2013 Essays

Gender influences in conference participation

Drew, Joshua Adam

In 2012 Lynne Isbell and her colleagues published a fascinating paper looking at the role of gender in conference proceedings among primatology meetings. In it they found that male organized symposia had half the number of female participants than those organized by women or both men and women. This was particularly interesting because primatology is a discipline where women have the numerical majority.

To say this opened up a can of worms would be an understatement. It provided a great mechanism for discussion on twitter and in the blogosphere (for good write ups of the original paper check here, here and here and of gender representation in geosciences here). A positive outcome of these discussions was that Jacqueline Gill (soon to be at U of Maine), Karen Lips (U of Maryland) and Mollie Thurman (here at Columbia) and I have decided to do a similar analysis at data from the Ecological Society of America, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and the Society for Conservation Biology.