The "Ben Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences" should be renamed as a "#Manward"

Uggh.

So in 2011 I won this award called the "Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. "  I was happy about it at the time.  I got a book and a plaque and was toasted at a meeting in Boston.  A few years ago I and others noted that the award had been given only to men.  Then Helen Berman won the award in 2014 and it looked like maybe the process was starting to not be so biased.

But I got alerted to the ongoing issues again by an email a few days ago.  And not only have the other winners all been men, all four nominees this year are men too.

Past Winners

• 2002 – Michael B. Eisen
• 2003 – James Kent
• 2004 – Lincoln D. Stein
• 2005 – Ewan Birney 
• 2006 – Michael Ashburner 
• 2007 – Sean Eddy 
• 2008 – Robert Gentleman 
• 2009 – Philip E. Bourne 
• 2010 – Alex Bateman 
• 2011 – Jonathan A. Eisen 
• 2012 – Heng Li 
• 2013 – Steven Salzberg 
• 2014 – Helen M. Berman 
• 2015 – Owen White 
• 2016 – Benjamin Langmead 
• 2017 – Rafael Irizarry 
• 2018 – Desmond Higgins

That comes to 16:1 M:F.  

Yuck.  This just is not reflective of the contributions of people to open access in the life sciences. There are many many many women who have made important contributions in this general area.  

When I won the award I was happy but I did notice the gender bias of the winners although that was when I was kind of just waking up to the issue of gender bias in STEM.  I tried to get people to nominate more women for the award the next year via FriendFeed, Twitter, email and other means.  For example: 

2012 Franklin Award Accepting Nominations - please consider nominating women - all past winners incl. me are male http://t.co/8DLeiPp6

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) February 17, 2012

2012 Franklin Award Accepting Nominations - please consider nominating women - all past winners incl. me are male http://t.co/8DLeiPp6

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) February 17, 2012

But that effort went nowhere I guess.  Helen Berman did win in 2014, but for the last four years it has been all men again.  Uggh.  At this point I think the only conclusion is that there is some bias in the system.  It is actually quite hard to figure out on the web just who is behind the whole award thing anyway.  It is given out by the "Bioinformatics.Org" group.   But the web site does not really have any details about what the group actually is.  There is a page for the award: https://www.bioinformatics.org/franklin/. And then there is a link to information about the selection process.

Here is the summary:

The selection process

1. Nominations may be submitted by members of Bioinformatics.org using this form (you must be a member and logged in).
2. Any person may be nominated, but the final list of nominees will be determined by Bioinformatics.org, based on the following criteria:
• All nominations must be submitted by current members of Bioinformatics.org.
• Self-nominations will not be counted.
• Nominations of past laureates will not be counted.
• There must be evidence that the nominee has done something to promote open access in the life sciences.
• After the above exceptions have been considered, there must remain at least two (2) nominations per nominee (a member must ``second'' each nomination).
3. The list of nominees will then be presented for a vote, on a ballot, to the members of Bioinformatics.org.
4. The time given for all votes to be collected will be specified on the ballot.
5. The nominee with the most votes will be the initial consideration for the Award. There will not be a run-off vote.
6. The initial consideration for the Award will then be contacted. He or she must be willing and able to accept the Award in person at the time of the ceremony.
7. If the initial consideration will not accept the Award in person at the time of the ceremony, then the nominee with the next most votes will be considered. And the process will be repeated until a laureate is found or until the list of nominees is exhausted.
8. An announcement about the identity of the laureate will be made sometime prior to the ceremony.

Well, that sounds, umm, not ideal.  No committee.  No names of members who do any of the reviewing.  So - my guess is that the gender bias in the award is connected to this highly anecdotal review process.  Pretty disconcerting.  I thus think this award should be renamed "The Ben Franklin Award for Men"

UPDATE:

And since the Ben Franklin award is basically only for men, it seemed inappropriate to have my plaque for the award hanging up, especially just below my "Everyone Needs Feminism" sign, so I took it down #GenderBias #STEMDiversity pic.twitter.com/DgxdgAIC3o

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 18, 2019

Kisaco Research - sponsoring YAMMMM - yet another mostly male microbiome meeting - again - not their first biased rodeo

Well, sadly, I am not shocked by this. Disappointed, yes.  But not shocked.  Just got an announcement sent to me for this meeting: Animal Microbiome USA 2019 | Kisaco Research

Happening next week in Kansas City.  Run by Kisaco Research.  I have written about their propensity to have meetings where most of the speakers were white men previously.  See

• Another white men's microbiome meeting from Kisaco #YAMMM #manel #STEMDiversity
• The White Men's Microbiome Congress #YAMMM #Manel #Boycott

People from the company claimed they were going to do better in the future.  And maybe they have for some meetings.  But alas not for this one.  By my estimate the speakers are ~ 85% male.  15% female.  Grrr.  Not good.  Not representative of the field.  Most  likely some sort of implicit or explicit bias going on.   

