Conferences are a central part of scientific life, but they are also an arena for gender disparities, according to a study proving popular on social media (T. M. Jones et al. PeerJ 2, e627; 2014). Researchers in Australia gathered data from the 2013 Australasian Evolution Society meeting and found that male speakers tend to get a bigger share of the exposure — a conclusion shared by past studies of conferences. Even though roughly the same number of men and women attended and presented at the evolution conference, women spoke for less time and were also less inclined to ask for longer slots for their talks. Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shared her take-home message on Twitter: “Ladies, request the long talk.” See go.nature.com/qcd1tf for more.
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Conference gender gap revealed. Nature 515, 11 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/515011f
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/515011f