Category Archives: YAMMM

05Mar / 2020

What’s worse than not cancelling your conference during #COVID19? How about a #MANEL #YAMMM during #COVID19.

Well got invited to this meeting "Non-Coding RNAs In Biology & Medicine Conference".  And I looked up the meeting so I could see if the meeting was still on and if yes, to then encourage the organizers to encourage them to postpone the meeting to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus going around.

And alas, the meeting still on - April 2-4, 2020
As a side note, it is around the corner from where I used to work (it is in the same general area as where TIGR used to me).

And, alas, on top of the meeting apparently still being on, it is also what appears to be a MANEL - a meeting with a highly skewed gender balance of speakers.  I say "what appears to be" since I just do not have time right now to do what I frequently do which is to look up people's personal websites to see how they describe themselves in terms of gender.  So I am basing this entirely on names and appearance but it does not look like a good balance.

Not a good look Johns Hopkins and USUHS,

#1 - due to #COVID19 this conference should be cancelled
#2 - due to the apparently extreme gender skew for the speakers, this conference is one I would encourage people to not attend anyway.




















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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in manel, YAMMM

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07Oct / 2019

Yet another mostly male microbiome meeting – #YAMMMM – a microbiome #manel in San Diego





Well, just when I thought the microbiome space was getting better about diversity of speakers.  I got called twice today from someone trying to get me to sign up for this meeting and I got an email about it too.

The meeting: "Gen-Next Probiotics and Microbiome - Advanced Therapeutics and Sequencing Congress” to be held on 6th and 7th February 2020 in San Diego, USA."

Speakers from the email:
• Maya Ivanjesku, Chief Scientific Officer, Dakota Biotech
• Bharath Prithiviraj, Senior Scientist, City university of New York
• Ross Youngs, CEO & Founder, Biosortia Pharmaceuticals
• Seth Crosby, Director, Research Collaborations, Washington University School of Medicine
• Elliot Friedman, Senior Research Investigator, University of Pennsylvania
• Peter Leighton, CEO, ProSperity Bioscience
• Tal Korem, Assistant Professor, Columbia University in New York City
• Chuck Collins, Professor, East Tennessee State University
• Joseph C Ellis, Sr. Staff Scientist, OAK Ridge National Laboratory
• Aubrey Levitt, CEO/Co-Founder, Postbiotics +
• M. Andrea Azcarate-Peril, Director, Microbiome Core Facility, University of North Carolina
• Arun Bhunia, Professor of Food Microbiology, Purdue University
• A. Bruce Johnson, PhD, Corporate Vice President, Business Development, Phibro Animal Health Corporation
• Michael Leonidas Chikindas, Microbiologist, Rutgers University

I looked up these people and their descriptions on various websites and with this information and other I assigned them to M vs F.  I realize this approach is imperfect.  I label my inferences below: M in yellow and F in green.

• Maya Ivanjesku, Chief Scientific Officer, Dakota Biotech
• Bharath Prithiviraj, Senior Scientist, City university of New York
• Ross Youngs, CEO & Founder, Biosortia Pharmaceuticals
• Seth Crosby, Director, Research Collaborations, Washington University School of Medicine
• Elliot Friedman, Senior Research Investigator, University of Pennsylvania
• Peter Leighton, CEO, ProSperity Bioscience
• Tal Korem, Assistant Professor, Columbia University in New York City
• Chuck Collins, Professor, East Tennessee State University
• Joseph C Ellis, Sr. Staff Scientist, OAK Ridge National Laboratory
• Aubrey Levitt, CEO/Co-Founder, Postbiotics +
• M. Andrea Azcarate-Peril, Director, Microbiome Core Facility, University of North Carolina
• Arun Bhunia, Professor of Food Microbiology, Purdue University
• A. Bruce Johnson, PhD, Corporate Vice President, Business Development, Phibro Animal Health Corporation
• Michael Leonidas Chikindas, Microbiologist, Rutgers University

So that comes to 11M vs 3F.