A conference where all the speakers are women - happening this week #YAMMM #manels #STEMDiversity #GenderBias

It was now six years ago that I wrote here wondering if it would be a good idea to have a conference where all the speakers were women.

See The Tree of Life: A conference where the speakers are all women?

I wrote about this because of the general issue with excessive numbers of conferences where most or all of the speakers were men.  I had come up with a term for such meetings - YAMMM.  Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting.  I even made some little pics / images to represent such YAMMMs.




And I blogged and Tweeted about such meetings a lot (and still do).  See STEM Diversity posts and related links here for example.

When I wrote the post I was wondering if this would be a good counter to the problem of these YAMMMs (also called manels by others).  The feedback (much of it on Twitter) was really useful, mostly.  And over the years I pondered doing such a thing but to be honest, never felt really comfortable with the idea.  I worried about some of the possible negative sides of doing this, such as how the speakers might get unwanted attention and critiqued for being selected solely because of their gender.  And I also worried about whether this would be viewed in some way as a form of "reverse discrimination".

But I did try to do other analogous things where one reversed the normal gender skew (which is almost always towards males).  For example, when I found out, kind of at the last minute, I was speaking at a meeting with a very very skewed gender ratio of speakers, I gave my talk, but changed only referenced the work of women in the field.  See What to do when you realize the meeting you are speaking at is a YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting)?  And in a class I teach I decided to basically replace most of the white male scientists I had been referencing with women and people of color.  Small things I know.  But I was pleased when people noticed these efforts and commented on how it made them think a bit about the examples we use when we give talks and teach.

Mind you, I have organized or helped organize a lot of meetings and seminar series since that post six years ago.  And I have tried to have the speakers at these be representative of diverse backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, career stage, type of institution, and more.  But I myself have never gone to the next level and flipped the standard gender bias on its head.

Thus I was intrigued in September last year when I found out that my friend and colleague Dr. Rob Knight was co-organizing (with Dr. Sandrine Miller-Montgomery) a meeting in San Diego on "microbiomes" (my main area of research) where all of the invited speakers were women.  I blogged briefly about this here: 1st annual CMI International Microbiome Meeting (CIMM) w/ a great #STEMDiversity statement & plan.  I include below the material from the conference site that I included in that post:

On behalf of Dr. Rob Knight, the Center for Microbiome Innovation is pleased to host the 1st annual CMI International Microbiome Meeting (CIMM) on February 27–28, 2019 in San Diego. Additionally, we are pleased to announce that the 1st Urobiome Meeting on February 26, 2019, led by Linda Brubaker MD, will occur in conjunction with CIMM to make the most of your visit to San Diego. 

During the first day of this event, leading researchers will present on the emerging science of the Urobiome and its recently discovered implications for human health, including common conditions such as urinary tract infection, urinary incontinence and bladder overactivity. 

The following two days will feature high-impact presentations on the latest discoveries in microbiome sciences, with sessions on topics ranging from the microbiome in human disease and wellness and the metabolome, to primate microbiomes, to environmental and ocean microbiomes. For this first edition, we have decided to demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers. Be prepared to hear from fantastic presenters such as Dr. Katie Amato (Northwestern University), Dr. Rita Colwell (University of Maryland), Dr. Merete Eggesbo (Norwegian Institute of Public Health), Dr Susan Prescott (University of Western Australia), Dr. Lita Proctor (NIH), and many more!

In addition, I agreed to serve on a panel at the end of the meeting discussing "Breaking the Glass Ceiling: How do we solve the gender imbalance in STEM?" (I had found out about their plans for the meetings when they invited me to serve on the panel). As someone who has critiqued meetings for egregiously skewed gender ratios of speakers and as someone who has called attention to in particular the many microbiome focused meetings with gender balance issues, the whole idea behind this conference was in essence represented by this statement:

For this first edition, we have decided to demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers

This was certainly a bold move by the organizers. So - now zoom to today.

Today I am heading down to San Diego for the meeting.  And yesterday I found out that there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal apparently critiquing the plan for having only female speakers.  It is entitled "No Men Allowed" by James Freeman. Alas, I do not have access to the editorial as it is behind a paywall.  There is also an editorial by Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute web site: Can the University of California bar males from presenting research at a biology conference?

So -- clearly, some people do not like the idea of a conference where all the speakers are women.  I confess I am still torn about the whole concept for the reasons I mentioned above.  However, even though I am torn, I do think it is important to push back against the clear implicit and explicit biases that have occurred against women in relation to speaking at conferences.  There is an extensive literature on this topic and on the topic of implicit and explicit biases that may be involved.  And I think this conference is an important form of push back.  The organizers may in fact get a bunch of grief over not having any male speakers.  But they will also provide an important venue for people to get challenged.  Conferences with only male speakers occurred for many many years without too many people raising any complaints.  And now some still occur but they are generally frowned upon in most places and are becoming rarer at least in my fields.  So in a way this conference can serve a similar function as Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dream of an all female US Supreme Court (this analogy was pointed out to me by Karen James). In reference to this concept Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:

"So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Of course, gender bias is just one of the forms of bias that happens in STEM fields and with STEM conferences.  It is not the only issue we need to worry about or work on.  But it is a big one.  And the organizers of this meeting have done something bold and risky to confront this issue.

