Abstract
Implicit and explicit biases impede the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields. Across career stages, attending conferences and presenting research are ways to spread scientific results, find job opportunities, and gain awards. Here, we present an analysis by gender of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting speaking opportunities from 2014 to 2016. We find that women were invited and assigned oral presentations less often than men. However, when we control for career stage, we see similar rates between women and men and women sometimes outperform men. At the same time, women elect for poster presentations more than men. Male primary conveners allocate invited abstracts and oral presentations to women less often and below the proportion of women authors. These results highlight the need to provide equal opportunity to women in speaking roles at scientific conferences as part of the overall effort to advance women in STEM.
Highlights
Implicit and explicit biases impede the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields
Attending conferences and interacting with colleagues is vital to the exchange of ideas within the science community
Recent research shows that extending a larger portion of invited and oral presentations to first-time presenters improves the overall parity in speaking opportunities12
Summary
Implicit and explicit biases impede the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields. Across career stages, attending conferences and presenting research are ways to spread scientific results, find job opportunities, and gain awards. We present an analysis by gender of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting speaking opportunities from 2014 to 2016. Male primary conveners allocate invited abstracts and oral presentations to women less often and below the proportion of women authors. These results highlight the need to provide equal opportunity to women in speaking roles at scientific conferences as part of the overall effort to advance women in STEM. The AGU Fall Meeting provides a high-powered test for equality in the allocation of speaking opportunities to men and women across a broad range of physical sciences. Note that authors selfidentify their gender, our binary analysis (female/women/male/ men) does not capture the spectrum of gender identity
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