Women Reject Speaking Invitations
Dear friends of women in science,
The NIH's Women in Science newsletter recently covered a study published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology concerning presentations at European Society for Evolutionary Biology Congress 2011. The authors analyzed 1022 presentations and found 46% of the presenters overall were women, they were only 15% of the invited talks and 25% of the invited plenary lectures. They tried to correct for the percentage of women in the field and for career stages of the researchers, and with those adjustments it seemed that women were only giving about half the expected number of invited talks. Delving into these statistics, they uncovered the interesting finding that only half of the invited women accepted, while 74% of the invited men accepted. Why would women turn down such invitations so often? Having them accept would clearly give a more balanced sex ratio of invited talks and help women gain visibility as important scientists. The authors speculated that offering enhanced childcare, more travel funding, and increased awareness of implicit gender biases could help address this issue.
What do you think? Have you turned down such invitations or do you know women who have? What do you think the reasons were? Would the suggested measures address them? Or could this be a result of imposter syndrome at work?
cheers,
Laura
p.s. I forgot to mention that the 20 women might not have been 20 different women. So, maybe the title of the post should be "At Least One Woman Rejected Some Speaking Invitations."
This reminds me of a joke that was circulating among mathematicians a while back (maybe in the 1990s). An explanation for why a math department had no women: "We asked X but she turned us down." X was always the same person.
Unlike talks, people don't generally hold more than two faculty positions, but the principle is the same. Suppose the distribution of invitations is different for women and men, with a few women are getting many invitations but invitations getting more equally distributed among men with respect to seniority, number of articles, impact of articles, etc. The women are likely to have a lower acceptance rate than the men.
I read the JEB article and don't think that the authors have ruled out this possibility. (The article is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12198/abstract) Maybe another thing to note is that the invitations didn't include travel money. If you get a whole lot of invitations per year, I suspect that you're more likely to accept the ones that include travel money, unless it's a short trip to the conference in question or there's some other reason why you want to attend. Also, note that the number of women was pretty small. The supplementary material for the article says that 20 women were invited and 10 declined.
So, I think that the title of Laura's post should be "Some Women Rejected Some Speaking Invitations."
Dear Laura,
I don't usually get invitations to speak. However, I did turn down a great opportunity this spring--conference organizers were reaching out to faculty at teaching colleges. I was already traveling for another meeting, and couldn't leave my husband with that much childcare responsibility in one semester. He commutes, so it falls on friends to help out when I am out of town. Childcare at the meeting wouldn't help since my son would miss school. I don't have a solution that would have helped.
Honestly, there may have been a bit of imposter syndrome as well, I've been out of the loop of the intense meetings for a while!
Related, and on the subject of invites, I know journal editors whose experience is that women scientists (academics) turn down reviewing or solicited review writing invites more often than men. I think Susan's explanation holds. But I wonder if there is some self-defeating trend here. What is the mindset of the inviter? What is their experience? They may have biases, but they also have experiences of repeated declinations, and a job that needs to get done. There is a feedback loop here that exists.
They turn it down because they have conflicting responsibilities (like family, or other commitments), or because they can't afford it and organizers won't pay their way.
I try to always go when invited to speak. But I am seldom invited.
This is an interesting and important study and I have shared it with my feminist email list. I checked a summary of the study itself and see it dealt with presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology Congress in 2011. So, we do not know if it is applicable to non-scientists or to the US.
I have been giving talks in the US and around the world since 1963, some for a fee and travel expenses, others pro bono, and have several scheduled in Florida and Antwerp, Belgium, through March of 2014 so you couldn't prove it by me.:) Interestingly, I've never had any training in public speaking and have often thought that would have been useful.
I have turned down speaking engagements when the audience was too small, it required travel and the organization couldn't pay even my travel expenses, or negotiations simply broke down.
Many women, with various skills, have, however, said to me that they didn't feel they could get up in front of an audience and give a talk, so clearly this is an area where training for women would be a good idea.
Dear Laura,
I think it's cold feet, not feeling like I'm really the expert they want to hear. I'm more likely to accept an invitation from someone I know pretty well, because then it's harder to convince myself that they don't expect what I have to offer.
AMR
