Yet another mostly male meeting (YAMMM) from Cold Spring Harbor

I guess this would go down in "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" or something like that. A few weeks ago, I posted an anonymous guest post about the lack of female speakers at the Programming for Biology workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) - Programming for Biology.  This got a response from Cold Spring Harbor on Twitter claiming they do work to have diverse speakers at their meetings.

Then I got an email last week inviting me to Cold Spring Harbor meeting on the History of DNA Sequencing with a truly awful gender ratio.  So I wrote a blog post about that: Cold Spring Harbor presents the men's only view on the evolution of sequencing.  And also started a discussion about this on Twitter.

CSHL presents men's only view on evolution of sequencing http://t.co/48mUrqFplj (men in yellow, women in green) pic.twitter.com/Wd0JLRcBQX

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 26, 2015

And in response to some comments from some of the CSHL Meeting people I decided to look into the past meetings in the same history of science series and was saddened with the incredibly low # of female speakers at all the meetings in this series. So I posted about that ...

Sadly, CSHL science history meetings consistently have low % of female speakers http://t.co/48mUrqX0JT #STEMWomen pic.twitter.com/mPbKRaKdx1

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 30, 2015

And had more discussions on Twitter where CSHL made some claims about these History of Science meetings being a special case (not buying their argument, just reporting what they said).

And I thought I could have a relaxing Fourth of July weekend not spending my time dealing with Cold Spring Harbor Meetings.  And then, well, I got an email from CSHL that I just looked at a few minutes ago.  This email invited me to one of their "CSHL Asia Conferences".

I clicked on the link and when to the meeting site: Biological Rhythms and sadly I got sucked into YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting) land.  Here are the details on the organizers and presenters as far as I could sort out.  I have labelled people I infer to be likely male in yellow and likely female in green.  (I note I accept that a binary male vs. female representation of gender is less than ideal but I think in general this is a useful thing to look and to make some hypotheses for to assess meetings).

Organizers:

1. Carla Green, UT Southwestern, USA
2. Michael Hastings, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK
3. Joseph Takahashi, HHMI/UT Southwestern, USA
4. Hiroki Ueda, University of Tokyo/RIKEN, Japan
5. Han Wang, Soochow University, China

Speakers

1. Joseph Takahashi, HHMI/UT Southwestern Medical Center, USA 
2. Ravi Allada, Northwestern University, USA 
3. Joseph Bass, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, USA 
4. Deborah Bell-Pedersen, Texas A&M University, USA 
5. Nicolas Cermakian, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, CANADA 
6. Xinnian Dong, Duke University, USA 
7. Yoshitaka Fukada, University of Tokyo, JAPAN 
8. Carla Green, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA 
9. Jinhu Guo, Sun Yat-Sen University, China 
10. Fang Han, Peking University People’s Hospital of Beijing, CHINA 
11. Qun He, China Agricultural University, China 
12. John Hogenesch, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, USA 
13. Zhili Huang, Fudan University, China 
14. Takao Kondo, Nagoya University/Div. of Biological Science, JAPAN 
15. Katja Lamia, The Scripps Research Institute, USA 
16. Cheng Chi Lee, University of Texas Health Science Center Houston, USA 
17. Yi Liu, UT Southwestern Medical Center, USA 
18. Chang Liu, Nanjing Normal University, China 
19. Hugh Piggins, University of Manchester, UNITED KINGDOM 
20. Till Roenneberg, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, GERMANY 
21. Louis Ptacek, HHMI/University of California San Francisco, USA 
22. Hiroki Ueda, RIKEN Kobe Institute, JAPAN 
23. David Virshup, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, SINGAPORE 
24. Han Wang, Soochow University, China 
25. Charles Weitz, Harvard Medical School, USA 
26. David Whitmore, University College London, UNITED KINGDOM 
27. Ying Xu, Soochow University, China 
28. Xiaodong Xu, Hubei Normal University, China 
29. Erquan Zhang, National Institute of Biological Sciences, China 
30. Zhangwu Zhao, China Agricultural University, China

So that is 30 speakers.  Only 29 of which could I find information on the web to make a hypothesis of gender.  Of those 29, I inferred 6 - or 20% to be female.  That is just really low for biological sciences.  I am sorry Cold Spring Harbor but you are just not doing a good enough job with diversity.  Scratch that, you are doing a bad job.  Sad to see.