On June 5 I posted a guest blog post by an anonymous person writing about the Programming for Biology workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) – Programming for Biology
And this post generated some responses including yesterday a series of responses from whomever is behind the Cold Spring Harbor Meetings Twitter account.
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Sounds great. And I retweeted all of these.
And then I got an email invite to a new Cold Spring Harbor Meeting: The Evolution of Sequencing Technology: A Half Century of Progress
With a long long list of speakers. Alas, the gender ratio here of speakers is abyssmal. I have highlighted men in yellow and women in green (with the caveat that I always try to giver that assigning gender from names or appearance or records is not always accurate)
- Mark Adams, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Gillian Air, University of Oklahoma
- Shankar Balasubramanian, University of Cambridge, UK
- Hagan Bayley, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd.
- David Bentley, Illumina Cambridge, Ltd
- Sydney Brenner, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Nigel Brown, University of Edinburgh, UK
- George Brownlee, University of Oxford, UK
- Graham Cameron, Bioinformatics Resource, Australia EMBL
- Piero Carninci, RIKEN Ctr.for Life Science Technologies, Japan
- Norman Dovichi, University of Notre Dame
- J. William Efcavitch, Molecular Assemblies, Inc.
- Miguel Garcia-Sancho, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Mark Gerstein, Yale University
- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago
- Walter Gilbert, Harvard University
- Philip Green, University of Washington
- Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology
- Clyde Hutchison, J. Craig Venter Institute
- James Kent, University of California, Santa Cruz
- Jonas Korlach, Pacific Biosciences
- Victor Ling, BC Cancer Agency, Canada
- David Lipman, NCBI/NLM National Instiutes of Health
- James Lupski, Baylor College of Medicine
- Thomas Maniatis, Columbia University Medical Center
- W. Richard McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Joachim Messing, Waksman Institute, Rutgers University
- Gene Myers, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology & Genetics, Germany
- Richard Myers, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology
- Debbie Nickerson, University of Washington
- James Ostell, NLM/NCBI
- Stephen Quake, Stanford University/HHMI
- Charles Richardson, Harvard Medical School
- Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs
- Jane Rogers, The Genome Analysis Centre, UK
- Mostafa Ronaghi, Illumina, Inc.
- Yoshiyuki Sakaki, University of Tokyo
- Jay Shendure, University of Washington
- Melvin Simon, Caltech
- Hamilton Smith, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Lloyd Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- J. Craig Venter, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Robert Waterston, University of Washington
- James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Jean Weissenbach, Genoscope, France
- Barbara Wold, Caltech
- Huanming Yang, Beijing Genomics Institute, China
That is right. 47 speakers. 4 of which are female. For a whopping 7.8 % female speakers. This is one of the most extreme skews I have seen for any meeting. This truly makes me sick to my stomach. Since there are plenty of women who have had and still have fundamentally important roles in the field of sequencing and sequencing technology I infer that this most likely reflects some type of bias in the meeting organization and planning process.
The meeting page lists the organizers as
- Mark Adams, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Nigel Brown, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Robert Waterston, University of Washington
And one of the major sponsors as Illumina.
I think they all have some explaining to do.
One last note – the meeting description says “The opening session will include a tribute to Frederick Sanger, the father of DNA sequencing, and will cover the early efforts in protein, RNA and DNA sequencing.” Really? The father of DNA sequencing? Seems perfect for this meeting I guess.
UPDATE 6/29/15 7 PM PST
Apparently this meeting is part of a series on the history of molecular biology. The meeting page says
The CSHL/Genentech Center Conferences on the History of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology (http://library.cshl.edu/hosted-meetings) aim to explore important themes of discovery in the biological sciences, bringing together scientists who made many of the seminal discoveries that began the field with others whose interests may include the current status of the field, the historical progress of the field, and/or the application of these techniques and approaches in biotechnology and medicine. Previous meetings in the series have included:
Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008)
History of Restriction Enzymes (2013)
Messenger RNA: From Discovery to Synthesis and Regulation in Bacteria and Eukaryotes (2014)
Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)
So I decided to take a peek at these meetings I started with Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008).
Organizers
- Mila Pollock
- Jan Witkowski
Advisors
- Sydney Brenner
- Peter Feinstein
- Lee Hood
- Tom Maniatis
- Richard Roberts
Speakers are listed below:
- Garen Bohlin
- Robert Bud
- Don Comb
- Peter Feinstein
- Maryann Feldman
- Herbert Heyneker
- John H. Leamon
- Yuk-Lam Lo
- Alan McHughen
- Stelios Papadopoulos
- Rich Roberts
- Robert Steinbrook
- Kenneth Thibodeau
- Marc Van Montagu
- Charles Weissmann
- Julie Xing
For speakers that comes to 14:2 male:female or 12.5 % female
Next I went to History of Restriction Enzymes (2013).
