 48

OCR text:

Microbiomania For five or six years past says Semolla you could not open a journal without encountierng an alleged discovery of one or more pathogenic bacilla and it is not necessary for me to tell you that the surest means of attaining celebrity is to discover in such and such a malady a new bacillus or a minute micrococcus I can not tell you what ridiculous puerilities have been brought forth by the imagination of physicians who are incapable of serious work and according to the rules of experimental medicine mount every new idea as though it were a triumphal car and think that in celebrating and exaggeraring its praises they manifest their love of progress 

Pretty awesome stuff I think.

3. The Louisville Medical Journal also comes up with a hit to microbiomania

Here is the attempt at an embed:

and the OCR interpreted text reads

and microbophobists The feeling against the theory of the microbial origin of cholera is very strong and was expressed by Prof Peter both at the Academy and the School of Medicine in these terms It is a pure satisfaction of natural history to say with the German School that there exists a microbe producer I say that there is a microbe product The parasitic doctrines have engendered a microbiomania which determined a terror which will be the opprobrium of the 19th century
Faris December 12 1884 

Now – nevermind that the OCR is not perfect (where is Faris?).  But not only is this fascinating.  But the beginning of the page has another word that seems worthy of resurrecting: microbophobists,  And this pulls up all sorts of fascinating discussions:


And the related search is perhaps more fascinating: microbophobia

So – in the end I did not come up with a totally new word.  But I do now have two words I really want to use more often and which I will use in the following ways:

  • Microbiomania which I define here as the overselling of the impact (beneficial or detrimental or otherwise) of microbiomes without the evidence to support such impact 
  • Microbophobia which I define here as the overwhelming and unreasonable fear of microbes (of any kinds).  This is similar in concept to “germophobia” but gets around the issue some people have with whether “germ” is a term that should be reserved for pathogens and thus that germophobia could be viewed as the fear of pathogens.  
——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

11/3 at #UCDavis: Dr. Sarah Mathew “The Evolution of Large Scale Cooperation in Humans: Insights from Turkana Warfare”

Evolutionary Anthropology Colloquium Series
Mondays at 4:10 pm in 273 SS&H

November 3rd:
The Evolution of Large Scale Cooperation in Humans: Insights from Turkana Warfare

Dr. Sarah Mathew
School for Human Evolution & Social Change
Arizona State University

CEO of Soylent goes even further off the deep end – going after his microbiome

Well, this is pretty deranged: Soylent CEO Is Lifehacking Water By Pissing In the Sink.  Forget all the wackiness of Soylent and the idea of limiting water intake.  And just look at the part of this on the micro biome

Feces are almost entirely deceased gut bacteria and water. I massacred my gut bacteria the day before by consuming a DIY Soylent version with no fiber and taking 500mg of Rifaximin, an antibiotic with poor bioavailability, meaning it stays in your gut and kills bacteria. Soylent’s microbiome consultant advised that this is a terrible idea so I do not recommend it. However, it worked. Throughout the challenge I did not defecate.

So – he took Rifaximin to kill his gut microbiome because he thought that would help him not defecate.  And then because he did not defecate he concluded that the Rifaximin played some role in such anti-defecation?  OMFG.  This is both bad science and some, well, crazy a*s-sh*t.  I – I – I – I just do not know what else to say.

Hat tip to Andrea Kuszewski.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Worth a look: Article by John Bohannon about arXiv paper from Google Scholar

Definitely worth checking this out (by John Bohannon): Uprising: Less prestigious journals publishing greater share of high-impact papers.   The article discusses a paper recently posted to arXiv by Anurag Acharya (from Google Scholar) and others: Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals.

