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posted by martyb on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-step-in-the-right-direction dept.

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


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Sunday April 23 2017, @04:49PM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Sunday April 23 2017, @04:49PM (#498388)

    > Clearly, enough are

    Based on what evidence?

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @09:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23 2017, @09:28PM (#498524)

    Based on VLM's exploitation of his own gender identity. He has happily abused all the privileges available to him to rise above the level he actually merits and so assumes that everyone else is equally unqualified.