A gloomy day at the #UCDavis Genome Center Halloween Symposium - a model for a #manel #yammm

It is a gloomy day, at least for me, at #UCDavis today.

Yes it is raining and cloudy.  But that is not the gloomy part. I like rain and clouds and we don't get enough of either around here. The issue for me is the Symposium happening today in my building.  Run by the UC Davis Genome Center, which I am a part of.  What is the problem?

Well here is the flier





That is nine presenters.  Eight of which are men. 

• S. Dinesh-Kumar
• Brett Phinney
• Anthony Herren
• Jessica Franco
• Jack Cuniff
• John Yates
• John Muchena
• Ilias Tagkopoulos
• Nuno Bandeira

That comes to 11% female speakers.  Not a good ratio.  But you know this is just one sample right?  It could be a random anomaly, or something else.

So - lets look at last years Halloween symposium.



That is five speakers, all men.

• Mingcheng Luo UC Davis
• Chris Streck 10X
• Marco Blanchette Dovetail
• Matthew Seetin PacBio
• Matthew Settles, UC Davis

OK so let's give it one more chance.  How about 2014.  See http://genomecenter.ucdavis.edu/2014/10/23/details-available-for-the-genome-center-halloween-symposium/

Four speakers. All male.

2014

• Bruce Draper UC Davis, Molecular and Cellular Biology
• Bruce Conklin, Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, UCSF
• David Segal, UC Davis, Genome Center
• Dana Carroll, University of Utah, Department of Biochemistry

So over the last three years we have 94% male presenters. It is a better if you go back further. 2013 was 50-50.  2012 was  ~ 70-% male.  2011 was  55:45 or so.  But over the last three years something has devolved.  And no, I will not be attending.  And yes, I have made comments about this, but maybe too few.  

It is so frustrating to keep seeing this happening over and over in academia and science.  And to see it so close to home, well, it is really extraordinarily disappointing. 

I sent the organizers which I think has some great examples of how to run a diverse meeting.

Below are some articles worth looking at on the topic. 

• Diversity matters in planning journalism conferences by Steve Buttry
• show me the policy | cubist crystal by Jenny Martin
• Stop Agreeing To Be On All-Male Panels — Just Stop - Emily Peck the Huff Post.
• Increasing Diversity at Your Conference
• Promoting Gender Diversity at Conferences
• Encourage speaker diversity at synthetic biology conferences from Synberc 
• 6 Steps for Planning a Diverse Conference by Jessica Fleuti 
• White male lineup at medical meeting sparks 'public shaming' in STAT
• STEM Women: How Men Can Help, with Professor Jonathan Eisen ...
• Discussion of speaker diversity triggered by a #manel (Storify)
• Speaker gender balance at Society for the Neurobiology of Language conferences 2009–2015
• Countering gender bias at conferences Carrie Arnold in Science
• Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance by Jenny Martin 
• How to Add More Women Speakers to Your Meetings by Michelle Russell in PCMA Convene
• Welcoming Women at STEM Conferences – and Beyond - the StoryExchange 
• To Get More Female Conference Speakers - GenomeWeb
• Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels NY Times
• How likely is an all-male speakers list, statistically speaking? A mathematician weighs in.

I certainly feel partially responsible for this, because it is in my building and run by my Center.   Now I had nothing to do with this even, but still ...  I will do my best to make sure this does not happen ever again at the UC Davis Genome Center.  But I will not be attending this year's meeting.  

Thanks to all for "Suggestions for 11 year old daughter who wants to learn to code"

I am so thankful to the whole community out there who gave answers to my request for suggestions for my 11 year old daughter who wants to learn to code.

Today we were both home sick and when she said she was bored she then asked if we could try some of the examples people suggested.  And we ended up playing around with Python at Codeacademy and she spent hours on it.  So much fun. See below:

Daughter & I both home sick - she is bored - so we reviewed this https://t.co/T0F15Bv8MH & today she is learning Python via @Codecademy

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) October 17, 2016

No - #FFS - no - I will not speak at your meeting given the lack of diversity of speakers

So a few days ago I got asked to do a paid speaking engagement for a meeting

Dear Dr. Eisen,

I hope this email finds you well!

We have a client that's interested in you speaking at their Autoimmune Conference in New York on March 24, 2017. 

Do you have a standard speaking fee/range that I can report back to my client?  If you're able to confirm your availability as well, that would be great!

The audience would be primarily physicians. 

Your consideration is very much appreciated!

Sincerely,

Sounded nice - getting paid to go to New York.  What could go wrong right?. Then I did some Googling to find out about the meeting.  Found it - the Interdisciplinary Autoimmune Summit: http://joinias.com. And, as I do for all meeting invites these days, I looked at their speaker line up.  For this years and previous years.  And well, I was not impressed.

A lot of men.  Men men men and men. So I wrote back

Matt Hahn @3rdreviewer talk at #UCDavis - pen and paper notes

Matt Hahn was at UC Davis giving a talk yesterday.

