Clarification added on 18 Feburary*.
Scientists are being urged to boycott a major international chemistry conference after its preliminary list of invited speakers and chairs featured no women.
An open letter on the website Change.org has called for a boycott of the 15th International Congress of Quantum Chemistry (ICQC), to be held in Beijing in June 2015. The move came after a list was posted on the conference website that allegedly showed no women among 24 speakers and 5 chairs and honorary chairs. The list, screenshots of which were seen by Nature, has since been taken down.
According to a blog by chemist Christopher Cramer of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the organizers had invited 27 scientists as speakers, only one of whom was a woman.
The letter, which has gained more than 600 signatures in 48 hours, was authored by three eminent theoretical chemists: Emily Carter of Princeton University in New Jersey; Laura Gagliardi of the University of Minnesota; and Anna Krylov of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
It reads: “It happened again — another major theoretical chemistry conference features an all-male program. One of us began boycotting such conferences 14 years ago and can’t believe that 14 years later we are still seeing such overt discrimination.”
In an e-mail to Nature, Josef Michl, president of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS), which runs the congress, said that the three letter writers had pointed out “a very serious problem” and were “justifiably concerned” with the partial list, which accounted for two-thirds of the eventual speakers.
According to Michl, Zhigang Shuai, a theoretical chemist from Tsinghua University who heads the conference organizing committee, had already asked Michl to send academy members the partial list and ask for suggestions of speakers — specifically women — to complete the line-up. The response to this had been excellent and the final list would be gender-balanced, Michl adds.
Michl says that it had been a mistake to release a partial and very imbalanced list, because “it can easily be misinterpreted”, adding that he would be sending a letter of apology to the three signatories and members of the IAQMS. Michl’s letter, a draft of which has been seen Nature, adds that a large fraction of the people already on the list were outside the control of the organizing committee, including medalists and newly elected IAQMS members and previous organizers.
However, Carter says that asking for female speakers after publicizing the all-male list of speakers looked like “tokenism” and that organizers should have solicited advice long before posting the list. “Asking afterward definitely is a subtle message that we ‘need to add some women, let’s just dig around the dregs’,” she says.
“There are mediocre scientists of both genders, but there are also outstanding scientists of both genders. And to not have bothered to think about this — or to think about the message it sends to every young scientists when you have a meeting that only has men speaking — is deeply discouraging,” she says. “This happens over and over again, and it’s not reasonable.”
Organizers of the ICQC say, however, that the message sent to members, which included the partial list of 24 speakers and request for further suggested speakers — specifically women — was sent on 9 February. This was done before the partial list was posted on the conference website, on 14 February.
The letter includes a link to the Women in Theoretical Chemistry web directory, which lists more than 300 female scientists holding tenured and tenure-track academic positions or equivalents in related areas. “Many of these women are far more distinguished than many of the men being invited to speak at these conferences,” the letter reads.
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*The article was amended to include the ICQC organizers’ clarification that the request for additional speakers was sent out five days before the list was posted on the website.
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I don’t mean to continue to pile on, but surely it should be recognized that the excuse “a large fraction of the people already on the list was outside the control of the organizing committee, including medalists and newly-elected IAQMS members and previous organizers” merely serves to illustrate that extreme gender imbalance permeates all IAQMS activities.
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Merely adding women to the speaker roster does not solve the problem. In fact, it only strengthens the internalized bias many hold, that “men are better than women at quantitative/analytical reasoning; however since it is beneficial to be ‘politically correct’ in 2014, men need to help women be better represented by enforcing a strict gender ratio at conferences”.
I find it extremely disturbing if not infuriating that women are still assessed on a different scale from men after establishing themselves in academia as outstanding members despite all the sexism they have faced along the way.
What message does this send to all the young female students/postdocs pursuing theoretical chemistry and aspiring to join the ranks of academia? We are all but convinced that no matter what talent we possess, no matter how clever our ideas are, no matter how much we demonstrate to the world we are indeed the cream of the crop — we will never be recognized as such (equal to our male counterparts!) due to this bias.
Why are there so few women in this field, then, indeed?
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I will not defend the inequality of women in any profession! However, 1 woman out of 27 people was on the speaker invite list! That’s 4%. My question is: What is the percentage of women currently engaged in and publishing new and current articles in Quantum Chemistry? If it’s more than 4%, then there might be a problem!
Should there be more than 4% women engaged in Quantum Chemistry? Perhaps! Maybe! But if there isn’t, that is another and separate issue to be addressed, and not necessarily the problem of the speaker invite committee!
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After seeing my remarks above, the organizer alerted me that in fact he had sent an email asking academy members for more suggested speakers including females five days prior to posting of the all-male speaker list. I immediately alerted Nature so as to correct the original blog post, which led to the clarification above. I would have to say this timeline only makes the case of discrimination stronger, since he did not wait to properly construct a speaker list representative of our profession, which, in answer to the query above is far higher than 4% female.
Waiting five days before posting an all male speaker list is surely not an appropriate amount of time to get ideas from busy people, reach consensus among a committee, send out invitations, and get acceptances. All of that should have been done before anything was posted, which is the essence of the harm done here.
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This debacle seems to be a prime example of a tempest in a teapot.
From the discussion and links above, my interpretation of what occurred is the following:
1) The organizers of a major chemistry conference sit down and come up with a list of speakers, with the restraints that some are pre-defined, and those scientists who in the recent past already lectured in the conference series should not be considered.
2) With two thirds of the speakers selected, they, commendably, recognize that the gender balance is skewed. They ask for help and recommendations from colleagues on filling the remaining slots, properly noting that more women would be desirable.
3) In order to get attention toward their conference, the organizers proceed to put up a partial list of speakers on the web, a common or at least not rare practice. Being natural instead of social scientists, it probably never even occurs to them that someone would be offended by a list of good scientists within their field. Perhaps having a cultural background where gender equality isn’t constantly being discussed plays a role as well.
4) A few prominent scientists within the field see the list of speakers, not knowing that the list is only partial and not final. Having first-hand experience of gender-based discrimination, to them, the absence of female speakers immediately jumps out.
5) Before contacting the conference organizers, the offended scientists start a boycotting campaign against the conference.
Mistakes were made by both parties. The conference organizers should have clearly communicated that the published list of speakers was preliminary, perhaps even waited until the final programme was complete. The boycott organizers should have started by asking the conference organizers “What’s up with this female-free speakers list?”. To err is, proverbially, very human, and scientists are just as human as the rest of the population.
Had tempers been tempered, the community would now not be in such turmoil. For the conference itself it is of course unfortunate. I fear that, due to the too-quick-on-the-draw boycott campaign, the female speakers of the final list cannot help but feel that they really are after-thought additions, even when that never was the intention. Then again, this being a prominent conference, all speakers, regardless of gender or background, will probably be recognized as the great scientist they are.
This whole exercise, although misplaced, at least serves as a reminder that the majority of the scientific community really does not accept discrimination. In the end, perhaps the undeservedly tarnished reputation of one specific chemistry conference isn’t such a high price to pay for this awareness to be further ingrained. Even though significant progress has taken place, discrimination unfortunately still does exist, and should naturally be abolished to the highest degree humanly possible.
Cordially, A Caucasian Male Scientist