Monday, February 09, 2015

Another "Yet another mostly male meeting (YAMMM)" from BGI

Well just saw an announcement for this meeting on Twitter: The First Announcement of The Tenth Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Genomics (ICG

And I hoped beyond hope that they would have a decent representation of women speakers at the meeting.  Why did I hope this?  Well, in the past, BGI run meetings have had incredibly skewed gender ratios of speakers.  See this post for a discussion of their past record: Kudos to the DOE-JGI for organizing a genomics meeting w/ a good gender ratio - no kudos to BGI - yet again

I guess I had hoped that perhaps they would try to change their practices after I and other people criticized them for their past record.  So - I went to the web site for the ICG10 meeting advertised in the Tweet.  Oh well, silly me for hoping.

On the front page they have 14 speakers they are promoting - all of them male.

Screen shot from ICG10 web site

On the announcement page they have a slightly different list where the ratio is 14:1
  • Jef Boeke, NYU Langone University School of Medicine, USA
  • Sydney Brenner, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Singapore
  • Charles Cantor, Sequenom, Inc., USA
  • Julio Celis, Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Denmark
  • Richard Durbin, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
  • Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology, USA
  • Thomas Hudson, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Canada
  • Maria Leptin, Chair of EMBO, Germany
  • Maynard Olson, University of Washington, USA
  • Aristides Patrinos, J. Craig Venter Institute, USA
  • Mu-ming Poo, University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • Richard Roberts, New England Biolabs, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, USA
  • Eils Roland, Heidelberg University, Germany
  • Mathias Uhlen, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Tilhuan Yilma, University of California, Davis, USA
Regardless, this is a consistent pattern of not having an even remotely balanced ratio of male to female speakers at their meetings.  And please, avoid their meetings until they change this.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Most recent post

My Ode to Yolo Bypass

Gave my 1st ever talk about Yolo Bypass and my 1st ever talk about Nature Photography. Here it is ...