Crosspost: Using Google Scholar in Scholarly Workflows

I wrote this for the Google Scholar blog where it was posted yesterday.  I am reposting it here, in part because comments are not allowed on the GS Blog (not sure why) and some people have asked me about that.  So here it is

When Anurag Acharya asked me recently if I would be interested in writing a guest post for the Google Scholar blog in relation to the 10th anniversary of Google Scholar I immediately responded “Yes.” Literally, that was the full content of my email response email response to his request. Why did I answer so enthusiastically? Well, I can put this down to three main reasons:

So – in thinking about what to write for this post, I came up with three main topics I thought would be good to cover – how I got interested in topics of searching for and sharing scholarly papers, how I use Google Scholar, and some ideas about future possible uses of Google Scholar.

Part 1: Some Background 

One day, in ancient history, my wife came home from work (at a biotech startup up focusing on bioinformatics) raving about this new search engine “Google” that people at her company were talking about. As someone who thought of himself as on the cutting edge of web technology, I was a bit dismayed that I had not somehow discovered this myself. But I got over that and tried it out. And, after searching for my name (and being impressed with how well this new search engine worked on such an important topic) I immediately started playing around with searching for scientific papers and data. I did this, I guess, because ever since I was in college, I had been becoming more and more interested in (or some would say obsessed with) issues relating to finding and sharing scientific knowledge.

Without going into two much detail some of the factors that contributed to my obsession included:

  • Working as a shelver and then assistant in the Museum of Comparative Zoology library in college and seeing how people struggled to find papers of relevance to their work;
  • Spending many years in graduate school (in the 1990s) working on projects that had been largely unstudied since the 1960s, including one (so called adaptive mutation) where researchers claimed to have discovered something new in the 1990s but had in fact missed a rich literature on the topic from the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., see this from 1955).
  • Building and sharing databases where I was trying to include a description of every paper that had been published about specific genes. I note – thanks to the Wayback machine my Stanford website from when I was a PhD student is still available – although alas the specific linked databases are not. I have reposted some of them for people to see what they were like (though many of the links in them are busted). See for example my sites on RecA, SNF2, MutS and more
  • Working on projects to catalog everything known about specific organisms in association with work I was doing to characterize the genomes of these organisms

In these and other projects I had seen and experienced just how much time could be spent on searching for papers and data about a particular topics. I am not sure I had a well-defined strategy in every case but I came to rely upon some preferred methods including:

  • “Citation walking” where one takes a paper of interest and then asks “how has this paper been cited?” and traverses across the literature via citations
  • Searching for keywords in abstracts and titles
  • Browsing through specific journals
  • Looking for papers by specific authors
  • For data, I mostly would look in specific centralized data repositories such as Genbank for DNA sequence information and PDB for three-dimensional structural data on proteins.

And of course many other approaches. Nothing really novel or brilliant here though I do think I got pretty good at how to carry out such searches. But one of the challenges was each approach had to be done in a different system and some of the systems were only available for a fee and some were not even online. And even with lots of time and pain, many things could be missed.

Thus when my wife introduced me to this new fangled Google thing my thoughts rapidly turned to – how can I use this new tool to help in finding and then sharing scientific papers or data about these genes and organisms I was studying? Did Google searches solve all my “issues” in this regard? Alas, no. But jump forward ~15 years to today and I am quite amazed in retrospect how much of my scholarly workflow flows through Google Scholar. But rather than try to recall and write about how my workflow changed with the advent of Google Scholar I thought I would just jump to the present time and discuss some ways that I use Google Scholar now.

Part 2: Using Google Scholar today

When working on this post I started to look around at how I use Google Scholar and I confess I was amazed at how many different ways I use it in my work. Here are some examples:

Tracking and using citations. One major general use of Google Scholar lies in tracking of citations to specific scholarly works. Here are some ways that I use such information:

  • Citations to individual works. A key aspect of scholarly work in many fields is examining how specific works are cited. Such information has many uses include discovering new works on a topic by seeing how specific papers from the past are cited, assessing impact of works, ego satisfying, and more. For many years, information on how a specific work was cited was nearly impossible to come by without paying for access to citation tracking databases. Now, with Google Scholar I (and others) can very rapidly gather such information.
  • Citation from diverse sources. One aspect of using Google Scholar to track citations to individual works is the way GS finds citations in diverse sources – not just in the peer reviewed scholarly literature. Now, in some ways this can be viewed as a limitation (some may not want to count or even know about citations from self published white papers, for example). But in others ways this is a wonderful thing as one can find citations to one’s work from very diverse sources outside of the “normal” mold.
  • Citation metrics. It is not a large conceptual leap to go from the ability to track citations to individual works to the ability to create summary statistics about citations across many works. There are many indices for such purposes – some useful and some not. But whatever you think of such indices – Google Scholar has opened up the ability for people to calculate such metrics for oneself or to offer services to calculate metrics for others. Such indices can be used in many ways but perhaps the most common is to summarize the citations for one individual researcher. Which leads into my next topic …

Google Scholar Pages. Perhaps my favorite development from Google Scholar in the last 10 years has been the introduction of Google Scholar Pages for individuals. I make use of my Google Scholar page and pages of others for dozens of things including these:

  • Citation metrics for myself. See above for a discussion of citation metrics in general. I use Google Scholar pages to examine citation metrics for myself and my papers all the time (right now GS shows two summary statistics H-index and I-10 index). And I use this information in many ways including putting it on my CV, including it in grant reports, and examining which of my scholarly works have had more “impact”.
  • As landing page for my publication list. Once one has a GS page, GS automatically adds new publications to one’s list and also updates citation counts and other information regularly. Thus I now include a link to my GS page on my blogs, my work web sites, and in my email signature.
  • To keep track of my coauthors. I have been blessed (and perhaps a bit cursed) to work in a field (genomics) where many projects involve large-scale collaborations across many institutions, involving many researchers. And I have found that a nice way to track these coauthors is via GS (although – note to GS folks – there used to be a way to show, publically, all coauthors in a list but I cannot seem to figure out how to do this anymore).
  • Author disambiguation. For people like myself with a relatively unique name, when others search for my scholarly works, they are pretty easy to find (although I note the fact that there is another Jonathan Eisen out there who publishes some works with a bit of a conspiracy theory angle has been both good and bad for me at times). But for many others, their name is not a perfect way to find their work. This may be because they have a name that is relatively common, or it may be because they have changed their name (e.g., after marriage). For such people creating a GS page can be very useful because once one trains GS with a set of works, it can find new works by that same person quite well (I first found out about this author disambiguation by GS when Anurag gave a talk at a meeting I organized last year). GS is certainly not the only tool in author disambiguation and others – like author UIDs (e.g., ORCID) are almost certainly better long term options. I note – author disambiguation may seem like a esoteric topic to many but it has major implications on important issues such as gender equity in academia, since women are much more likely to change their names during their career than men are.
  • Automated updates of new papers by specific authors. One option associated with GS author pages I use extensively is the ability to “follow” specific authors and get notified of new publications of theirs.
  • To keep track of a collection of people. Most researchers do not regularly update their individual publication pages on their websites. However, if those researchers have GS pages one can keep track of their new papers quite easily (either by the follow option mentioned above or just by browsing occasionally). For example, for my microBEnet project I curate a list of GS pages for researchers in the whole field with connections to studies of “microbiology of the built environment” and thus (hopefully) help others keep up with what is going on in the field.
  • Who is in a specific field? One feature of GS author pages that is not used a lot as far as I can tell, but which has some value is the “areas of interest” tag one can add to one’s profile. Though not everyone uses such tags, I have found they are a useful tool in finding researchers working on specific topics. For example, I list “symbiosis” as one of my areas of interest and if I click on the link for that on my page I get a list (sorted by citation counts – which is both useful and annoying) of others who have listed that same area of interest. And many of the people in this list I am not familiar with yet they do work on topics in which I am very interested.

