Tag: women in science

YAMMGM: Yet another mostly male genomics meeting

Just got an email from Illumina – key parts are below:

2013 Illumina Scientific Summit

Dear Jonathan,

Illumina’s third annual Scientific Summit will be held June 3rd through 7th in charming New Orleans, Louisiana, at the Loews Hotel. Described by a past attendee as, “an upscale Gordon Conference”, the Scientific Summit is an invitation-only meeting of 120 leading scientists and thought leaders plus the Illumina executive and R&D leadership teams. 

Plenary sessions will be focused on the Genetic Etiology of Cancer and Genetic Diseases, The Changing Landscape of Medical Genetics, Microbial Detection, and Epigenetics. The formal presentations will be complemented by attendee-driven discussion sessions on a variety of topics ranging from workflow bottlenecks to future applications of Next Generation Sequencing in single cells and diagnostics.

The following distinguished scientists are scheduled to speak:

Dr. Mark Adams, Scientific Director, J. Craig Venter Institute

Dr. Kenneth J. Bloom, Chief Medical Officer, Clarient

Dr. David Craig, Deputy Director of Bioinformatics, Associate Professor and Director, Neurogenomics Division, Head Neurobehavioral Research Unit, TGen

Dr. Richard Gibbs, Wofford Cain Chair in Molecular and Human Genetics, Professor, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Professor, Programs in Translational Biology & Molecular Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. David Goldstein, Director, Duke Medical Center for Human Genome Variation, Duke University

Dr. Steven Jones, Head of Bioinformatics and Associate Director, Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, BC Cancer Agency 

Dr. Michael Katze, Professor, Microbiology, University of Washington

Dr. Jim Knowles, Professor and Associate Chair for Research and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, USC

Dr. Peter Laird, Director, USC Epigenome Center, Professor of Surgery,Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Keck School of Medicine, USC

Neil Miller,  Director of Informatics and Software Development, Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine, Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City

Dr. Steven Musser, Director, Office of Regulatory Science, FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition

Dr. Charles Perou, Distinguished Professor of Genetics, Professor, Pathology & Lab Medicine, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina School of Medicine

Dr. Jonathan Sebat, Chief, Beyster Center for Genomics of Neuropsychiatric Diseases, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of California, San Diego

Dr. George Weinstock, Professor of Genetics and Molecular Microbiology, Washington University

Dr. Liz Worthey, Director of Genomic Informatics, Medical College of Wisconsin

I love Illumina sequencing toys.  I really do.  No so impressed with the gender ratio of this meeting however.  Would not have gone anyway … but if I COULD have attended I would not have.  I wonder -did they even think about whether there might be some bias here?  There certainly are plenty of female candidates they could have invited. Maybe they did not invite women? Maybe all the women said no?

——–
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.

——–

Special issue on Women in Science (the field) in Nature (the journal) (articles appear to be freely available too)

Definitely worth a look at this special in Nature on Women in Science: Special: Women in Science.  Articles seem to be freely available – at least for now (they were not initially).

Here are links to some of the articles:

Any many more … 
——–
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.

——–

Crosspost from PLOS Biologue: Working to increase diversity of PLOS Biology Academic Editors and Advisory Board members

On the PLOS Biologue (the blog for PLOS Biology) I have a post that may be of interest.  I discuss our efforts to increase the diversity of the people involved in the various Boards of PLOS Biology.  This is my first task I have taken as the Chair of the PLOS Biology Advisory Board.  See the post: Working to increase diversity of PLOS Biology Academic Editors and Advisory Board members.
——–
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.

——–

ASM Career Development Grants for Postdoctoral Women

American Society for Microbiology:Career Development Grants for Postdoctoral Women.

Career Development Grants for Postdoctoral Women

The Membership Board is pleased to announce that the Career Development Grants for Postdoctoral Women Committee is accepting applications for its 2013 grant program.

