If you want to go to a #manel or a #YAMMM check out Cold Spring Harbor Asia meetings - where men get to speak about stuff

I just got an email about this meeting: CSH Asia 2016 Conference on Microbial Communities in the Environment: Emerging Technologies and New Frontiers:

So the first thing I did was to look at the gender ratio of speakers. I dug into each person listed here as much as a I could and attempted to infer what their gender is.  I realize this is fraught with problems and have written about this previously.  So as much as possible I looked for what pronouns were used to describe these people before infer their possible gender.  I was unable to get any clear gendered pronouns for one person but the others I think I got enough evidence to make a hypothesis.  I colored those I inferred to be male in yellow and those I inferred to be female in green. 


Organizers

• Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France
• Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA
• Nan Qin, Zhejiang University, China
• Ting Zhu, Tsinghua University, China

Keynote Speakers:

• Dusko Ehrlich, INRA, France
• Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago, USA

Invited Speakers:

• Christopher Carr , Massachusetts Institute of Technology , USA 
• Yehuda Cohen , Nanyang Technological University , SINGAPORE 
• Alana Firl , University of California, Davis , USA
• Andrew Holmes , University of Sydney , AUSTRALIA 
• George Kowalchuk , Utrecht University , NETHERLANDS 
• Shuangjiang Liu , Institute of Microbiology, CAS , CHINA
• Nan Qin , Zhejiang University , CHINA
• Jacques Ravel , University of Maryland , USA 
• Peter Turnbaugh , University of California, San Francisco , USA 
• George Weinstock , Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine , USA 
• Paul Wilmes , University of Luxembourg , LUXEMBOURG 
• Gary Wu , University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine , USA 
• Ruifu Yang, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, CHINA
• Yunsheng Yang , Chinese PLA General Hospital , CHINA
• Jun Yu , The Chinese University of Hong Kong , CHINA
• Yu-Zhong Zhang , Shandong University , CHINA 
• Liping Zhao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CHINA
• Jizhong Zhou , University of Oklahoma, USA 
• Ting Zhu , Tsinghua University , CHINA 

Thus of the speakers (keynotes and invited) I infer a ratio of 18 men to 2 women (and one unknown).  So that is 10% women.  Not remotely representative of the gender in the general area of microbial communities.  

And sadly this is not the first time I have seen such skewed ratios in meetings from Cold Spring Harbor.  See for example: Yet another mostly male meeting (YAMMM) from Cold Spring Harbor and 

Cold Spring Harbor presents the men's only view on the evolution of sequencing and Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) - Programming for Biology

I note - this whole thing saddens me even more because one of the invited female speakers is Alana Firl, who is a post doc at UC Davis jointly working in my lab and Sundar's lab.  She is completely awesome and brilliant.  But this meeting?  Well, it is a manel (a panel of mostly men).  A YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting).  And a disappointment.  

So I decided to see if maybe it was just this meeting in the CSHL Asia series and if others were all OK.  So I went to their list of past meetings and looked at just the keynote speakers. 

Precision Cancer Biology and Medicine: 3 keynotes.  All male. 

Membrane Proteins: Structure and Function. 1 keynote. Male.

Lipid Metabolism and Human Metabolic Disorders. 3 keynotes. All male. 

Frontiers of Plant Biology: Epigenetics & Development. 2 keynotes. Both male. 

Novel Insights into Glia Function & Dysfunction. 3 keynotes. All male.

Francis Crick Symposium: Advances in Neuroscience. 2 keynotes. One male. One female. 

Molecular Basis of Aging and Disease. 4 keynotes. 3 male.

Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy. 2 keynotes. Both male. 

And I went to their list of future meetings and looked at a few (in fields I knew a bit about)

Frontiers in Single Cell Genomics: three keynotes - all male

Telomere and Telomerase: one keynote - male 

Synthetic Biology: one keynote - male

Chromatin, Epigenetics and Transcription: three keynotes -all male

DNA Metabolism, Genomic Stability and Diseases: two keynotes - one male and one female

Latest Advances in Plant Development & Environmental Response/AWAJI,JAPAN: two keynotes  - both male

Systems Biology of Gene Regulation and Genome Editing: no keynotes yet

So in these meetings it is 29:3 male to female for the keynote talks.  Less than 10% female. Great.  CSH Asia meetings.  Where men get to speak about all the stuff they know.