Automated discovery of new papers by topic. Pretty much all scholars these days are drowning in information and in keeping up with scholarly works. There are many reasons for this of course, and there are also some solutions. I find, for example, that social media is a great way to keep up to date on what new papers are coming out or have come out recently. But social media does not find everything and as someone who is responsible for keeping others up to date on various fields (e.g., this is one of my jobs at microBEnet) I also rely on both manual and automated searchers of the scholarly literature to find new papers or old papers I have missed. GS has two key ways to help in this regard. The first is relatively simple in concept but takes advantage of the power of Google indexing – which is just directly searching GS for papers on particular topics. And the advanced search options allow some customization of such searches. But as someone who is quite busy, I do not actually end up searching GS for new papers all that often. Instead I rely upon automated searches through various services including Pubmed, Pubchase, and GS. I use GS in two ways for such automated searches:

  • Create an alert. When one does a search on GS, in addition to results one is presented with an option to “Create an alert” (which I think may only come up if one is logged in with a Google account). I now have dozens of such alerts in operation. To avoid getting drowned by the results I set them up to send only once a week and I filter them into a separate mail folder that I only look at when I have time. But I frequently find interesting new papers this way.
  • GS Updates. Another option now available, if one has a GS profile, is to use the GS Updates system (which I have written about before here and here for example). This system uses one’s publication list to scan for new papers that are related in some way to one’s prior work.

Many other uses of GS. I have gone on perhaps way too long here so I am only going to briefly mention a few other uses of GS.

  • Finding online versions of papers. Unquestionably one of the most valuable uses of GS is to find online versions of scholarly works. But since others have written extensively about this I will just say the following: if you publish any scholarly work I recommend you make it freely and openly available AND that you make sure that it gets indexed by GS.
  • Full text searches of the literature. Another critically important aspect of GS is that it facilitates full text searching of the scholarly literature which is important for many reasons.
  • Finding works outside of the “normal” places to publish. Another key feature of GS is that it indexes much more than just publisher’s sites. If one posts a preprint on one’s own web server, that paper may show up in GS (which I think is a good thing). GS also indexes many diverse sources of scholarly works and thus helps in finding works that may otherwise not see the light of day.

Part 3: Where do we go from here?

As an active user of Google Scholar I of course have many comments, complaints, ideas and thoughts about what it could do better and where it might go in the future. And there are SO many things that could be added or improved upon – things like better figure and table searching, better exporting of information, better abilities to curate and create collections and to then use such collections as training sets for automated searchers, and more and more and more.  I have written about some such issues and suggestions from time to time in my blog (see for example, this and this and this).  There is certainly lots of work to be done.

But in thinking about this I realized that making a list of issues and suggestions is only of limited value. What I think GS really needs is a better public forum where GS can discuss what their plans are for the future and also where users and developers can discuss what they would find useful. And though I see some places for such discussions on the Google Scholar blog and in related sites, I don’t see a lot. So – I would like to end with a call for GS to create a better site for such discussions of the future of GS …

Update – Adding some comments and responses from Twitter

La Biology and Mathematics in the Bay Area (BaMBA) at #UCDavis 11/22

Got this in the old email tubes (note – I spoke at BaBMA a few years back – great meeting).

Dear Colleagues,

The Biology and Mathematics in the Bay Area (BaMBA) Day is an annual meeting aimed at creating a fairly informal atmosphere to explore the role of mathematics in biology. Going beyond traditional applied mathematics, the topics include sophisticated computational methods, biophysical methods, discrete mathematics and topological methods. Our goal is to encourage dialogue between researchers and students from different disciplines in an atmosphere that promotes the open exchange of ideas and viewpoints to discuss the role of mathematics in modern molecular biology. Please join us for a day full of enticing discussions!

