A quick—and far from precise—nose count at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Amsterdam in August 1985 showed that 20 percent of the participants were women. But while many women presented posters or were major research contributors to the work reported at the addresses, they were conspicuous by their absence in the major symposia and the mini-symposia.
We recently did a nose count of women authors in two randomly chosen issues each of two leading journals in the biosciences— the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the Journal of Cell Biology— both of which list the author's first name. Female names made up 19 percent (57 out of 300) and 18 percent (48 out of 280), respectively, of the authors' names. These figures agree remarkably well with the attendance of women at the International Congress.
Curiously, the magic 20 percent also agrees with attendance at the 1986 summer meeting of the ...
