Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements

Sarvenaz Sarabipour; Benjamin Schwessinger; Fiona N. Mumoki; Aneth D. Mwakilili; Aziz Khan; Humberto J. Debat; Pablo J. Sáez; Samantha Seah; Tomislav Mestrovic

Conferences in many disciplines lack participant diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity and other identity groups as chairs and speakers (8, 10, 43) . 97% of 270 conferences that we examined lacked a statement of gender balance or diversity ( Figure 2 , Table S9 ) (8) . In particular, women are underrepresented among conference and symposium session chairs, plenary or keynote speakers, invited lecturers, or as panelists in a broad range of academic meetings (8, (44) (45) (46) . In our examination of 270 conferences in various disciplines, out of the meetings reporting names of chairs, organizers and invited speakers online, only 43% and 34% of conferences achieved gender parity for conference chairs and session chairs respectively; 41% achieved gender parity for conference organizers or steering committees; 32% and 34% achieved gender parity for keynote and plenary speakers respectively and only 17% had equal numbers of male and female invited or featured speakers (Table S9, Figure 2 ). The process by which speakers are selected, including speakers chosen from abstracts submissions, can generally be improved by removing intended and unintended biases (47) . The current lack of diversity hinders advancement in scholarship, and it is especially discouraging to junior researchers (48) . The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.022079 doi: bioRxiv preprint