BaMBA 9 will be held 9am-6pm on Saturday, November 22nd, in 1002 Geidt Hall on the UC Davis campus. The talks by keynote speakers will be followed by a poster session. Continue reading “La Biology and Mathematics in the Bay Area (BaMBA) at #UCDavis 11/22”

#UCDavis teaching position for Experimental Ecology and Evolution in the Field Winter & Spring

DEPARTMENT OF EVOLUTION AND ECOLOGY

TEACHING POSITION AVAILABLE

WINTER & SPRING 2015

(Jan. 2, 2015 through Jun. 12, 2015)

LECTURER

Experimental Ecology and Evolution in the Field

EVE/ENT 180A (Winter) and EVE/ENT 180B (Spring)

Responsibilities: A 100% position teaching EVE/ENT 180A and EVE/ENT 180B Experimental Ecology and Evolution – (4 units each). Lecture/laboratory – 3 hours, fieldwork – 3 hours. Experimental design in field ecology. Examination of primary literature, experimental design, independent and collaborative research, analysis of data, development of original research paper based on field experiments.

Continue reading “#UCDavis teaching position for Experimental Ecology and Evolution in the Field Winter & Spring”

Some suggestions for having diverse speakers at meetings

Been having a lot of discussions online in response to my post (Apparently, the National Academy of Sciences thinks only one sex is qualified to talk about alternatives to sex #YAMMM) tracking the awful gender ratio for speakers and session chairs at meetings run by the National Academy of Sciences in their Sackler series.  Some people were asking what one can do to improve gender diversity at meetings so I thought I would post this which I was meaning to do anyway …

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I wrote this in an email to a meeting organizer after I had turned down their invitation due to the imbalance in gender of the speakers (more about this another time — this is not the same case as the one I wrote about here: Turning down an endowed lectureship because their gender ratio is too skewed towards males #WomenInSTEM). 

Anyway, my colleague wrote a long and very helpful email to me after I withdrew from the meeting when I saw the speaker list.  In the email she detailed things that her organization was trying to do to increase diversity of speakers at meetings.  She ended it with this:

Thus, I take your comment to heart and wanted you to know that I care about this issues as well.  I would love to hear how you balance these inequities at your meetings and learn as much as I can.  Thank you for taking the time to bring this up I know how busy you are and appreciate your candor. Truly looking forward to more scientific exchanges and perhaps some education around gender issues.

And I wrote back, quickly, without digging into the literature or all the posts in the world about this some quick suggestions which I think others might find useful. So here is my response – again – was not meant to cover all the things one can do – just examples:

Thanks so much for the response and I am really glad to see all you are trying to do in this area. 

In terms of how we try to balance inequities at meetings I organize I would note a few simple things

  1. Do not try to invite only the famous people or the people doing the “top” work.  This usually biases one towards more established researchers (as in, older) and this alas also usually is accompanied by distortion of diversity.
  2. DO try to invite people across the breadth of career stages.  Meetings to me should not be only about getting the PIs whose labs are doing the best work to talk.  It should also be about giving opportunities to junior researchers – PhD students, post docs and junior faculty who are doing exciting work – perhaps more focused or smaller scale – but nevertheless exciting.  If one opens up a invited speaker list to people at diverse career stages one generally greatly increases the gender and ethnic diversity. 
  3. DO try to invite people from diverse institutions – research universities, research institutes, companies, non profits, NGOs, the press, non research universities, and more.
  4. DO try to be flexible about times and dates for talks – I have found that women more than men have other commitments (e.g. kids) for which they cannot change dates of activities. 
  5. DO try to provide child care assistance (as you are doing).
  6. DO try to make sure women are on the organizing committee See http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-easiest-possible-way-to-increase-female-speakers-at-conferences/282858/
  7. DO make sure to provide travel funds.
  8. DO try to include some talks on related areas that may not be the main theme of the conference.  For example history of science and ELSI related topics increase the pool of women and speakers with diverse backgrounds which can be invited.
  9. DO ask the women who turn down invitations if they care to say why.
  10. DO commit to spending a decent amount of time searching for qualified female speakers.  Sometimes there are people who fit ALL the goals of a meeting and they are just missed because women on average have lower public profiles than men doing the same type of work.

Just some ideas off the top of my head.

Jonathan

see also 

http://www.stemwomen.net/jonathan-eisen/ 

and 

http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/p/posts-on-women-in-science.html

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–