I will report more from the meeting. I would also love to hear what other people think about the plan for this conference.

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PS. Thanks to multiple colleagues for some private feedback on this conference.  If I get permission I will post details of their comments.

YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting - Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit 2019

Uggh. In the middle of a faculty retreat and saw a Tweet about this meeting and could not help looking at their speaker list. And am not impressed.  Too many male speakers.

Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit 2019
A Meeting to Hear Men (81%) Not Women (19%) Discussing Microbiota*, **

YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting

Gail A. Hecht, MD, MS, Loyola University Medical Center (U.S.)

Jack A. Gilbert, PhD, University of Chicago (U.S.)

Session Moderator: Giovanni Barbara, MD, University of Bologna (Italy)

Suzanne Devkota, PhD, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (U.S.)

Magnus Simren, MD, PhD, AGAF, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)

Christoph Thaiss, PhD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)

Session Moderator: Purna Kashyap, MBBS, Mayo Clinic

Eric Martens, PhD, University of Michigan (U.S.)

Liping Zhao, PhD, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (U.S.)

Paul Cotter, PhD, University College Cork (Ireland)

Robert Britton, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine (U.S.)

Joseph Zackular, PhD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)

Premysl Bercik, MD, McMaster University (Canada)

Dirk Haller, PhD, Technical University of Munich (Germany)

Eran Elinav, MD, PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel)

Karine Clément, MD, PhD, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (France)

Alexander Khoruts, MD, University of Minnesota (U.S.)

Diane Hoffmann, JD, MS, University of Maryland (U.S.)

Francisco Guarner, MD, PhD, University Hospital Vall d’Hebron (Spain)

Dylan Dodd, PhD, Stanford University (U.S.)

Stanley L. Hazen, MD, PhD, Cleveland Clinic (U.S.)

Rohit Loomba, MD, University of California, San Diego (U.S.)

Gary D. Wu, MD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)

Session Moderator: Hania Szajewska, MD, Medical University of Warsaw (Poland)

Purna Kashyap, MBBS, Mayo Clinic (U.S.)

Geoffrey Preidis, MD, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine (U.S.)

Pinaki Panigrahi, University of Nebraska (U.S.)

* Gender inferred by Google Searches, looking at personal websites, and some guessing
** Assuming just M:F genders which is clearly a bad assumption

YAMMM alert: Yet another mostly male meeting - Frontiers in Microscopy at Janelia Farm

So I got invited to a meeting at Janelia Farm today. Alas I cannot go because it is while I am teaching in the Spring. But in pondering the meeting (which is not posted currently on the Janelia site) I decided to snoop around and see what their other meetings looked like. And, as I generally do, I also scanned the meetings to see if they seemed to have diverse participant pools. And, well, the first meeting on their Spring meeting list alas did not look so good from a diversity point of view.

This is the meeting: Frontiers in Microscopy Technologies and Strategies for Bioimaging Centers Network

This unique meeting will bring together directors of imaging centers and program leaders of open access infrastructures. Our goal is to create a platform to explore the frontiers in imaging technologies, discuss common challenges, and strategize how the global imaging community can build a common network to tackle the era of “big data” as well as rapid technological advances in microscopy.

First glance did not look great so I dug into it a bit more. I tried to infer the gender of the people listed on the site by looking for their personal web sites or other descriptions of them to see what gender pronouns were used. When that was not available I guessed based on name or appearance. I know this is not ideal / perfect but it usually does a decent job of estimating gender balance for a meeting.

Here is what I inferred (and color coded). 

• Male
• Female

Organizers

1. Teng-Leong Chew, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI 
2. Antje Keppler, European Molecular Biology Laboratory 

Ok that is good. It has been shown that having a good gender balance of organizers can help lead to a good balance for a meeting. 

Invited Participants

1. Holly Aaron, University of California, Berkeley
2. Pablo Ariel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
3. Richard Cole, NY State Department of Health, Wadsworth Center
4. Hunter Elliott, Harvard Medical School
5. John Eriksson, Turku BioImaging
6. Scott Fraser, University of Southern California
7. Jeremy Freeman, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
8. Ronald Germain, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/NIH
9. Gary Greenburg, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
10. David Hoffman, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
11. James Jonkman, Advanced Optical Microscopy Facility
12. Luke Lavis, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
13. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
14. Elisa May, University of Konstanz
15. Robert Price, University of South Carolina
16. Joshua Rappoport, Northwestern University
17. Jean Salamero, Institut Curie
18. Hari Shroff, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering/NIH
19. Robert Singer, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
20. Jason Swedlow, University of Dundee
21. Aaron Taylor, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
22. Paul Tillberg, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
23. Jean-Yves Tinevez, Institut Pasteur
24. Michael Unser, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
25. Jennifer Waters, Harvard Medical School
26. Simon Watkins, University of Pittsburgh

Well, this is pretty skewed.  That comes to 22:4 male; female.

