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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, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 23 2017, @08:19PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday April 23 2017, @08:19PM (#498495) Journal

    Well, just wait until they recognize that the plural forms need more variations, too: Namely one for each possible combination of genders (with the exception of none at all, because in a group there's always at least one gender). That is, there will be 47 singular forms and 247−1 plural forms. ;-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 23 2017, @09:22PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 23 2017, @09:22PM (#498521) Journal

    That will perhaps require more chalk to write down than exist as mass in the universe ;-)