Three grants ($1200 each) are given annually to advance the careers of postdoctoral women with outstanding scientific accomplishments and potential for significant research in the area of microbiology.  The fields covered by the award are any of those represented by the scientific divisions of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).  The grants support the career development of the winning candidates by providing funds to attend a meeting (other than the ASM General Meeting or ICAAC), to visit another laboratory, to take a course in a geographically distant place, or for other travel to advance the candidate’s career.

To be eligible for this program, a woman scientist must hold a doctoral degree and have no more than five years of relevant research experience since receipt of her most recent doctoral degree.  Candidates must currently be performing postdoctoral work in microbiology, at an institution in the United States.  The candidate must be a member of ASM.  A letter of support must be provided by a nominator, who should be the candidate’s research project director, Department Chair, or Center Director.  The nominator must be a member of ASM and may only support one candidate for this award per year.  (Other guidelines exist – please check the website cited below for more details.)

Deadline for applications is February 1, 2013.

For more information on the program and the application process, go tohttp://www.asm.org/index.php/career-development-grants-for-postdoctoral-women on the Membership section of the ASM website, or contact Anne Dempsey at ASM Headquarters by email (adempsey@asmusa.org) or telephone (202-942-9381).

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Meeting 2012 Speaker Gender Ratio #LAMG12

Got some questions about the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes 2012 Meeting in regard to gender ratio of speakers and organizers, after I have been complaining about ratio at other meetings.  Here is the full list of speakers and organizers for this meeting.  Women in bold.
Organizers:
  1. Jeffrey H. Miller
  2. Jonathan Eisen
  3. Ashlee Earl
  4. Lisa Raleigh
So the organizers are a 50-50 split.
Speakers (in order)
  1. Jonathan Eisen
  2. Nina R. Salama
  3. Frederic Bushman
  4. Kristine Wylie
  5. Janet K. Jansson
  6. Forrest Rohwer
  7. Curtis Huttenhower
  8. Tanja Woyke
  9. Maomeng Tong
  10. Jeffrey Cox
  11. Susannah Tringe
  12. Julian Parkhill
  13. Rustem F. Ismagilov
  14. Gautam Dantas
  15. Pamela Yeh
  16. Mike Gilmore
  17. Lance B. Price
  18. James Meadow
  19. Jason E. Stajich
  20. Laura Sauder
  21. Tara Schwartz
  22. Susanna Remold
  23. Bernhard Palsson
  24. Anca Segall
  25. Trent Northern
  26. Rick Morgan
  27. Beth Shank
  28. Morgan Langille (added)
  29. Anthony Fodor (added)
  30. Peter Karp
  31. Tatiana Tatusova
  32. Timothy Harkins
  33. Katrine Whiteson
  34. Mallory Embree
  35. Varum Mazumdar
  36. Abigail McGuire
  37. Ee-Been Goh
  38. Shota Atsumi
  39. Howard Xu

So 37 39 speakers, 16 of which are women.  So that comes to 43.2 41%.

——–
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.

——–

Q-Bio conference in Hawaii, bring your surfboard & your Y chromosome b/c they don’t take a XX

Wow.  Just wow.  And not in a good way.  Just got an email invitation to a meeting.  The meeting is

“THE FIRST ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO MEETING: Quantitative Biology on the Hawaiian Islands. February 18-21, 2013.”  

Well, I mean – who wouldn’t want to go to Hawaii for a meeting.  And a meeting that 

“brings together scientists and engineers who are interested in all areas of q-bio.”  

Plus 

“Each year, the meeting will rotate on the Hawaiian Islands with a different thematic focus within q-bio.”

So I could go to Hawaii each year.  Cool.  And 

“The focus for the meeting this year will be Synthetic Biology, with about half of the invited speakers chosen as renowned experts in this area.”  

I like synthetic biology and, well, sometimes I like experts, so still good

But then, OMG, then, the confirmed speaker list and the conference organizers.