Organizers
- Herb Boyer, University of California, San Francisco
- Stu Linn, University of California, Berkeley
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs
Speakers are listed below:
- Aneel Aggarwal, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
- Werner Arber, University of Basel, Switzerland
- Tom Bickle, University of Basel, Switzerland
- Herb Boyer, University of California, San Francisco
- Jack Chirikjian, Georgetown University
- Steve Halford, Bristol University, United Kingdom
- Ken Horiuchi, The Rockefeller University
- Clyde Hutchison, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Arvydas Janulaitis, Institute of Biotechnology, Lithuania
- Stu Linn, University of Califoria, Berkeley
- Bill Linton, Promega
- Arvydas Lubys, Institute of Biotechnology, Lithuania
- Matthew Meselson, Harvard University
- Rick Morgan, New England BioLabs
- Andrzej Piekarowicz, Warsaw University, Poland
- Alfred Pingoud, Institute of Biochemistry – Giessen, Germany
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Rich Roberts, New England BioLabs
- John Rosenberg, University of Pittsburgh
- Ham Smith, J. Craig Venter Institute
- Bruno Strasser, Yale University & University of Geneva
- Geoff Wilson, New England BioLabs
OK that is 21:1 or 4.5 % women. Well, I guess this makes the meeting on sequencing look good.
Organizers:
- James Darnell, The Rockefeller University
- Adrian Krainer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Speakers
- Arnold Berk, University of California, Los Angeles
- Douglas Black, HHMI, University of California, Los Angeles
- George Brawerman, Tufts University School of Medicine
- Sydney Brenner, Janelia Farm Research Campus, HHMI
- Stephen Buratowski, Harvard Medical School
- Louise Chow, University of Alabama
- Juan Pablo Couso, University of Sussex, UK
- James Darnell, The Rockefeller University
- Gideon Dreyfuss, HHMI, University of Pennsylvania
- Grigorii Georgiev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
- Adrian Krainer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Tom Maniatis, Columbia University Medical Center
- James Manley, Columbia University
- Lynne Maquat, University of Rochester Medical Center
- Matthew Meselson, Harvard University
- Melissa Moore, University of Massachusetts Medical School
- Bernard Moss, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases
- Arthur Pardee, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
- Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Rich Roberts, New England BioLabs
- Robert Roeder, The Rockefeller University
- Mike Rosbash, Brandeis University
- Robert Schleif, John Hopkins University
- Robert Singer, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
- Nahum Sonenberg, McGill University, Montré, Quéc, Canada
- Joan Steitz, Yale University/ HHMI
- David Tollervey, Wellcome Center for Cell Biology; University of Edinburgh, UK
- Jonathan Warner, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
- James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
So so much better no? 24:5 Male: Female or 17% female (for the speakers).
Finally I checked out Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)
Organizers
- Dhruba Chattoraj, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
- Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University
- Stanley Falkow, Stanford University
- Richard Novick, New York University
- Chris Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK
- Jan Witkowski, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
Speakers
- Peter Barth, Helsby, Cheshire UK
- Susana Brom, Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México, Cuernavaca, Morelos Mexico
- Ananda Chakrabarty, University of Illinois
- Mike Chandler, Université Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- Dhruba Chattoraj, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
- Don Clewell, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
- Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University
- Fernando de la Cruz, Universidad de Cantabria, Spain
- R. Curtiss III, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
- Julian Davies, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Stanley Falkow, Stanford University
- Laura Frost, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- Barbara Funnell, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Mathias Grote, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
- George A. Jacoby, Lahey Clinic, Burlington, MA
- Mark Jones, Life Sciences Foundation, San Francisco, CA
- Saleem Khan, University of Pittsburgh
- Bruce Levin, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
- John Mekalanos, Harvard Medical School
- Marc van Montagu, Ghent University, Belgium
- Richard Novick, New York University
- David Sherratt, University of Oxford, UK
- David Summers, University of Cambridge, UK
- Chris Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK
- Eva Top, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
- Gerhart Wagner, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Michael Yarmolinsky, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda MD
- Peter Young, University of York, UK
That comes to 24:4 for speakers or 14% female.
Notice any patterns? The totals for these meetings come to 17 women out of 142 speakers. Or ~12 %. That is a dismal record for Cold Spring Harbor Labs and certainly does not convince me that they are trying at all to have diversity represented at their meetings. I note – I truly love many things about CSHL. This is definitely not one of them.
UPDATE 2 – Some discussion of this post on Twitter
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//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js UPDATE 3: Made a Storify w/ some of the discussions