PIXABAY, RAWPIXELThe roster of invited speakers from four major virology conferences has been dominated by men over the last three decades, according to a recent analysis appearing in the August issue of the Journal of Virology. While these trends are “bleak,” the authors write in their report, “the future is promising” due to a recent uptick in female inclusion.
This report “highlighted what [we] have known for years; scientific and organizing committees need to do a better job with speaker diversity,” says American Society for Virology (ASV) president Stacey Schultz-Cherry of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in an email to The Scientist. ASV’s annual conference was among those included in the report.
The exclusion of women in scientific conferences is hotly discussed, but often, there aren’t sufficient data to support either side of the argument, write the authors. Virologists Ann Palmenberg and Robert Kalejta of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, sought to lend credence to claims of unequal representation by digging through past line-ups of invited speakers from four key conferences in their field.
The researchers tallied male and female scientists invited to speak ...