Or 85% male.

The meeting I was invited to had a pretty good gender balance of invited participants.  So maybe this microscopy meeting is an anomaly.  But it made me wonder - does HHMI or Janelia Farm haver a diversity policy for meetings?  I could not find anything in Googling around or looking at their web sites.  If they do not have one, I think they should consider developing one.  I did find many examples of what seems to be a commitment to supporting diversity in STEM by HHMI.  But this meeting is definitely not doing a good job of that.  HHMI can do better.

The Massry Prize is a #YAMMA (yet another mostly male award) #MatildaEffect #Massry #GenderBias

I was really pleased to see the announcement that the 2017 Massry Prize was awarded to Norm Pace, Jeffrey Gordon and Rob Knight.  Alas, then someone pointed me to the web site listing past winners of the prize. Massry Prize.  And I compiled the list (with some help from Wikipedia)

Massry Prize

Yet Another Mostly Male Award

YAMMA

1. 1996 Michael Berridge 
2. 1997 Judah Folkman 
3. 1998 Mark Ptashne 
4. 1999 Gunter Blobel 
5. 2000 Leland H. Hartwell 
6. 2001 Avram Hershko
7. 2001 Alexander Varshavsky 
8. 2002 Mario Capecchi
9. 2002 Oliver Smithies 
10. 2003 Roger Kornberg
11. 2003 David Allis 
12. 2003 Michael Grunstein 
13. 2004 Ada Yonath 
14. 2004 Harry Noller 
15. 2005 Andrew Fire
16. 2004 Craig Mello 
17. 2004 David Baulcombe 
18. 2006 Akira Endo
19. 2007 Michael Phelps 
20. 2008 Shinya Yamanaka
21. 2008 James A. Thomson
22. 2008 Rudolf Jaenisch 
23. 2009 Gary Ruvkun
24. 2009 Victor Ambros 
25. 2010 Randy Schekman 
26. 2011 F. Ulrich Hartl 
27. 2011 Arthur Horwich
28. 2012 Michael Rosbash
29. 2012 Jeffrey C. Hall
30. 2012 Michael W. Young 
31. 2013 Michael Sheetz
32. 2013 James A. Spudich 
33. 2013 Ronald D. Vale 
34. 2014 Steven Rosenberg
35. 2014 Zelig Eshhar 
36. 2014 James P. Allison
37. 2015 Philippe Horvath
38. 2015 Jennifer Doudna 
39. 2015 Emmanuelle Charpentier
40. 2016 Gero Miesenböck
41. 2016 Peter Hegemann
42. 2016 Karl Deisseroth
43. 2017 Rob Knight
44. 2017 Jeff Gordon
45. 2017 Norm Pace

42 male

3 female

I colored them based on my inference of gender. I realize that I may have some of this wrong and that using a binary system is not right in many cases but I think this certainly shows a pattern.  I also realize there are many possible explanations for the imbalance here but I think it is reasonable to consider that bias against women may be a component of this. 

Some useful reading in regard to prizes in the sciences:

• American Council on Science and Health: Why Don't Women Win The Nobel Prize?
• Heather Metcalf: Improving Recognition Through Awards: How to Mitigate Bias in Awards
• Anne E. Lincoln, Stephanie Pincus, Janet Bandows Koster, 
  Phoebe S. Leboy: 
  The Matilda Effect in science: Awards and prizes in the US, 1990s and 2000s

Not sure what to do here with this information.  I deeply respect the award winners here and think they are highly deserving of important science awards.  But it pains me to see such a big skew in the gender balance of winners of this Massry Prize and think, sadly, that there is likely some kind of bias at work here.  When there is a bias against recognizing the achievements of women it is known as the Matilda Effect.  I suggest everyone involved in handing out awards such as this, and anyone reporting on such awards, should read up on it.

I note - I posted the gender ratio of winners of this award to the Gender Avenger site. See below:

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

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.



---------------------------------------------
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.

Wrap up from Gender Bias Under the Microscope Symposium #RFUSymposium #GenderBias

Had an amazing time at Rosalind Franklin University for their Gender Bias Under the Microscope Symposium. I made a Storify about it here:

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For other posts on STEM Diversity see here.

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No thanks Precision Medicine #PMWC2017 - I don't want to go to your $&*@(#@( #manel #yammm #biased meeting

Today I got this email, ostensibly from Keith Yamamoto, who I have interacted with a bit over the years, including in the writing of the NAS "New Biology" report.



So I decided to check out the meeting site.  Precision Medicine World Conference. Hosted by Stanford and UCSF and Duke and Others.  And also a "manel". Also known as a YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting).  A festival in fact of men.  So so so many men listed as speakers. Here is my round up.




