PIXABAY, CLAUDE_STAR
Women are less likely to be invited and assigned speaking opportunities at conferences, according to a study published yesterday (April 24) in Nature Communications.
Heather Ford of the University of Cambridge says in a statement that she and her colleagues were motivated to investigate the gender distribution of conference speakers after finding there were “too many conference sessions” with just one female presenter, or none at all.
Ford and her colleagues investigated the lists of speakers at American Geophysical Union (AGU) meetings between 2014 and 2016 to see how many male and female speakers were either assigned talks—meaning they’d submitted an abstract and had been accepted—or invited to give a presentation by conference organizers. The analysis revealed that women generally had fewer speaker opportunities than ...