Or ~ 80% M.

No thanks.  I will skip this YAMMMM.  And you should too. 



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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in manel, microbiome, YAMMM, YAMMMM

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07Mar / 2019

Kisaco Research – sponsoring YAMMMM – yet another mostly male microbiome meeting – again – not their first biased rodeo

Well, sadly, I am not shocked by this. Disappointed, yes.  But not shocked.  Just got an announcement sent to me for this meeting: Animal Microbiome USA 2019 | Kisaco Research

Happening next week in Kansas City.  Run by Kisaco Research.  I have written about their propensity to have meetings where most of the speakers were white men previously.  See
People from the company claimed they were going to do better in the future.  And maybe they have for some meetings.  But alas not for this one.  By my estimate the speakers are ~ 85% male.  15% female.  Grrr.  Not good.  Not representative of the field.  Most  likely some sort of implicit or explicit bias going on.   


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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in gender bias, kisaco research, microbiomes, STEMdiversity, YAMMM, YAMMMM

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26Feb / 2019

A conference where all the speakers are women – happening this week #YAMMM #manels #STEMDiversity #GenderBias

It was now six years ago that I wrote here wondering if it would be a good idea to have a conference where all the speakers were women.

See The Tree of Life: A conference where the speakers are all women?

I wrote about this because of the general issue with excessive numbers of conferences where most or all of the speakers were men.  I had come up with a term for such meetings - YAMMM.  Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting.  I even made some little pics / images to represent such YAMMMs.




And I blogged and Tweeted about such meetings a lot (and still do).  See STEM Diversity posts and related links here for example.

When I wrote the post I was wondering if this would be a good counter to the problem of these YAMMMs (also called manels by others).  The feedback (much of it on Twitter) was really useful, mostly.  And over the years I pondered doing such a thing but to be honest, never felt really comfortable with the idea.  I worried about some of the possible negative sides of doing this, such as how the speakers might get unwanted attention and critiqued for being selected solely because of their gender.  And I also worried about whether this would be viewed in some way as a form of "reverse discrimination".

But I did try to do other analogous things where one reversed the normal gender skew (which is almost always towards males).  For example, when I found out, kind of at the last minute, I was speaking at a meeting with a very very skewed gender ratio of speakers, I gave my talk, but changed only referenced the work of women in the field.  See What to do when you realize the meeting you are speaking at is a YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting)?  And in a class I teach I decided to basically replace most of the white male scientists I had been referencing with women and people of color.  Small things I know.  But I was pleased when people noticed these efforts and commented on how it made them think a bit about the examples we use when we give talks and teach.

Mind you, I have organized or helped organize a lot of meetings and seminar series since that post six years ago.  And I have tried to have the speakers at these be representative of diverse backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, career stage, type of institution, and more.  But I myself have never gone to the next level and flipped the standard gender bias on its head.

Thus I was intrigued in September last year when I found out that my friend and colleague Dr. Rob Knight was co-organizing (with Dr. Sandrine Miller-Montgomery) a meeting in San Diego on "microbiomes" (my main area of research) where all of the invited speakers were women.  I blogged briefly about this here: 1st annual CMI International Microbiome Meeting (CIMM) w/ a great #STEMDiversity statement & plan.  I include below the material from the conference site that I included in that post:

