Having at least one woman on the speaker-recruiting team for a scientific conference boosts the number of female speakers, finds a 7 January study (A. Casadevall and J. Handelsman mBio http://doi.org/qsh; 2014). The authors examined 460 symposia with a total of 1,845 speakers at two annual meetings sponsored by Washington DC's American Society for Microbiology in 2011–2013. They focused on 104 all-male convener teams and 112 with at least one woman. When at least one woman was on the team, the proportion of female speakers rose from an average of 25% to 43%. Co-author Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, says that early-career female scientists can benefit from volunteering to be speaker recruiters.