Just so sick of meetings like this.  Apparently Keith Yamamoto and UCSF and Duke and Stanford and all the Sponsors endorse having a meeting where about 1 in 6 of the speakers are women.  No thanks. Not interested.  I am sure they can all make a litany of excuses.  But I am so tired of hearing them.  In the end the only way to get some of these groups to change their practices is to boycott their meetings.  And to publicly discuss, with the sponsors and speakers and organizers, why their meeting is not OK.


UPDATE 1 - Some responses and discussion on Twitter

Congratulations SynbioBeta #SBBSF16 - you are having a #YAMMMy #manel

Well this is disappointing.

Someone sent me an announcement for SynBioBeta SF 2016 - SynBioBeta possibly thinking I would go to it.  Since it was local I decided to check it out.  And, well, the 1st thing I did was to look at the gender balance of the speakers (as much as I could infer from a quick skim).  And it did not look good.  So I dug into it in more detail.

They have a speaker page and I went through most of them to make sure my inference of gender was correct (based on looking at the pronouns used to describe them in their speaker bio and also in other web sites).  I know this is imperfect but seems potentially a decent estimator.  And low an behold when you sum it all up you get 79% male speakers vs. 21% female speakers.  They could definitely do better.

Agilent - where men are thought leaders

Well this is disappointing.  Was googling for a person and found this Agilent "Thought Leaders Program".  It is described as

This invitational program promotes fundamental scientific advancements by contributing financial support, products and expertise to the research of influential thought leaders in the life sciences, diagnostics, and chemical analysis.

Alas it might be described better as "Agilent Male Thought Leaders Program". In my estimation (based on the pronouns used in the descriptions of the people and in Googling around for more information), of the 31 "thought leaders" 28 are male.  That comes to a bit more than 90%.  It seems like there is some sort of bias here.   Agilent should and could do better.

UC Davis Storer Lecture series - since 1963 87% of speakers are male

I wrote this blog post a while ago but never published it partly out of fear for upsetting some of my colleagues.  I try to be brave about such things, but I guess I just did not quite get up the poxy.  Well, today something came up that stimulated me to write the post.

I got an email announcement for a talk that seems potentially quite interesting. The problem is not the talk.  The problem is with the endowed Lectureship that this talk is connected to.  So here is the post I have worked on on and off over the last year or more.

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UC Davis has an endowed lecture series- the Storer Lectureship in the Life Sciences.  It has been running since the 1960s and is a relatively big deal on campus here.  The speakers come in, usually give one or two talks (one for the public and one for researchers).  They usually have a big dinner (I have gone to a few of these) and the speakers get a decent honorarium (a few thousand dollars) and some sort of gift.

Most years I have been here, I have received a request from the organizers for suggested speakers and every once in a while I have made suggestions, some of which have even led to invitations.  Recently, I had suggested a famous colleague who is also a UC Davis alum.  Alas, she could not come.  The organizers asked if I had any other suggestions and I sent them a list of a few candidates who are both very good, well known and do something related to microbes.  The organizers really liked one of the suggestions and asked if I would be willing to invite this person.

So I started drafting a letter.  And as part of drafting a letter I wanted to give examples of past speakers to show how great a set of speakers we had for this series.  So I Googled "Storer" and
UC Davis" or something like that and got to the page:

Storer Lectureship in the Life Sciences

And that is when I got a bit heartbroken.  The speakers have been, well, very male.   I note I spent a while looking at descriptions of each speaker that I did not know to try and determine their gender, looking at their web sites if available, or how they were described (e.g., what pronouns were used).  I am pretty confident in the assignments though I realize this is an error prone approach.  Here is the full list as far as I have put together with the males labelled in yellow and females in green.
 