On behalf of Dr. Rob Knight, the Center for Microbiome Innovation is pleased to host the 1st annual CMI International Microbiome Meeting (CIMM) on February 27–28, 2019 in San Diego. Additionally, we are pleased to announce that the 1st Urobiome Meeting on February 26, 2019, led by Linda Brubaker MD, will occur in conjunction with CIMM to make the most of your visit to San Diego. 
During the first day of this event, leading researchers will present on the emerging science of the Urobiome and its recently discovered implications for human health, including common conditions such as urinary tract infection, urinary incontinence and bladder overactivity. 
The following two days will feature high-impact presentations on the latest discoveries in microbiome sciences, with sessions on topics ranging from the microbiome in human disease and wellness and the metabolome, to primate microbiomes, to environmental and ocean microbiomes. For this first edition, we have decided to demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers. Be prepared to hear from fantastic presenters such as Dr. Katie Amato (Northwestern University), Dr. Rita Colwell (University of Maryland), Dr. Merete Eggesbo (Norwegian Institute of Public Health), Dr Susan Prescott (University of Western Australia), Dr. Lita Proctor (NIH), and many more!
In addition, I agreed to serve on a panel at the end of the meeting discussing "Breaking the Glass Ceiling: How do we solve the gender imbalance in STEM?" (I had found out about their plans for the meetings when they invited me to serve on the panel). As someone who has critiqued meetings for egregiously skewed gender ratios of speakers and as someone who has called attention to in particular the many microbiome focused meetings with gender balance issues, the whole idea behind this conference was in essence represented by this statement:
For this first edition, we have decided to demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers
This was certainly a bold move by the organizers. So - now zoom to today.

Today I am heading down to San Diego for the meeting.  And yesterday I found out that there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal apparently critiquing the plan for having only female speakers.  It is entitled "No Men Allowed" by James Freeman. Alas, I do not have access to the editorial as it is behind a paywall.  There is also an editorial by Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute web site: Can the University of California bar males from presenting research at a biology conference?

So -- clearly, some people do not like the idea of a conference where all the speakers are women.  I confess I am still torn about the whole concept for the reasons I mentioned above.  However, even though I am torn, I do think it is important to push back against the clear implicit and explicit biases that have occurred against women in relation to speaking at conferences.  There is an extensive literature on this topic and on the topic of implicit and explicit biases that may be involved.  And I think this conference is an important form of push back.  The organizers may in fact get a bunch of grief over not having any male speakers.  But they will also provide an important venue for people to get challenged.  Conferences with only male speakers occurred for many many years without too many people raising any complaints.  And now some still occur but they are generally frowned upon in most places and are becoming rarer at least in my fields.  So in a way this conference can serve a similar function as Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dream of an all female US Supreme Court (this analogy was pointed out to me by Karen James). In reference to this concept Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:
"So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."
Of course, gender bias is just one of the forms of bias that happens in STEM fields and with STEM conferences.  It is not the only issue we need to worry about or work on.  But it is a big one.  And the organizers of this meeting have done something bold and risky to confront this issue.

I will report more from the meeting. I would also love to hear what other people think about the plan for this conference.


PS. Thanks to multiple colleagues for some private feedback on this conference.  If I get permission I will post details of their comments.





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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in gender bias, meetings, STEMdiversity, YAMMM

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29Nov / 2018

YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting – Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit 2019

Uggh. In the middle of a faculty retreat and saw a Tweet about this meeting and could not help looking at their speaker list. And am not impressed.  Too many male speakers.

Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit 2019
A Meeting to Hear Men (81%) Not Women (19%) Discussing Microbiota*, **
YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting

Gail A. Hecht, MD, MS, Loyola University Medical Center (U.S.)
Jack A. Gilbert, PhD, University of Chicago (U.S.)
Session Moderator: Giovanni Barbara, MD, University of Bologna (Italy)
Suzanne Devkota, PhD, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (U.S.)
Magnus Simren, MD, PhD, AGAF, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
Christoph Thaiss, PhD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Session Moderator: Purna Kashyap, MBBS, Mayo Clinic
Eric Martens, PhD, University of Michigan (U.S.)
Liping Zhao, PhD, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (U.S.)
Paul Cotter, PhD, University College Cork (Ireland)
Robert Britton, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine (U.S.)
Joseph Zackular, PhD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Premysl Bercik, MD, McMaster University (Canada)
Dirk Haller, PhD, Technical University of Munich (Germany)
Eran Elinav, MD, PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel)
Karine Clément, MD, PhD, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (France)
Alexander Khoruts, MD, University of Minnesota (U.S.)
Diane Hoffmann, JD, MS, University of Maryland (U.S.)
Francisco Guarner, MD, PhD, University Hospital Vall d’Hebron (Spain)
Dylan Dodd, PhD, Stanford University (U.S.)
Stanley L. Hazen, MD, PhD, Cleveland Clinic (U.S.)
Rohit Loomba, MD, University of California, San Diego (U.S.)
Gary D. Wu, MD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Session Moderator: Hania Szajewska, MD, Medical University of Warsaw (Poland)
Purna Kashyap, MBBS, Mayo Clinic (U.S.)
Geoffrey Preidis, MD, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine (U.S.)
Pinaki Panigrahi, University of Nebraska (U.S.)

* Gender inferred by Google Searches, looking at personal websites, and some guessing
** Assuming just M:F genders which is clearly a bad assumption

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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in gender bias, gender ratio, YAMMM

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19Mar / 2018

YAMMMM: Yet another mostly male microbiome meeting – Microbiome Therapeutics Europe Meeting


YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting:
Microbiome Therapeutics Europe Meeting

From their speakers page I estimated gender balance of speakers 

19:6 M:F 
or 75% male


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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in YAMMM, YAMMMM

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16Mar / 2018

YAMMMM – Yet another mostly male microbiome meeting – 2018 Translational Microbiome Conference

Uggh.

Here is a sad sad example of a YAMMMM - yet another mostly male microbiome meeting (a phrase first coined by Carly Rosewarne).

The 2018 Translational Microbiome Meeting.
https://www.microbiomeconference.com

From my estimates there are 47 speakers of which 41 are male (note - these are inferences of gender and may be inaccurate).  That comes out to an estimate of 87% male speakers.  That is just not good.  The microbiome field has a good sample pool of people of diverse backgrounds that could be speakers at meetings and thus meetings that are this skewed in diversity should not be supported.

  

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UPDATE 3/20/2018

The organizer of the meeting Mollie Roth has written to me to object to my post. She says she tried to have a more diverse collection of speakers. She says she invited many other women to speak, some who did not answer, and some who could not come, and some women who could not come sent men to replace them.

She wrote (I have removed names here)

  • XXX from YYY was committed to speak and had to drop out due to work commitments, 
  • that XXX of YYY was invited to speak and declined, 
  • that XXX of YYY was invited to speak and choose to send a man instead, 
  • that XXX committed to speak and had to drop out due to other commitments and is sending a man instead
  • that XXX of YYY was invited and never responded
  • that XXX andXXX of YYY were invited and never responded
That’s 7 women off the top of my head without going into my files and pulling up all the ones that were invited and never responded or declined because they could not make it or accepted and ultimately sent a man from their companies instead. I wonder what that number alone would do to your stats?

I responded that I did not feel this was in any way sufficient but she disagrees.  I pointed her to some suggestions for how to run a more diverse meeting that do not simply involve inviting more women to speak.

She also noted that she offended by my post and that I did not continue a private conversation we had on Linked In regarding this meeting.  I note I did not continue the private conversation, and chose to post this post, because her response to my private critique made it seem that she was not interested in having a private conversation about the meeting.

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UPDATE 2.  3/20/2018 3 PM PST.

The organizer of the meeting Mollie Roth apparently thinks that I have deleted her "comment" on this blog.  I have not done that.  The 1st comment made to this blog is the one where she is accusing me of deleting a comment.  I note - blog comments are open for anyone to post here for 2 weeks and then comments get moderated.  I checked the Blogger SPAM comment filter but there is nothing there.  So I can only conclude she did not make a comment.  I emailed her to try to find out what she meant but she did not answer directly.  I think what she may have meant is that she wanted me to post the full email of her communication with me to the blog but I am honestly not sure. I am pondering posting all my communications with her but am not sure if that is a good idea at this point.