2013 CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

  1. Jim Collins, Boston University
  2. Johan Elf, Uppsala University
  3. Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology
  4. Timothy Elston, UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine
  5. James E. Ferrell, Stanford University 
  6. Martin Fussenegger, ETH Zurich
  7. Leon Glass, McGill University
  8. Terry Hwa, University of California, San Diego
  9. Roy Kishony, Harvard Medical School
  10. Galit Lahav, Harvard University
  11. Andre Levchenko, Johns Hopkins University
  12. Wendell Lim, University of California, San Francisco
  13. Andy Oates, The Max Planck Institute, Dresden
  14. Bernhard Palsson, University of California, San Diego
  15. Gurol Suel, UT Southwestern Medical Center
  16. Chao Tang, Peking University
  17. John Tyson, Virginia Tech
  18. Craig Venter, The J. Craig Venter Institute
  19. Chris Voigt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  20. Ned S. Wingreen, Princeton University  

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:

  1. Bill Ditto, University of Hawaii 
  2. Jeff Hasty, UC San Diego 
  3. Bill Hlavacek, University of New Mexico
  4. Alex Hoffmann, UC San Diego
  5. Brian Munsky, New Mexico Consortium 
  6. Lev Tsimring, UC San Diego 
That is a 25:1 ratio.  Pathetic.  Embarrassing.  The sponsors – UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences and BioCircuits Institute, San Diego Center for Systems Biology, the University of Hawaii and the Office of Naval Research – should all be ashamed.

For other posts on this topic see

UPDATE – I have now submitted an abstract to the meeting.  The abstract I submitted is available here and posted below

The probability of having one out of twenty six participants at a scientific meeting be female

A quantitative analysis of gender bias in quantitative biology meetings 
Jonathan A. Eisen
University of California, Davis
(Note – new title suggested by John Hogenesch)
Scientific conferences have key participants which I define to be the speakers and the organizers. Such key participants can be divided into two main classes based on gender: male and female, which I denote here as M and F, respectively (I realize there are other gender classes and I regretfully am not including them here). The number of key participants (which I denote as KP) for conferences varies significantly. For this analysis I focused on meetings with KP = 26. This value was selected for multiple reasons, including (a) that it is the number of letters in the English alphabet (b) that its factors include the number 13 which I like, and (3) because in email announcements for this meeting KP= 26. I sought to answer a relatively simple question – what is the probability that, for a meeting with KP=26, that F = 1. I chose this because this seemed extreme and because F=1 in the email announcements for this meeting. Using the probability mass distribution formula as below:
which becomes

n = NP = number of participants
k = f = the number that are female
p = percentage of f in population being sampled

I have calculated Pr (F=1) for KP = 26. Assuming for the moment that p = 0.5 (i.e., that the population to be sampled is 50:50 male vs female) then Pr (F=1) = 3.8743E-07. This is highly unlikely by chance alone. However the assumption of p = 0.5 is certainly off in some fields. I therefore calculated P (F=1) for different frequencies of F in the population (i.e., what is the expected ratio of females to sample from).

Thus for a meeting with NP = 26, only when the frequency of F is ~0.16 does P (F=1) exceed 0.05. So a question is then, what should we use for p for this meeting? An informal survey (John Hogenesch, posted to Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jonathaneisen/posts/10151208978630767?comment_id=24634832&offset=0&total_comments=15 ) suggests that in qBio the percentage is about 20%. However that may not be an ideal estimate since this meeting is specifically about synthetic biology, I do not have a any estimate of p for this field. However, examination of key meetings in the field (e.g., see http://syntheticbiology.org/Conferences.html for a list) reveals a percentage of perhaps a bit higher. For example at SB5 the ratio was about 35%. I conclude that it is likely that p > 20% in Synthetic Biology. Given that for p = 0.2 the Pr (F=1) < 0.05 I therefore conclude that the null hypothesis (that having one female out of 26 key participants) can be rejected – and that this meeting has a biased ratio of males: females.