Oct 5-16, 1963	Ernest W. Caspari	University of Rochester
Oct 17-31, 1966	Vincent G. Derhicr	Univesity of Pennsylvania
May 7-20, 1967	Ernst Mayr	Harvard University
Nov 3-15, 1968	Elizabeth C. Crosby	Univesity of Michigan
Jan 3-15, 1969	W.D. Billings	Duke University
Apr 13-23, 1969	Frank Fenner	Australian National University,
Apr 5-19, 1970	A. Frey-Wyssling	Eidgenossiche Tcchnische Hochschule
Nov 11-23, 1970	Carl L. Hubbs	Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Feb 1-12, 1971	H.L. KornBerg	University of Leicester, England
Nov 22-Dec 3, 1971	Hilary Koprowski	University of Pennsylvania
Jan 17-28, 1972	George Beadle	University of Chicago
Jan 17-28, 1972	Muriel Beadle	University of Chicago
May 1-12, 1972	Sterling Hendricks	Agriculture Research Service, U.S.D.A
Oct 16-27, 1972	George Gaylord Simpson	The Simroe Foundation
Feb 23-Mar 9, 1973	Sir Alan S. Parkes	The Galton Foundation
Apr 9-20, 1973	Peter R. Marler	The Rockefeller University
May 7-18, 1973	George C. Cotzias, M.D.	Brookhaven National Laboratory
Nov 6-13, 1973	Eugene E. Odum	University of Georgia
Nov 12-16, 1973	Peter Alexander	Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital
Mar 4-15, 1974	Davis A. Hamburg, MD.	Stanford University School of Medicine
Apr 1-15, 1974	Kent V. Flannery	University of Michigan
Nov 4-15, 1974	Garrett Hardin	University of California, Santa Barbara
Mar 30-Apr 9, 1975	Kenneth J. Carpenter	University of Cambridge
Apr 20-May 2, 1975	Murray S. Blum	University of Georgia
Oct 20-31, 1975	Bert W. O'Malley, M.D.	Baylor College of Medicine,
Apr 12-23, 1976	Sydney Brenner	Division of Cell Biology of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England
May 17-28, 1976	Peter S. Carlson	Michigan State University,
Nov 22-Dec 3, 1976	Roger Y. Stanier	Pasteur Institute,
Jan 24-Feb 4, 1977	Peter Albersheim	University of Colorado
Feb 22-Mar 4, 1977	*Jere Mead, M.D. Cecil K. and Philip Drinker	Harvard University
Apr 11-12, 1977	S. J. Singer	University of California, San Diego
Nov 20-30, 1977	James D. Ebert	Marine Biological Laboratory
Feb 8-15, 1978	Sir Kenneth Blaxtcr	Rowen Research Institute
Apr 5-12, 1978	Eric H. Davidson	California Institute of Technology
Oct 9-20, 1978	Jutgen Aschoff	Max-Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology
Feb 20-22, 1979	*Burt L. Vallee, Paul C. Cabot	Harvard Medical School
Apr 24-26, 1979	Carl R. Woese	University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Nov 5-16, 1979	Daphne J. Osborne	Oxford University
Februarv 4-15, 1980	John F. Eisenberg	Smithsonian Institution.
Apr 16-18, 1980	George E. Palade, M.D.	Yale Medical School
May 5-16, 1980	Jerre Levy	University of Chicago
Oct 27-30, 1980	Colin Blakemore	Oxford University
Jan 21-27, 1980	Pierre Dejours	CNRS
Feb 26-Mar 5, 1981	Richard Alexander	University of Michigan
Oct 20-27, 1981	Alfred F. Harper	University of Wisconsin Madison
May 11-19, 1982	Glenn W. Burton	USDA-SEA
Oct 11-18, 1982	Richard F. Leakey	National Museums of Kenya
Jan 6-11, 1983	Eric R. Kandel, M.D.	Columbia University,
Oct 12-18, 1983	Donald S. Farner	University of Washington
Feb 13-15, 1984	Daniel Branton	Harvard University
Apr 24-26, 1984	J. Michael Bishop	University of California, San Francisco
Dec 3-6, 1984	Maurice Fried	National Research Council
Apr 3-8, 1985	John Krebs	Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology
May 8-14, 1985	Geoffrey M. Ole Maloiy	University of Nairobi
Oct 8-10, 1985	Michael P. Hassell	Imperial College, London
Apr 21-24, 1986	John Maynard Smith	University of Sussex.
Dec 1-4, 1986	Aldo Carl Leopold	Boyce Thompson Institute
Mar 2A, 1987	Gerald Edelman	The Rockefeller University
Nov 10-12, 1987	Jean-Claude Chcrrnann	Pasteur Institute, Paris France
Jan 15-20, 1988	Jean-Pierre Changeux	Pasteur Institute, Paris France
Apr 11-15, 1988	John I. Harpcr	University College of North Wales
Oct 17-21, 1988	Rudiger Wehner	University of Zurich
Oct 23-26, 1989	John C. Torrey	Harvard University
Feb 26-Mar 2, 1990	Heinz Saedler	Max-Planck-Institute
Nov 5-7, 1990	Francis Crick	The Salk Institute
Jan 28-31, 1991	Thomas A. McMahon	Harvard University
May 28-30, 1991	Lynn Margulis	University of Massachusetts
