Conference committees with women enlist more female speakers, says study.
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.
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Female speakers. Nature 505, 445 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7483-445a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7483-445a