The Agricultural Bioscience International Conference #ABIC2014 run by @ABICFoundation: where you can hear lots of talks by men #YAMMM

Well, here is this week’s YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting) alert: The Agricultural Bioscience International Conference in Saskatchewan.

Male Speakers: 40
Female speakers 4

  1. Marc Albertsen
  2. Robert Carberry
  3. David Fischhoff
  4. Maurice Moloney
  5. Frédéric Seppey
  6. Juliana Alexandre
  7. Tom Carrato
  8. Michael Frodyma
  9. Carlo Montemagno
  10. Tim Sharbel
  11. Simon Barber
  12. David Chalack
  13. Richard Gray
  14. Giuseppe Natale
  15. Roman Szumski
  16. Roger Beachy
  17. Raju Datla
  18. Wayne Hunter
  19. Matthew O’Mara
  20. Albert Vandenberg
  21. Suzanne Bertrand
  22. Swapan Datta
  23. David Irvin
  24. Peter Phillips
  25. Victor Villalobos
  26. Julie Borlaug
  27. Maurice Delage
  28. Lawrence Kent
  29. Ingo Potrykus
  30. Simon Warner
  31. Jim Brandle
  32. David Dent
  33. Ganesh Kishore
  34. Andrew Potter
  35. Howard Wheater
  36. John Buchanan
  37. Claude Fauquet
  38. Robert Lamb
  39. Thomas Redick
  40. Hong-Wei Xue
  41. Derek Byerlee
  42. Nina Fedoroff
  43. Greg Meredith
  44. Andrew Reed

Who gets the credit/blame for this wonderful arrangment? 
  1. Chair, Wilf Keller, Ag-WestBio Inc.
  2. Jerome Konecsni, Innovation Saskatchewan
  3. Muriel Adams, ABIC Foundation
  4. Art Froehlich, Ad Farm
  5. Pierre Fobert, National Research Council
  6. Graham Scoles, University of Saskatchewan
  7. Peter Phillips, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy
  8. Paul McCaughey, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
  9. Dr.Abdul Jalil, Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture (originally colored green)
  10. Janice Tranberg, Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture
This goes with another YAMMM from Canada recently: Today’s YAMMM (Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting) Brought to You by CIFAR & NAS.  I have not done any analysis of meetings organized by country but I am thinking it might be worth looking into.  I would really suggest if anyone is considering going to this meeting for you to skip it.  There should be consequences for such a skewed ratio.  And while you are at it consider writing to the organizers and sponsors.  I will …

YAMMGM – yet another mostly male genomics meeting (series): Plant Genomic Congresses by Global Engage

Just got invited to the “Plant Genomics Congress Asia” meeting. As usual, the first thing I look at now is gender ratio.  From their web site I got a list of their speakers (so far) and their advisory board.  I highlighted in Yellow ones I am inferring are male and in green ones I am inferring are female.  For the meeting the ratio so far is 17:4 male to female.  Not the worst I have seen but still pretty bad.  Though if you look at their advisory board at least the ratio for the speakers is better — it is 17:0 for the Advisory Board.

  1. John Manners, Chief, CSIRO Plant Industry, Australia 
  2. Dave Edwards, Principal Research Fellow, School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia 
  3. Nagendra Singh National Professor-BP Pal Chair, National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, India 
  4. Han Zhao, Professor of Biology and Biotechnology, Institute of Biotechnology Jiangsu, Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China 
  5. Huaan Yang, Department of Agriculture and Food (DAFWA), Australia 
  6. Rajeev K. Varshney, Principal Scientist (Applied Genomics) & Director, Centre of Excellence in Genomics, ICRISAT, India 
  7. Apichart Vanavichit, Professor, The Rice Gene Discovery Unit, Kasetsart University, Thailand 
  8. Norman Warthmann, Senior Post Doc, Borevitz Laboratory, ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, Australian National University, Australia 
  9. Chungui Lu Lecturer in Post-Genomics, Faculty of Science, Nottingham University, UK 
  10. Beng Kah (Bk) Song, Lecturer, Monash University, Sunway Campus, Australia/ Malaysia 
  11. Kenneth Olsen, Associate Professor Department of Biology, Washington St Louis University, USA 
  12. Yue-Ie Hsing, Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academica Sinica, Taiwan 
  13. Meilina Ong Abdullah, Breeding and Tissue Culture Unit, The Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Centre, Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) Malaysia 
  14. Yijun Ruan, Professor and Director, Systems Biology Center, HuaZhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China 
  15. Sachiko Isobe, Head Applied Plant Genomics, Kaduza DNA Research Institute (KDRI), Japan 
  16. Yuan-Ming Zhang, Professor of Statistical Genomics, State Key Lab. of Crop Genetics and Germplasm Enhancement, Nanjing Agricultural University, China 
  17. Parveen Chhuneja, Geneticist, Bioinformatics Centre School of Agricultural Biotechnology, Punjab Agricultural University, India 
  18. Shengyi Liu, Professor and Head, The Key Lab of Oil Crops Biology, the Ministry of Agriculture, PRC Department of Genomics, Oil Crops Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China 
  19. Wen-Hsiung Li, Director and Distinguished Research Fellow, Biodiversity Research Center, Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academica Sinica, Taiwan 
  20. Graham King, Director, Southern Cross Plant Science Professor of Plant Genomics and Epigenetics, Southern Cross University, Australia 
  21. Ryan Lister, Professor/ARC Future Fellow, Plant Energy Biology ARC CoE, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Western Australia 
  22. Amitabh Mohanty, Lead Trait Discovery, E.I. DuPont India Pvt Ltd. 

Advisory Board:

  1. Robin G Allaby, Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, UK
  2. Todd Blevins, Senior Postdoctoral Associate, Pikaard Lab, Indiana University
  3. Roger Bossé, Global Product Line Leader, PerkinElmer
  4. James Coomer, Senior Technical Advisor for Europe. Data Direct Networks
  5. Tamas Dalmay, Professor of RNA Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich 
  6. Massimo Delledonne, Professor, Department of Biotechnology & Director, Functional Genomics Center,  University of Verona, Italy
  7. Joe Duran, Director – HPC Systems, Technology Solutions Division, Fujitsu
  8. Alberto Ferrarini , Biotechnology Professional, University of Verona 
  9. Keywan Hassani-Pak, Group Leader Applied Bioinformatics, Computational and Systems Biology, Rothamsted Research
  10. Julin Maloof, Professor, Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis
  11. Piotr Mieczkowski, Director of NGS Facility, Research Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina
  12. Stephen P. Moose, Associate Professor, Maize Genomics, Department of Crop Sciences,, Program Leader, Feedstock Genomics, Energy Biosciences Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
  13. Lukas Mueller, Professor, Plant Breeding and Genetics, Boyce Thompson Institute, Cornell University
  14. Odd-Arne Olsen, Professor at Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences (IPM), Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) , Faculty of Education & Natural Sciences, Hamar University College (HUC), Norway
  15. Chris Pires, Associate Professor Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia
  16. Uwe Scholz, Group Leader, Research Group Bioinformatics and Information Technology, IPK
  17. Alan Schulman, MTT Agrifood Research and Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki 
So after checking out this meeting I decided – at their suggestion to check out the meetings in Europe and the USA they are organizing.  The speakers for the US meeting are a whopping 33:4 male to female according to my count and the ratio for the European meeting is about the same (mind you I like some of the speakers – am not blaming them — but this meeting should be avoided in my opinion).  Definitely not impressed with the organizers here or the Global Engage organization behind these meetings.  Uggh. What is wrong with people?  It is really not actually that hard to do better than this.