UPDATE 2: Here is the full email I received, just for the record

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE 09/15/12http://w-qbio.org/abstracts.html

THE FIRST ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO MEETING
Quantitative Biology on the Hawaiian Islands
February 18-21, 2013http://w-qbio.org/

The Winter q-bio meeting brings together scientists and engineers who are interested in all areas of q-bio. Each year, the meeting will rotate on the Hawaiian Islands with a different thematic focus within q-bio. The focus for the meeting this year will be Synthetic Biology, with about half of the invited speakers chosen as renowned experts in this area.

SPONSORED BY:UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences and BioCircuits Institute
San Diego Center for Systems Biology
University of Hawaii
Office of Naval Research

2013 CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Jim Collins, Boston University
Johan Elf, Uppsala University
Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology
Timothy Elston, UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine
James E. Ferrell, Stanford University
Martin Fussenegger, ETH Zurich
Leon Glass, McGill University
Terry Hwa, University of California, San Diego
Roy Kishony, Harvard Medical School
Galit Lahav, Harvard University
Andre Levchenko, Johns Hopkins University
Wendell Lim, University of California, San Francisco
Andy Oates, The Max Planck Institute, Dresden
Bernhard Palsson, University of California, San Diego
Gurol Suel, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Chao Tang, Peking University
John Tyson, Virginia Tech
Craig Venter, The J. Craig Venter Institute
Chris Voigt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ned S. Wingreen, Princeton University

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:
Bill Ditto, University of Hawaii
Jeff Hasty, UC San Diego
Bill Hlavacek, University of New Mexico
Alex Hoffmann, UC San Diego
Brian Munsky, New Mexico Consortium
Lev Tsimring, UC San Diego

***REGISTRATION NOW OPEN***
Registration fee covers conference venue, opening reception, banquet, coffee & snacks.

EARLY BIRD ($450.00) REGISTRATION DEADLINE: December 1, 2012
REGULAR REGISTRATION ($550) DEADLINE: February 5, 2013

REGISTER NOW: http://w-qbio.org/abstracts.html

HOTEL: A block of rooms have been reserved for registered conference participants available for a negotiated rate of $199 per night at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki. The rooms are available on first come first serve basis and will be available soon, so book early!

CONTRIBUTED TALKS: If you wish to present your work at the conference, either as an oral talk or a poster, you must submit an abstract through the conference website by the September 15th deadline. Abstract guidelines and submission information at:http://w-qbio.org/guidelines.pdf

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: September 15, 2012
Accepted abstracts will be announced October 31, 2012.

We encourage you to forward this message to any colleagues that may be interested in taking part in this exciting event.

Questions should be emailed to: coordinator@w-qbio.org

UPDATE 4:  (9/18/12)

Plus some links that may be of relevance

UPDATE 6: 9/23/12

Some more links on the recent PNAS paper on gender bias and evaluating scientists

UPDATE 7:  9/23/12

Interesting article on gender and invitations to write major reviews
UPDATE 8: More follow up to the Gender Bias study from PNAS 9/26

UPDATE 9: Other posts on gender bias of interest

UPDATE 10: 11/21/13

Just got this in my email.  Kudos to the people behind qBio for adding more women to their planning committee and adding a many women to the speaker list.
***ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2013***
http://w-qbio.org/abstracts/

UPDATE:  In response to participant interest, the submission deadline has been extended to December 2, 2013.  This year 15 contributed talks will be selected from the submitted abstracts to be presented with the invited talks during the plenary sessions.  Contributed talks will also be selected for parallel breakout sessions which commence in the late afternoon.

THE SECOND ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO MEETING
Quantitative Biology on the Hawaiian Islands
February 17-20, 2014
http://w-qbio.org/

The Winter q-bio meeting brings together scientists and engineers who are interested in all areas of q-bio. The venue for 2014 is the Hilton Waikoloa Village, which is located on the Kohala Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. The resort lets you experience breathtaking tropical gardens, abundant wildlife, award-winning dining, world-class shopping, art and culture, and an array of activities. The Island of Hawaii is the youngest and biggest in the Hawaiian chain, providing a vast canvas of environments to discover–home of one of the world’s most active volcanoes (Kilauea), the most massive mountain in the world (Maunaloa), and the largest park in the state (Hawaii Volcanoes National Park).