Nov 18-21, 1991	Richard C. Lewontin	Harvard University
Feb 4-6, 1992	Philip Leder	Harvard Medical School
Apr 13-16, 1992	Patrick Bateson	University of Cambridge
Nov 16-19, 1992	Melvin I. Simon	California Institute of Technology
Feb 1-5, 1993	Anne McLaren	Wellcome/CRC Institute
Apr 13-16, 1993	Judah Folkman	Harvard Medical School
Jan 24 -27, 1994	Philippa Marrack	National Jewish Center
Feb 28-Mar 3, 1994	Stephen O'Brien	National Cancer Institute
Apr 18-21, 1994	Roy M. Anderson	University of Oxford
Oct 31-Nov 2, 1994	Michael J. Berridge	The Babraham Institute
Feb 6-10, 1995	Hal Hatch	CSIRO Division of Plant Industry
May 1-5, 1995	Elaine Fuchs	The University of Chicago
Oct 16-19, 1995	Peter Ellison	Harvard University
Mar 4-8, 1996	Gottfried Schatz	University of Basel, Switzerland
Apr 8-10, 1996	Daniel Hillel	University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Feb 3-6, 1997	Peter R. Grant	Princeton University
Apr 14-17, 1997	William J. Lennarz	State University of New York
May 5-7, 1997	Carolyn W. Slayman	Yale University School of Medicine
Apr 20-22, 1998	Floyd Bloom	The Scripps Research 1nstitute
May 18-20, 1998	Ian Wilmut	Roslin Institute
Jan 11-13, 1999	Leroy E. Hood	University of Washington
Apr 26-28, 1999	Patricia Goldman-Rakic	Yale University School of Medicine
Jan 30-31, 2001	Charles Arntzen	Arizona State University
		University of Oxford
Mar 4-6, 2002	Jan H. Hoeijmakcrs	Erasmus University
Apr 11-12, 2002	Fred H. Gage	The Salk Institute
May 6-7, 2002	Phillip A. Sharp	Center for Cancer Research, MIT
Jan 13-15, 2003	George M. Martin, M.D.	University of Washington
Mar 10-11, 2003	Kim A. Nasmyth	Vienna Biocenter
Apr 28-29, 2003	Tim Flannery	Director of the South Australian Museum
Dec 1-2, 2003	William Greenough	University of Illinois
Feb 18-19, 2004	Bruce Ames	Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute
Nov 29-30, 2004	Hans Herren	International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology
Apr 26-27, 2005	H. Robert Horvitz	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
May 9-10, 2005	Steven Chu	Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jan 24-25, 2006	Cynthia Kenyon	University of California, San Francisco
Mar 14-15, 2006	Thomas D. Pollard	Yale University
Oct 23-24, 2006	Mimi Koehl	University of California, Berkeley
Dec 4-5, 2006	Simon A. Levin	Princeton University
Apr 5-6, 2007	Sir Peter Crane, FRS	University of Chicago
Apr 23-24, 2007	Stephen Quake	Stanford University
May 14-15, 2007	Pasko Rakic	Yale University
Mar 23-24, 2009	Sean Carroll	University of Wisconsin
Apr 20-21, 2009	H. Allen Orr	University of Rochester
May 19-20, 2009	John Doebley	University of Wisconsin
Mar 11-12, 2010	Elliot Meyerowitz	California Institute of Technology
May 17-18, 2010	Robert Langer	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
May 11-12, 2011	Nina Federoff	Pennsylvania State University
Jan 11-12, 2012	Jane Lubchenco	NOAA
Apr 24-25, 2012	Ilkka Hanski	University of Helsinki
May 30-31, 2012	Loren Rieseberg	University of British Columbia
Oct 2-3, 2012	Ed Delong	MIT
Nov 15, 2012	Jordi Bascompte	Estación Biológica de Doñana
Nov 19, 2012	Simon Boulton	London Research Institute
Jan 16, 2013	Ary Hoffman	University of Melbourne
Jan 31, 2013	Jonathan Losos	Harvard
Mar 18, 2013	Gloria Coruzzi	NYU
Apr 10-11 2013	Peter Agre	Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
May 6, 2013	Richard Wrangham	Harvard
May 16, 2013	Sue Carter	RTI International
May 28, 2013	Larry Gold	CU Boulder
June 4, 2013	Eric Schadt	Mount Sinai
June 05, 2013	Nancy Moran	Yale
Oct 28-29, 2013	Walter Bodmer	University of Oxford
Dec 4-5, 2013	Ronald Kaback	UCLA
Feb 24, 2014	Patricia Wright	Stony Brook
Mar 5-6, 2014	Steve Carpenter	University of Wisconsin
Apr 9-10, 2014	Jerry Coyne	University of Chicago
May 20-21, 2014	May Berenbaum	University of Illinois
May 28-29, 2014	Joel Cohen	Rockefeller University
Oct 28-29, 2014	Charles Rice	The Rockefeller University
Nov 19-20, 2014	Rolf Zinkernagel	University of Zurich
Apr 15-16, 2015	Tim Clutton Block	University of Cambridge
Oct 7-8, 2015	Richard Lenski	Michigan State
April 22, 2016	Steve Nowicki	Duke University

