Murdoch University neuroscientists are leading the charge to create high-quality, gender balanced speaker line-ups at scientific conferences. It’s a new way to put a stop to manels – the all-too-common all male speaker line ups at scientific conferences.

Dr Ann-Maree Vallence and Dr Hakuei Fujiyama from Murdoch University and Dr Mark Hinder from the University of Tasmania have developed a world first, data-driven approach to speaker selection to directly address gender imbalance in invited speakers at conferences.

“Presenting at conferences is a critical part of scientific career development and so the low ratio of female representation is cause for concern,” Dr Vallence said.

Addressing the imbalance

A recent report by BiasWatchNeuro demonstrated that only 27 percent of invited speakers at around 400 neuroscience conferences between 2014 and 2018 were women, and more than 80 percent of conferences had less than 50 percent women.

“It is vital to develop approaches that ensure the high scientific standards expected in conferences programs to be used in conjunction with policies and quotas to overcome gender disparity in this arena,” Dr Vallence said.

 “The traditional approach to speaker selection is based on who the organising committee knows, or whose work they are familiar due to overlap with their own research disciplines.

"We saw a critical need for a data-driven approach to provide credibility to speaker selection.”

The team developed a two-step approach to invited speaker selection, aiming to develop conference speaker lists of high quality scientists with an even balance of gender represented.

The team, together with Graduate Diploma students Brigid Bolton, Ellika Carson, Courtney McAuliffe, Chelsea Moran, and Tayla Stucke at Murdoch University, audited the top ten neuroscience journals, recording highly cited papers, and the first and last authors listed on the papers. The gender, field-weighted citation impact and total publication count of these authors were recorded.

The researchers used the data to build a database of high quality scientists from which speakers could be selected for conferences.

The researchers believe this data-driven approach can be used to develop high quality conference programs without gender disparity, as well as generating a positive spiral for increased diversity more broadly in STEM.

“The database identifies potential speakers based on scientific impact metrics that are frequently used by researchers, hiring committees, and funding bodies,” Dr Fujiyama said.

“This measure could also be used in other STEM areas with evidence of gender disparity in conference programs such as sport and exercise medicine, evolutionary biology, mathematics, ecology, geophysical sciences, and microbiology.

“Presentation of science from broader perspectives is important, and ultimately will increase the impact of science in society.”

The research was published in PLOS ONE.