SPONSORED BY:
UC San Diego BioCircuits Institute and the San Diego Center for Systems Biology
The University of Hawaii at Manoa
UC San Diego Divisions of Biological Sciences and Engineering
The Office of Naval Research

2014 CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Naama Barkai, The Weizmann Institute of Science
Sangeeta Bhatia Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hana El-Samad, University of California, San Francisco
Zev Gartner, University of California, San Francisco
Taekjip Ha, University of Illinois
Shigeru Kondo, Osaka University
Arthur Lander, University of California, Irvine
Andrew Murray, Harvard University
Steve Quake, Stanford University
Petra Schwille, Max Planck Institute
Christina Smolke, Stanford University
Aleksandra Walczak, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:
Kevin Bennett, University of Hawaii at Manoa
William Ditto, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Hana El-Samad, University of California, San Francisco
Jeff Hasty, University of California, San Diego
Alexander Hoffmann, University of California, San Diego
Galit Lahav, Harvard University
Eva-Maria Schoetz-Collins, University of California, San Diego
Chao Tang, Peking University
Lev Tsimring, University of California, San Diego

***REGISTRATION NOW OPEN***
Registration fee covers conference venue, registration reception, banquet, coffee & snacks.

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION ($500/$425 Student) DEADLINE: December 20, 2013
REGULAR REGISTRATION ($600/$525 Student) DEADLINE: January 31, 2014
LATE REGISTRATION ($675/$600 Student) After January 31, 2014

REGISTER NOW: http://w-qbio.org/

HOTEL:  A block of rooms has been reserved for registered conference participants at a negotiated rate of $199 per night at the Hilton Waikoloa Village. The rooms will be available soon on a first-come, first-served basis, so book early!

CONTRIBUTED TALKS:  If you wish to present your work at the conference, either as an oral talk or a poster, you must submit an abstract through the conference website by the November 5th deadline. Abstract guidelines and submission information at: http://w-qbio.org/abstracts/

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: EXTENDED UNTIL MONDAY, December 2, 2013 (Extended due to large volume of interest!)
Accepted abstracts will be announced by December 6, 2012.  You may submit your abstract now and if accepted, still register by the early bird registration deadline of December 20, 2013.
Abstract guidelines and submission information at: http://w-qbio.org/abstracts/

We encourage you to forward this message to any colleagues that may be interested in taking part in this exciting event.

Questions should be emailed to: coordinator@w-qbio.org

——–
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.

——–

Winner of the "genome conference speakers should be male" award …

Presenters at the World Genome Data Analysis Summit.  Women highlighted in yellow.

  1. Richard LeDuc, Manager, National Center for Genome Analysis Support, Indiana University
  2. Gholson Lyon, Assistant Professor, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory
  3. Christopher Mason, Assistant Professor, Cornell University
  4. Liz Worthey, Assistant Professor, Medical College of Wisconsin
  5. Garry Nolan, Professor of Genetics, Stanford University
  6. David Dooling, Assistant Director, Genome Institute, Washington University
  7. Peter Robinson, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, DataDirect Networks
  8. Thomas Keane, Senior Scientific Manager, Sequencing Informatics, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
  9. Eric Fauman, Associate Research Fellow, Pfizer
  10. Geetha Vasudevan, Assistant Director and Bioinformatics Scientist, Bristol-Myers Squibb
  11. Shanrong Zhao, Senior Scientist, Johnson & Johnson
  12. Bill Barnett, Director, National Center for Genome Analysis Support, Indiana University
  13. Zemin Zhang, Senior Scientist, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genentech
  14. Christopher Mason, Assistant Professor, Cornell University
  15. James Cai, Head, Disease & Translational Informatics, Roche
  16. Eric Zheng, Fellow of Bioinformatics Science, Regeneron
  17. Monica Wang, Associate Director, Knowledge Engineering, Millennium
  18. Joachim Theilhaber, Lead Bioinformatics Research Investigator, Sanofi
  19. Francisco De La Vega, Visiting Scholar, Stanford University
  20. Don Jennings, Manager of Data Integration, Enterprise Information Management, Eli Lilly
  21. Deepak Rajpal, Senior Scientific Investigator, Computational Biology, GSK
  22. Mark Schreiber, Associate Director, Knowledge Engineering, Novartis

