Analysis of scientific society honors reveals disparities.

Daniel S. Himmelstein,Matthew R. Gazzara,Ariel A. Hippen,Trang T. Le,Casey S. Greene

doi:10.1016/j.cels.2021.07.007

Abstract

Delivering a keynote talk at a conference organized by a scientific society or being named as a fellow by such a society indicates that a scientist is held in high regard by their colleagues. To explore if the distribution of such indicators of esteem in the field of bioinformatics reflects the composition of this field, we compared the gender, name origin, and country of affiliation of 412 honorees from the "International Society for Computational Biology" (75 fellows and 337 keynote speakers) with over 170,000 last authorships on computational biology papers between 1993 and 2019. The proportion of honors bestowed on women was similar to that of the field's overall last authorship rate. However, names of East Asian origin have been persistently underrepresented among honorees. Moreover, there were roughly twice as many honors bestowed on scientists with an affiliation in the United States as expected based on literature authorship. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.

Highlights

Scientists’ roles in society include identifying important topics of study, undertaking an investigation of those topics, and disseminating their findings broadly
We focused on the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), its honorary fellows, and its affiliated international meetings that aim to have a global reach: Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB)
We curated a dataset of ISCB honors that included 412 keynote speakers at international ISCB-associated conferences (ISMB and RECOMB) as well as ISCB Fellows

Summary

Introduction

Scientists’ roles in society include identifying important topics of study, undertaking an investigation of those topics, and disseminating their findings broadly. The scientific enterprise is largely self-governing: scientists act as peer reviewers on papers and grants, comprise hiring committees in academia, make tenure decisions, and select which applicants will be admitted to doctoral programs. A lack of diversity in science could lead to pernicious biases that hamper the extent to which scientific findings are relevant to minoritized communities. At medical conferences in the US and Canada, the proportion of female speakers is increasing at a modest rate (Ruzycki et al, 2019). Gender bias appears to influence funding decisions: an examination of scoring of proposals in Canada found that reviewers asked to assess the science produced a smaller gender gap in scoring than reviewers asked to assess the applicant (Witteman et al, 2019)

Methods

Results

Conclusion