So for now I am posting the entirety of her first message to me which I had edited a bit above.  I am still editing out identifying features of others however. See below.

Professor Eisen

XXX was kind enough to forward your email to me encouraging him not to participate in the Arrowhead conference. 

Really? Rather than engaging in a conversation with me on LinkedIn and learning more about this year’s gender imbalance, you are posting about it on your blog and reaching out to speakers encouraging them to drop out. 

Would you care to take a moment to learn that -


  • XXX from YYY was committed to speak and had to drop out due to work commitments, 
  • that XXX of YYY was invited to speak and declined, 
  • that XXX of YYY was invited to speak and choose to send a man instead, 
  • that XXX committed to speak and had to drop out due to other commitments and is sending a man instead
  • that XXX of YYY was invited and never responded
  • that XXX andXXX of YYY were invited and never responded

That’s 7 women off the top of my head without going into my files and pulling up all the ones that were invited and never responded or declined because they could not make it or accepted and ultimately sent a man from their companies instead. I wonder what that number alone would do to your stats?

I will ask, although I am sure you will neither respond nor do the right thing, that you primarily stop contacting speakers to ask them not to participate. But secondarily you should really if not retract your offensive post add some of this information to inform it and perhaps encourage the women to own some of this issue themselves this year.

I am sure you will do neither, unfortunately. I will be sure we do address this issue in our conference blog and in our social media channels.
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UPDATE 3 3/20 11 PM PST

I guess my inclusion of this additional information was not enough for the organizer Mollie Roth.  She seemed to imply that I was hiding her explanations from the public.  So ... I am going to post them all here.

This all started with a Linked in message from her to me on March 5 telling me about this meeting.
I wrote back a few days later - obviously not enthusiastic about this meeting



She then wrote back, clearly not impressed with me.  I am not sure if she would be OK with me posting all of the comments she made in that thread so I am just posting the most relevant one here which is how she ended the discussion.

 

Sounded to me like she did not want anything to do with me ever again.  I pondered what to do for a while.  Was writing back a good or a bad thing?  I did not know.  But I decided to try. I wrote a response and tried to send it but the message would not go through.  I assumed she blocked me or disconnected / delinked me (I don't know what that is called on Linkedin).  I thought about emailing her back but the last message from her implied to me that she wanted nothing more to do with me.

So a few days later I wrote a blog post about YAMMMMs in relation to this meeting.  And then I wrote this blog post here.  And then I engages in some discussion about the post on Twitter and asked some of the speakers to not speak at the meeting.  I emailed one that I knew well and he forwarded the email to Mollie. She then sent me an email. I have deleted names and other identifying features of other people from this and other messages.

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Professor Eisen 
XXX was kind enough to forward your email to me encouraging him not to participate in the Arrowhead conference. 
Really? Rather than engaging in a conversation with me on LinkedIn and learning more about this year’s gender imbalance, you are posting about it on your blog and reaching out to speakers encouraging them to drop out.  
Would you care to take a moment to learn that -
 XXX from YYY was committed to speak and had to drop out due to work commitments,   
that XXX of YYY  was invited to speak and declined, 
that XXX of YYY was invited to speak and choose to send a man instead, 
that XXX committed to speak and had to drop out due to other commitments and is sending a man instea
that XXX of YYY was invited and never responded that XXX and XXX of YYY were invited and never responded 
That’s 7 women off the top of my head without going into my files and pulling up all the ones that were invited and never responded or declined because they could not make it or accepted and ultimately sent a man from their companies instead. I wonder what that number alone would do to your stats? 
I will ask, although I am sure you will neither respond nor do the right thing, that you primarily stop contacting speakers to ask them not to participate. But secondarily you should really if not retract your offensive post add some of this information to inform it and perhaps encourage the women to own some of this issue themselves this year 
I am sure you will do neither, unfortunately. I will be sure we do address this issue in our conference blog and in our social media channels. 