The total numbers come to 19 females out of 142 speakers or ~13% female and 87% male.  Ugh.

And the person I had suggested to invite was male.  So I wrote back to the organizers and I wrote:

From: Jonathan Eisen 

Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 11:34 AM 

To: XXXCc: XXX 

Subject: Abyssmal gender ratio of speakers in the Storer Lectureship series 

XXX and XXXX 

With sincere apologies but ... 

In preparing a letter of invitation for XXX I decided to include some examples of previous Storer Lecturers. And therein lies the problem On the web sitehttp://www.dbs.ucdavis.edu/seminars_and_events/storer_lecture_list.htmlfrom my count, there are 121 past speakers listed. Of these, 15 appear to be female (from my estimate). That comes to 12%. That is embarassaingly low. I hope my calculations here are wrong. 

Can you tell me if the Storer Lectureship has any policies regarding diversity of speakers? If yes, can you provide me with those details.

If no, I recommend you implement one as soon as possible. Either way, I refuse to have my name affiliated with this series, and will not invite anyone to talk in it, without further information and without some serious attempt to figure out how to do a better job representing the diversity of biologists who could give such talks. 

Jonathan

They wrote back with a very detailed response and were very supportive of the concept of increasing diversity of speakers.  And they explained some of the efforts they had made in this regard.  And they really seem to be trying in some ways.  But in the end, their main justification for the lack of diversity was that they were trying to invite already recognized, in essence famous, biologists.  People who had won a Nobel or were in the National Academy of Sciences or were HHMI investigators.  And this pool, that they had chosen, was skewed in gender balance.

So I wrote back to them June 18:

All
Thanks very much for the response.

I understand you have some constraints and greatly appreciate that you are committed to trying to improve the diversity of speakers.  However, the end result is truly not acceptible in my mind and therefore I believe more needs to be done, urgently, to improve the situation.

What are some possible ways to improve the situation?

Well, the number one recommendation I would make would be to not constrain the pool to honorific groups that themselves have severe skews.  No we cannot solve those skews and there are many causes for them.  But I believe it is a major mistake to use the diversity of those groups (NAS, Nobel, HHMI) as a target.  Either invite people to represent diversity well even from a constrained pool, or, open up to a broader pool (there are plenty of incredible scientists who have not gotten HHMI, NAS, or Nobels).

In addition to opening up the pool and not aiming at such a low bar, there are many things one can do to improve the diversity of speakers.  I have written about this extensively as have many others.  I can point the committee to some of these articles if interested.

In the end, whatever the reasons are, the Storer series has ended up with extremely biased gender ratio of speakers.  I think it is up to the committee to fix this with a combination of actions.  But the first thing I would recommend is to not use the diversity of a set of pools you have chosen as an excuse.  We can and should do better and if the pools are the reason, the pools from which you sample need to be changed.

Jonathan

They wrote back, saying they were really committed to achieving better gender balance in the future writing "we are totally committed to the same goals as you in terms of gender balance now and in the future." And they also wrote that they expected "the final lineup to reflect at least 30 percent or more female" as long as one additional woman (the person I had originally recommended) would come (though I had told them she said she could not).  And then they asked if I would reconsider inviting the man who I had been about to invite that had started this whole discussion.

So I wrote back again July 14:

Thanks again for the response. And though I do not want to continue beating a dead horse, I am not convinced we are doing enough in this area. For example, what explains the "at least 30 percent" and how close to 30% will that be. This is important as, for example, the National Science Foundation will not support their people attending meetings if female speakers are at < 33%. I think 30% is, to be honest, just not acceptable in biology. So beofre contributing any more to this series I need to know exactly what is meant by "we are totally committed to the same goals as you in terms of gender balance now and in the future."

For example, here are some questions I would like to know the answers to:

• Are you committed to achieving gender balance in the speaker series or just saying you are being more even than before?
• Are you committed to researching and using diverse options to ensure diversity of speakers beyond just focusing on who is invited?
• Are you interested in understanding why the series has been so undiverse in the past and addressing this directly or just moving forward?
• Are you willing to address the lack of diversity in the past publicly and also discuss efforts to improve the diversity? 

I would very much like to know more detail about how serious you are to having a diverse series and what you plan to do to achieve this. 

With apologies, but in regard to inviting XXX or XXX. I am sorry but given the past record of this series, which as I said is among the worst I have seen anywhere, I am just not willing to be involved in any way until I see a stronger and more public committment to diversity. 

I am happy to help with the series and to help improve the diversity of speakers. But this should be done openly and publicly and forcefully. And without evidence of this, I am unable and unwilling to be involved.

And, well, I have not heard from them again.  So, I am writing this.  For many reasons.  But a key one is, I think we need to be more public about such issues.  And we just need to fix things that are broken.

So today I decided to make the post live.  I wish I had done this earlier.

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Some responses

The Tree of Life: UC Davis Storer Lecture series - Concerning stats about gender disparities from @phylogenomics https://t.co/Auo9KQWoG9

— Andy Jones (@andyojones) April 21, 2016

Important read: "UC Davis Storer Lecture series - since 1963 87% of speakers are male" https://t.co/gcsgSt1Woe

— Alexandra Rosati (@AlexGRosati) April 21, 2016

Another example of male-biased seminar series. https://t.co/cFFrErA8Ah

— Haldre Rogers (@haldre1) April 22, 2016