Repeated, extremely biased ratio of M:F at meetings from SFB 680 "Evolutionary Innovations" group #YAMMM

Well, this is disappointing, to say the least - there is a conference coming up in July 2015 on "Forecasting Evolution":  SFB 680 | Molecular Basis of Evolutionary Innovations at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

Here is the listed lineup of invited speakers:

1. Andersson (Uppsala University), (NOTE I AM ASSUMING THIS IS DAN ANDERSSON)
2. Trevor Bedford (Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), 
3. Jesse Bloom (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), 
4. Arup Chakraborty (MIT)
5. Michael Desai (Harvard University), 
6. Michael Doebeli (University of British Columbia), 
7. Marco Gerlinger (Institute of Cancer Research, London, 
8. Michael Hochberg (CRNS, Montpellier), 
9. Christopher Illingworth (Cambridge University), 
10. Roy Kishoni (Harvard University), 
11. Richard Lenski (Michigan State University), 
12. Stanislas Leibler (Rockefeller University), 
13. Marta Luksza (IAS Princeton), 
14. Luke Mahler (University of California, Davis), 
15. Leonid Mirny (MIT), 
16. Richard Neher (MPI Tuebingen), 
17. Julian Parkhill (Sanger Institute), 
18. Colin Russell (University of Cambridge), 
19. Sohrab Shah (University of British Columbia), 
20. Boris Shraiman (UCSB), 
21. Olivier Tenaillon (Inserm Paris).

For a whopping 20:1 ratio of men to women or 4.8% women. And this in a field that is just overflowing with excellent female researchers.

So I dug around a little bit.  Here is another meeting from the same group at the University of Cologne - a group known as SFB 680. SFB 680: Molecular Ecology and Evolution: Cologne Spring Meeting 2012.



Speakers:

1. Ian Thomas Baldwin, MPI Jena
2. Nitin Baliga, ISB Seattle 
3. Andrew Beckerman, University of Sheffield 
4. Joy Bergelson, University of Chicago
5. Michael Boots, University of Sheffield 
6. John Colbourne, Indiana University 
7. David Conway, LSHTM London
8. Santiago Elena, IBMCP Valencia
9. Duncan Greig, MPI Plön 
10. Bryan Grenfell, Princeton University 
11. Eddie Holmes, Pennsylvania State University 
12. Peter Keightley, University of Edinburgh
13. Britt Koskella, University of Oxford
14. Juliette de Meaux, University of Münster 
15. Thomas Mitchell-Olds, Duke University
16. Hélène Morlon, Ecole Polytechnique Paris 
17. Wayne Potts, University of Utah 
18. Michael Purugganan, New York University
19. Andrew Rambaut, University of Edinburgh 
20. Walter Salzburger, University of Basel 
21. Johanna Schmitt, Brown University
22. Ralf Sommer, MPI Tübingen
23. Miltos Tsiantis, University of Oxford 
24. Diethardt Tautz, MPI Plön 
25. Daniel Weinreich, Brown University

Session and Meeting Chairs:

1. Michael Lassig
2. Maarten Koornneef
3. Eric von Elert
4. Thomas Wiehe
5. Jonathan Howard

That would be 25:5 or 16.6% female.

And then there was this: Perspectives in Biophysics in October 2014. 

1. Konstantin Doubrovinski
2. Tobias Bollenbach
3. Stefano Pagliara
4. Damien Faivre
5. Ingmar Schön
6. Kurt Schmoller
7. Max Ulbrich
8. Florian Rehfeld
9. Steffen Sahl
10. Timo Betz
11. Alexandre Persat

And this Evolutionary Genomics 2011

1. Rubén Alcázar (MPI for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne)
2. John Baines (Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel)
3. Thomas Bataillon (University of Aarhus)
4. Frank Chan (MPI for Evolutionary Biology, Plön)
5. George Coupland (MPI for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne)
6. Susanne Foitzik (Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz)
7. Isabel Gordo (Instituto Gulbenkian, Lisbon)
8. Oskar Hallatschek (MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen
9. Jonathan Howard (University of Cologne)
10. JinYong Hu (MPI for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne)
11. Jeffrey Jensen (University of Massachusetts, Medical School, Worchester)
12. Michael Lässig (University of Cologne)
13. Dirk Metzler (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich)
14. Ville Mustonen (Welcome Trust Sanger Institute)
15. John Parsch (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich)
16. Frank Rosenzweig (University of Montana, Missoula)
17. Christian Schlötterer (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna)
18. Shamil Sunyaev (Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School) 
19. Karl Schmid (University of Hohenheim)
20. Ana Sousa (Instituto Gulbenkian, Lisbon)
21. Diethard Tautz (MPI for Evolutionary Biology, Plön)
22. Xavier Vekemans (University of Lille)

Session and Meeting Chairs

• Wolfgang Stephan
• Michael Lässig
• Berenike Maier
• Wolfgang Stephan
• Peter Pfaffelhuber
• Juliette de Meaux

For a 19:3 ratio or 13.6 % women for the speakers and if you include session chairs it comes to 23:5 or 18 % female total.

And Evolutionary Innovations in 2010. 

Invited speakers:

1. R. Bundschuh (Ohio State University), 
2. C. Callan (Princeton University),
3. A. Clark (Cornell University), 
4. J. Colbourne (Indiana University),
5. E. Dekel (Weizmann Institute),
6. L. Hurst (University of Bath), 
7. S. Elena (Universidad Polytecnica de Valencia), 
8. E. Koonin (National Center for Biotechnology Information), 
9. M. Kreitman (University of Chicago),
10. S. Leibler (Rockefeller University, New York and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton),
11. T. Lengauer (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), 
12. S. Maerkl (Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne), 
13. C. Marx (Harvard University), 
14. L. Mirny (Massachusetts Intitute of Technology), 
15. V. Mustonen (Sanger Institute), 
16. C. Pal (Biological Research Center, Szeged),
17. D. Petrov (Stanford University), 
18. B. Shraiman (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara),
19. S. Sunyaev (Harvard University), 
20. D. Tautz (Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology)

Plus session chairs 

1. Johannes Berg
2. Siegfried Roth
3. Wolfgang Werr
4. Martin Lercher

And addition speakers not listed on their invited speakers page:

1. Michael Lassig
2. Ruben Alcazar
3. Juliette de Meaux
4. Joachim Krug

For a whopping ratio of 27:1 or 3.6 %

The only meeting from them I could find with a decent / non massively skewed ratio was the following very small one: Evolution of Development

1. Cassandra Extavour
2. Angela Hay
3. Felicity Jones
4. Nicolas Gompe
5. Kristen Panfillio
6. Christiane Kiefer

This is a nice case.  But it really seems like an exception in a long list of meetings with a much smaller representation of female speakers than one would expect based on the researchers in the fields.   I think the SFB680 seriously need to consider what is causing these biases and they should do something about it.

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See this page for other posts of mine on this and related topics.