Yes @3rdreviewer has arrived at #UCDavis #holobiont #epigenetics #aquarius pic.twitter.com/yirR4rWdio

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) October 6, 2016

I did not have my laptop available so took notes with - gasp - a pen and paper.  I thought it was quite a nice talk so am posting my notes here.  More about Matt and his work can be found here: http://www.indiana.edu/~hahnlab/.

The White Men's Microbiome Congress #YAMMM #Manel #Boycott

So I got this email this morning inviting me to attend a conference: the Second Annual Human Microbiome Congress in San Diego. (also called the North American Microbiome Congress).



And it struck me that all the featured speakers were men.




 Great.  So I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, hoping that maybe if I looked at the rest of the speakers it would be better.

So I had to register on some web site to download the full agenda for the meeting.  And there were the featured speakers, rippling with diversity



So then I went to scroll through the document looking for the other speakers.

OMFG - what a joke.

Yet another biased meeting from Oxford Global - their meetings should be shunned #YAMMM #GenderBias

Well, Oxford Global has done it again.  They have found a way to be one of the most extremely gender biased conferences around.  Their 2016 Genome Editing Congress Speakers. Their web site lists 20 speakers, 19 of which are men.  (One of the men is listed twice - I am not sure if that is due to giving two talks or a mistake.  So this may be 19 speakers~ 95, 18 of which are men).  Regardless that comes to ~ 95% male speakers.

• Andre Choulika, CEO Cellectis
• Guna Rajagopal, VP – Global Head, Computational Sciences, Discovery Sciences Janssen
• Lorenz Mayr, VP & Global Head, Reagents & Assay Development Astrazeneca
• Zheng-Yi Chen, Associate Professor Harvard Medical School
• Daniel Anderson, Associate Professor MIT
• Marcello Maresca, Associate Principal Scientist Astrazeneca
• John Doench, Director; Associate Director, Genetic Perturbation Platform Broad Institute
• Chad Cowan, Associate Professor  Harvard
• Pablo Perez Pinera, Associate Professor University of Illinois
• Jim Collins, Professor MIT
• Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Director, Transgenic Core Facility University of Nebraska Medical School
• Danilo Maddalo, Senior Scientist and Lab Head Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
• Rodolphe Barrangou, Associate Professor North Carolina State University
• Stephanie Mohr, DRSC Director Harvard Medical School
• Robert Howes, Associate Director MedImmune
• Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Director, Transgenic Core Facility University of Nebraska Medical Center
• James Carothers, Assistant Professor University of Washington
• William Theodorus Hendriks, Instructor in Neurology Harvard Medical School
• Mark Osborn, Assistant Professor University of Minnesota
• Jeff Chamberlain, Professor University of Washington

1 and 19 were counted at Genome Editing USA Congress #OxfordGlobal. Learn more at GenderAvenger Tally

Sponsors of the meeting should be contacted about this:

Sadly this is a consistent pattern for Oxford Global. See for example Oxford Global Sequencing Meetings: Where MEN Tell You About Sequencing #YAMMM and also Time to boycott Oxford Global meetings due to blatant sexism

Really - we need as a community to stand up to these types of meetings.  Oxford Global meetings should be boycotted.  And the companies that sponsor their meetings are complicit in their gender bias.



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UPDATE  10/2 12:56 PM - decided to look at another one of their meetings that is linked from this one

2nd Annual Next Generation Sequencing USA Congress
3-4 October 2016, Boston, USA

83 % male speakers.  Grand.

• James Knight, Director of Bioinformatics Yale University
• John Quackenbush, Professor Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
• Shanrong Zhao, Director Pfizer Inc.
• Nazneen Aziz, Research Professor Arizona State University
• George Weinstock, Director and Professor Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine
• Alexander Wait Zaranek, Director Informatics Harvard Medical School
• Rong Mao, Medical Director, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, ARUP Laboratories; Associate Professor, Pathology University of Utah School of Medicine
• Mark Gerstein, Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, and Computer Science Co-Director of the Yale Program in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics
• James Willey, Professor of Medicine and Pathology University of Toledo
• Neil R. Smalheiser, Associate Professor in Psychiatry University of Illinois College of Medicine
• Mark Borodovsky, Regents’ Professor Georgia Tech
• Scott J. Tebbutt, Associate Professor & Chief Scientific Officer University of British Columbia & PROOF Centre of Excellence
• Michael Fraser, Program Director, Cancer Genomics, Radiation Medicine Program Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
• Justin Johnson, Associate Director and Principal Scientist AstraZeneca
• Leonora Balaj, Instructor in Neurology Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School
• Aleksandra Markovets, Senior Scientist AstraZeneca
• Baohong Zhang, Director of Clinical Bioinformatics Pfizer, Inc.
• Steven Hart, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics Mayo Clinic
• Manolis Kellis, Professor and Head, MIT Computational Biology Group MIT
• John Methot, Head of Scientific Computing Biogen
• Andrew Hollinger, Associate Director: Scientific Communications Broad Institute
• Yingtao Bi, Senior Manager in Statistics Abbvie Bioresearch Center
• Paul Blainey, Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering, MIT and Core Faculty Member Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard

4 and 19 were counted at #oxfordglobal. Learn more at GenderAvenger Tally

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For other posts on STEM Diversity see here.