I won’t go to your conference because the plenary speakers are all men
A cool colleague whose work I respect sent me an invitation to present at his session in a large, long-running research conference. For a second, I was tempted: his topic is of great interest to me. But before even clicking on the link, my heart sank in anticipation of what I knew I would see.
Plenary speakers, semi-plenary speakers … all male.
Twenty five featured speaking slots, and they didn’t notice that their list had no women in it? That’s just not acceptable.
So I quickly replied to my colleague. After pleasantries, I explained my problem with this conference:
“Year on year, they stay uneducated to the fact that it is not OK anymore to have an all-male plenary speaker list. This year, they also have an all-male semi-plenary set!
I cannot in good conscience participate in a professional conference that has no concern at all for this. And I have corresponded with some members of this community before to point out the need for awareness of this problem.
So thank you for the invitation, but I can’t consider this. I’m convinced this community needs some real shaking. It is stale and inwards-looking.”
That felt good.
I then dug up an email thread from a year ago, when I brought to the attention of an organizer of a different conference of the same community that his list of plenaries had only male speakers.
He responded:
“I am completely opposed to any positive discrimination. The only distinction we made was to look for geographical diversity. We are conscious that if we did not make this effort we would end up with most speakers from the USA. It’s possible that we overlooked many capable researchers able to give a plenary, but in no case would I accept that a criterion for selecting someone be that she’s a woman.”
Well, that’s that then.
Reading it now, I am surprised at my calm, informative reply.
“To think of this issue as requiring positive discrimination starts from a fairly strong assumption: that there are no women equally qualified than the 19 speakers your committee already chose.
When you were looking for a balance in geographic origin, to avoid an all-US speaker list, what was your reasoning? You probably searched for researchers of the same high caliber, well known in their fields, who you are confident would give a good talk. But given that geographical diversity is a value for the conference, you placed this among the criteria for making your list. Perhaps you took into account that researchers who spent their whole careers in Latin America, say, may have a shorter publication list — due to the scarce funding and depressed infrastructure for science there — than a US researcher. The organizing committee perhaps could see beyond the list of publications and recognize the capacity, originality, even courage of the latin american scientist who has managed to remain productive in research despite the handicaps. That’s not positive discrimination: it is applying a more objective function than measuring the value of a scientist merely by counting papers.
What I would like is that you apply the same process when considering the gender of invited speakers.
And if I may add, neglecting to consider the gender of your speaker list really looks bad on your organization, as some recent examples show.
Science Careers (“Boycotting All-Boy Conferences,” March 2014) reported on the case of theoretical chemistry conferences: a subject-area directory lists 300 tenured or tenure-track women, plenty of them “far more distinguished than many of the men being invited to speak at these conferences.” In that story, the organizers ended up “retracting” and modifying their program, after the bad press.
A previous article of the same column (“Making Scientific Meetings More Woman-Friendly,” January 2014) reports on a study of 460 symposia in microbiology. It found that the strongest influencer on the presence of women among the panelists was the presence of at least one woman among the organizers.
Granted, correlation does not imply causation. But that’s not the only study supporting this association. An article appearing in PLoS ONE in 2012 reports an analysis of 21 annual conferences of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. In a sub-field where women dominate (primatology), the proportion of women panelists is strongly dependent on the gender of the organizers. (“Stag Parties Linger: Continued Gender Bias in a Female-Rich Scientific Discipline,” November 2012)
On the other hand, the problem is somewhat circular. The visibility of a researcher influences the perception of his colleagues regarding his capacity and impact, making an invitation more likely. But without speaking engagements, a researcher’s visibility might stay low. A study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology analyzed this particular issue for invited speakers in that field. (“Fewer invited talks by women in evolutionary biology symposia,” June 2013.)
Also, there’s unconscious bias to account for. Solid evidence has accumulated indicating that both men and women tend to first come up with male names when thinking of who to invite as speaker or nominate for an award. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study in 2012 showing this bias in teachers, who favor their male students. (“Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students,” October 2012.) I’m sure you’ve heard of the studies using male and female names on the same résumés, resulting on the male applicants being perceived as more capable.
These are the effects that need to be counteracted by a deliberate effort to search for women to invite as speakers.”
In his short reply to my evidence-rich missive, this organizer sounded genuinely persuaded to think about it more and try harder next time … yet he’s now among the all-male speakers in the conference I was just told about. It looks like he forgot our correspondence. Or perhaps he doesn’t really care.
Since my meticulous reply seems to have been wasted on him, I’ve turned it into this blog post.
It gives me the chance to declare that I will have no part in this or related conferences, unless and until there is real change. In the meantime, I’ll spend my time with more enlightened communities (my favorite of which right now is SciPy).
