Tag: Holly Ganz

I am supposed to be talking at a meeting Tuesday: Almaden Institute 2014: Sequence the City -Metagenomics in the Era of Big Data.

In looking at the agenda for the meeting I am pretty bummed about the gender ratio of speakers. Looks like 18:5 Men to Women. 

• Jeff Welser IBM 
• David Haussler UCSC 
• Daniel Huson Tubingen U 
• Joe DeRisi UCSF 
• Jane Carlton NYU 
• Ajay Royyuru IBM 
• Paula Olsiewski Sloan Foundation 
• Christopher Mentzel Moore Foundation 
• Anne Marie Kimball Gates Foundation 
• Jonathan Eisen UC Davis 
• Jessica Green U Oregon 
• Mark Adams JCVI 
• Eric Alm MIT 
• Raul Andino UCSF 
• Scott Kahn Illumina 
• Mike Lelivelt Ion Torrent 
• Radoje (Rade) Drmanac Complete Genomics 
• Brett Bowman Pacific Biosciences 
• Chris Mason Cornell 
• Bart Weimer UC Davis 
• David Crean Mars 
• Astri Wayadande Oklahoma State U 
• Christopher Elkins FDA

Not sure what to do about this. I am certainly (in a few minutes) going to be writing to the organizers. I am also pondering cancelling talking. I try very hard to be vigilant about gender ratios at meetings and it drives me crazy to see such skews. I know it is not always possible to have meetings have equal representation and I know some people try very hard and do not succeed. But this seems unpleasantly extreme. So – any thoughts or recommendations as to what to do would be appreciated.

UPDATE 5/5 –

Well the schedule has been updated – and now the male: female speaker ratio is 21:6. Note – Jack Gilbert is moderating and speaking and I am counting him twice. Also Robert Prill is opening each day and closing day 2 so in a way this could be counted as 23:6.

• Robert Prill, IBM 
• Jeff Welser IBM 
• David Haussler UCSC 
• Daniel Huson Tubingen U 
• Joe DeRisi UCSF 
• Jane Carlton NYU 
• Ajay Royyuru IBM 
• Laurie Garrett (moderating) 
• Paula Olsiewski Sloan Foundation 
• Christopher Mentzel, Moore Foundation 
• Anne Marie Kimball Gates Foundation 
• Jonathan Eisen UC Davis 
• Jessica Green U Oregon 
• Robert Prill 
• Mark Adams JCVI 
• Eric Alm MIT 
• Raul Andino UCSF 
• Jack Gilbert (moderating) 
• Jack Gilbert (speaking) 
• Scott Kahn, Illumina 
• Mike Lelivelt Ion Torrent 
• Radoje (Rade) Drmanac Complete Genomics 
• Brett Bowman Pacific Biosciences 
• Chris Mason Cornell 
• Bart Weimer UC Davis 
• David Crean Mars 
• Astri Wayadande Oklahoma State U 
• Christopher Elkins FDA 
• Robert Prill

UPDATE 5/7

So I decided to go to the meeting and talk. Here is a video slideshow of my talk with audio.

 and here are the slides on Slideshare

I am not sure if I made the right decision but what I decided to do was to change my talk to feature the work of women and to highlight those women.

UPDATE 5/8

Here are some pics showing the before (left) and after (right) for how I changed my talk from the previous talk I gave about this topic.  Among the changes I made:

• I added names and pictures of the women behind the work 
• Changed examples to be about work of women when I had been using work of men
• Added additional examples of work by women directly related to my talk

I think this strategy is a potentially useful tool in combatting the implicit and subtle biases against women in STEM fields.  All of what I said was true.  I just made sure to emphasize and use examples of work by women when previously I had either not said who did certain work or had sometimes emphasized work by men.  And I made sure to show pictures and say the names of the women behind the work too.

Added name and picture of program officer Paula Olsiweski who I had quoted previously.

Changed example of new publication that we add to our collection and used a publication by a female graduate student, post doc Rachel Adams.

Included name and picture of student post-doc Rachel Adams on other slides about the topic

Included name and picture of student post-doc Rachel Adams on other slides about the topic.

Added a mention of the blog post by student post-doc Rachel Adams.

Added picture and name of post doc Allison Fish who organized meeting I was discussing.

Added name and picture of Mary Jo Seminoff who coordinates production of the newsletter I had mentioned.

Added screenshot and names of Holly Bik interviewing Amy Pruden for the “People Behind the Science” series mentioned in previous slide.

Added name and picture of Brooke Borel and discussed her news stories (had mentioned news stories in general w/o examples)

Added picture and name and blog post of Holly Ganz who wrote about the news stories by Brooke Borel.

Changed example to be about Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello instead of Thomas Bruns.

Changed example to be about Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello instead of Thomas Bruns.

Added extra slide discussing Software Carpentry workshop organized by Jenna Lang and Tracy Teal (and added names and pics of them).

Added pics and names of Jo Handelsman and Tiffany Tsang who coordinated one of the examples on the slide but who had not gotten mentioned specifically.

Added picture and name of undergraduate student Hannah Holland-Moritz who was involved in this work.

Added picture and name of research associate Madison Dunitz who led this work.

Added name and picture of undergraduate student Sabreen Aulakh who was involved in this work.

Added picture of graduate student Laura Sauder who was our main contact in the lab of Josh Newfeld.

Added pictures and names of Darlene Cavalier and Caren Cooper who inspired me to get involved in Citizen Science.

Added picture and name of Darlene Cavalier who was keynote speaker at these meetings.

Added extra slide on the phone microbiome project and added names and pics of the people involved including graduate student Georgia Barguil.

Added names and pics of the people behind this project (Holly Menninger and Rob Dunn)

Changed slide a little bit and added name and pic of Jessica Richman, one of the people behind the uBiome project.

Added pics that included more of the key women behind this project – including Darlene Cavalier, Wendy Brown and Jenna Lang.

Added a slide about Altmetrics and added pic and name of Heather Piwowar and mentioned her work  Had included one line about Altmetrics on a slide before.

Added reference to paper by Holly Bik and Miriam Goldstein and emphasized the workshops run by Holly Bik.  Included pics and names on slide too.

UPDATE 5/8

Added links to find out more information about the work of the women in the slides (links are in the image captions).
UPDATE 9/6/14 https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js