So that is a ratio of 19:3 for a whopping 13.6% women.  Please – I beg of you – if you are organizing a conference give some thought to the diversity of speakers.  In my experience the best conferences have always ended up being ones with highly diverse speakers.  These conferences were good probably because the organizers put a lot of thought into who to invite to speak, rather than just inviting either big names or people that one knew in some way.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out that I listed one person (Chris Mason) twice — so it is only an 18:3 ratio.  Phew.  Much better.

For other posts on this topic see

——–
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.

——–

"Genomics: the Power and the Promise" meeting – could be called "Men Studying Genomics" instead

Just got another email advertising this meeting: Genomics: the Power and the Promise.  Organized by Genome Canada and the Gairdner Foundation.  And, well, though I love some of the things Genome Canada has done, this conference really stick in my craw in the wrong way. Why?  It has a serious male speaker overabundance.  Here is the list of speakers:

Day 1 

  1. Pierre Muelien
  2. John Dirks
  3. Gary Goodyear
  4. Eric Lander
  5. Craig Venter
  6. Philip Sharp
  7. Svante Paabo
  8. Tom Hudson
  9. Peter Jones
  10. Stephen Scherer
  11. Michael Hayden
  12. Bertha Maria Knoppers

Day 2

  1. Stephen Mayfield
  2. Elizabeth Edwards
  3. Curtis Suttle
  4. Peter Langridge
  5. Michel Georges
  6. William Davidson
  7. Klaus Ammann

That is 17:2 male: female ratio. That is one female speaker per day.  Not impressive.

On Day 2 there are two panels (which generally I do not count as “speakers” but at least there are a few more women on these):

  • Panel 1: Sally Aitken, Vincent Martin, Elizabeth Edwards, Curtis Suttle, Gerrit Voordouw, Steve Yearley
  • Panel 2: William Davidson, Martine Dubuc, Isobel Parkin, Graham Plastow, Curtis Pozniak, Peter Phillips 

So if you count these that then comes to a ratio of presenters of 25: 6.  Do I want quotes for meetings?  No, but given that the ratio of men: women in biology is close to 1:1 this suggests to me some sort of bias.  Where does this bias come from?  I don’t know.  Could be at the level of who gets invited.  Could be at the level of who accepts.  Could be some non obvious criterion for selecting speakers that leads to a bias towards men.  I don’t know.  But I personally think they could do better.  And I note – they could probably do better in terms of other aspects of diversity of speakers, but I am focusing here just on the male vs. female ratio.  Again, I am not suggesting one should have quotas for all meetings but at the same time, a 17:2 male to female speaker ratio suggests something could use some working on.

As a side story I decided to look at some past conferences sponsored by Genome Canada.  I worked my way down the list … see below:

  • 2008 Joint IUFRO-CTIA International conference. Speakers: 8:2 male: female
  • 6th Canadian Plant Genomics Workshop Plenary Speakers 8:2
  • 8th Annual International Conference of the Canadian Proteomics Initiative.  See below.  32:2 male to female.  I have no idea what the ratio is in the field of proteomics but this is a very big skew in the ratio.  94% male.  
    1. Leigh Anderson (Plasma Proteome Institute)
    2. Ron Beavis (UBC)
    3. John Bergeron (McGill)
    4. Christoph Borchers (UVic)
    5. Jens Coorssen (U Calgary)
    6. Al Edwards (U Toronto)
    7. Andrew Emili (U Toronto)
    8. Leonard Foster (UBC)
    9. Jack Greenblatt (U Toronto)
    10. Juergen Kast (UBC)
    11. Gilles Lajoie (U Western Ontario)
    12. Liang Li (U Alberta)
    13. John Marshall (Ryerson)
    14. Susan Murch (UBC Okanagan)
    15. Richard Oleschuk (Queens)
    16. Dev Pinto (NRC)
    17. Guy Poirier (Laval)
    18. Don Riddle (UBC)
    19. David Schreimer (University of Calgary)
    20. Christoph Sensen (University of Calgary)
    21. Michael Siu (York)
    22. John Wilkins (University of Manitoba)
    23. David Wishart (University of Alberta)
    24. Rober McMaster (Universiyt of British Columbia)
    25. Peter Liu (University of Toronto)
    26. Christopher Overall (Universiyt of British Columbia)
    27. John Kelly (NRC, Ottawa)
    28. Joshua N. Adkins (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA)
    29. Dustin N.D. Lippert (University of British Columbia)
    30. David Juncker (McGill University)
    31. Jenya Petrotchenko (University of Victoria)
    32. Detlev Suckau (Bruker Daltonik GmbH)
    33. Peipei Ping (University of California)
    34. Robert McMaster (University of British Columbia)
I couldn’t bear to go on any further.
Now – note – I am not accusing anyone of bias here.  But I do think it might be a good idea for Genome Canada to put some more effort into figuring out why the conferences they sponsor have such skewed ratios.  And perhaps they can try to do something about this.  For more on this issue from my blog see
——–
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.

——–

Diversity (of speakers, participants) at meetings: do something about it

Some unformed thoughts here but here goes.

Every so often I see a conference announcement and am annoyed by the XY/XX excess for the speakers.  Some recent examples

And more.

Now – I complain about this here and there on Twitter and the like

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But I felt that this needed a blog post to not get lost in the Twitter stream.  So here it is.

I note – I have posted about this issue previously: A conference where the speakers are all women? | The Tree of Life and for conference for which I am involved I have been trying very hard to work on the speaker diversity (not just XX vs XY, but age, career status, ethnicity, etc).  And it certainly can be difficult to make sure that diversity is there.  But the meetings I list above are pretty egregious.  The Genome Canada one features seven major speakers – all white males.  Yes, they are all big names.  But in biology, where women are reasonably well represented, it suggests a bias to me if a meeting can somehow only manage to invite and/or attract all senior, white, XYs to be major speakers.  Not sure what that bias is and it could be different in each case –  could be who is invited – could be the field itself – could be timing/nature of the meeting – could be something to do with families (e.g., perhaps women are invited but are more likely to feel like limiting travel due to roles in child care).

Also I note – biases are not necessarily affecting any one gender or ethnic group.  For example, I have generally stopped going to meetings/conferences that are on weekends and I have also stopped going to meetings/dinners after 6 PM because I do not want to skip out on time with my family.

So here is a plea.  Next time you are involved in organizing a meeting – make some effort to have a strong representation of diversity of speakers and participants.  For example, if you invite lots of women for example and all say no – try to figure out why and see if you can fix the issue.  Offer travel fellowships for students.  Offer child care or child activity options (even if you cannot pay for it – at least make it easy for people).  Make sure to advertise/promote the meeting to groups/institutions with a high representation of underrepresented groups.  Don’t give up if your first efforts don’t work.  Sometimes it can be difficult to make sure diversity levels are high.  But keep trying … it will help make the conference better and also will help the field in general …

For other posts on this topic see

——–
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.

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A conference where the speakers are all women?

So – I was working on organizing a conference – a part of a series – and I was frustrated that prior conferences in the series had only or mostly male speakers. So I suggested for the new conference in the series we have only female speakers. Still working on pulling that off but probably won’t quite happen. So then I posted to twitter and Google+ the idea – and asked a question about it. I made a “storification” of this which you can see below the fold:


http://storify.com/phylogenomics/a-conference-where-the-speakers-are-all-women.js[&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://storify.com/phylogenomics/a-conference-where-the-speakers-are-all-women&#8221; target=”_blank”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;View the story “A conference where the speakers are all women?” on Storify&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;]

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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.

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