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Invited speakers at neuroimmunology conferences in 2016 were disproportionately male, and not because male scientists were producing higher quality work, according to a new study. Instead, qualified female scientists were overlooked by organizing committees. Robyn Klein, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine, of neuroscience, and of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, discussed the findings, published online April 18 in Nature Immunology.
[...] There's a growing body of research showing that female scientists' contributions to their fields are often not reflected in the number of speaker invitations they receive, and that this under-recognition hurts their careers and slows the pace of scientific progress. While this bias may be unconscious, data from sources such as BiasWatchNeuro -- founded in 2015 to track the proportion of female conference speakers relative to the proportion of female faculty in the relevant field -- show that it is widespread. Encouragingly, the data also show that bringing such biases to light helps to reduce their impact.
Robyn S Klein, et al. Speaking out about gender imbalance in invited speakers improves diversity. Nature Immunology, 2017; 18 (5): 475 DOI: 10.1038/ni.3707
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @02:29PM
And yeah, I just read the actual article. It's very brief and includes lovely stuff like putting men and women into different graphs (when there's no reason to not just use a different color for women or whatever on the same graph) and then does the super awesome tactic of also using setting a different range for the axes understating the majority of men due to a higher y axis and overstating the majority of women due to a lower y axis. Very classy, much science.
Her complaint is that there were plenty of women with publications in b-grade journals that could have replaced men who have 0 publications in any journal within the past two years. She in no way pursued the question of whom these speakers were or why they were invited before immediately jumping to thinly veiled threats by referencing governmental funding legalese. So yes, threaten people's funding and I'm certain you'll get more b-tier female speakers just so they don't have to worry about implied legal threats.
And to be clear, I'm not actually saying there is no bias. I don't really know. I just find that every single time one of these reports comes out the actual headline is frequently grossly hyperbolic, and this is no exception. I think people should do more effort in trying to disprove their own hypotheses before rushing to publish. But hey thanks to this article (which was also published in nature immunology) she now has a paper published within the past 2 years in a journal with an impact factor of 7+. Better invite her to every single immunology conference to share her groundbreaking research on them all being sexists - or there may be consequences! The progress of science - just racing forward!