Mollie
Mollie Roth, J.D.Managing PartnerPGx Consulting

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I wrote back

Mollie 
In our conversation on Linked In you basically told me you were not interested in discussing the issue. Your last message was "I am sorry I reached out to you and will not make the mistake of doing so again. Good day." 
Regardless, I tried to write back but was unable to respond to you via the messaging system.  I assumed that was because you blocked me in some way.  
Given that you did not seem to want to discuss it further in private, I decided to take it public.  I would be more than happy to add whatever response you want to my blog post or you can post there. I stand by my critique of your meeting.  It is not enough to just invite a few women to speak in my opinion and there is much literature on this out there if you are interested.  In order to achieve a diverse meeting one must work a bit more on it.  If you are interested in suggestions for how to do this, please see this part of my blog.
https://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/p/posts-on-women-in-science.html 

Jonathan
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She then wrote back
Jonathan  
I neither blocked you nor impeded your communication in any way on LinkedIn or anywhere else. I have my doubts that you are so easily put off, I think you prefer the hype and hyperbole of being the individual who “outs” the bad actors, regardless of whether they are or they are not. 
I take offense at your characterization that I did no more than invite a few women, I do substantial research and go well beyond a bald faced email with no followup. I know many of these women personally from interactions over the years from prior conferences - where we have agreed women were well represented - but saying my conference fails on this front from a single year is a slant helpful only to you. 
I will be more than happy to have you demonstrate your acuity with gathering these women and getting them to the table next year. Writing about these issues from an academic perspective is one thing, actually driving engagement is quite another.  
In fact I will be more than happy to make a space for you on the podium this year if you would like to come speak about these issues and commit to lending your knowledgeable hand as a consultant next year to demonstrate how these “suggestions” work in practice. What say you Professor Eisen, willing to put your academic suggestions to the test in the real world? 
So I responded
Mollie 
In your 1st communication with me in September of 2015, you wrote 
"Let me start by applauding you for the commentary in your blog post on overselling the microbiome about the gender imbalance in Dr. Roizen’s conference. " 
So back then you supported a public critique of a meeting in relation to its gender balance of speakers.  This is why I wrote back to you privately on Linked In in such a shocked state regarding your current meeting. 
So -what has changed since then?  Your meeting has an unbalanced gender for speakers.  And I bogged about it.  Just like I did previously and which you applauded me for. 
Again, I stand by my critique of your meeting.  And no, I am definitely not interested in attending it in any way or for any purpose.  And I will continue to recommend other people not attend it or speak at it as it now stands.  If you run a meeting with a better gender balance I would be more than happy to participate in some way in a discussion of gender issues in STEM.
She wrote back
It is not until one is unfairly targeted that one understands how skewed people pointing these types of things out are. Knowing what I know now about your skewed attacks, I was perhaps unfair in assuming others were acting in bad faith. I d not believe you are acting in good faith, nor do I believe you will do so. I think you like the fight, I think you like the hyperbole and I think you like pointing fingers with no intention of trying to understand the other side. 
I wrote back

Ok. 
Believe what you want. 
I still welcome any comments you would like to make on my blog and whether you believe it or not I truly believed you did not want to hear a anything more from me in private.  I certainly could have made more of an effort to figure that out.  But your response led me to believe that that path was closed.
Molly wrote
If you were sincere Professor Eisen you would amend or include further information you have been provided on your blog post yourself. Of course I am going to contradict what you said or have a different perspective but it really only has substantial meaning if you are willing to say “ok hang on, here are some things I did not know” and further inform the conversation yourself. 
I will get in touch with our speakers and let them know the nature of your communications and how you have refused to take the information you have been provided and adjust your outrage. 
So I decided to do what she asked.  It seemed only fair.  And I updated my post with a summary of her comments.  I did not say I agreed with her but I did try to provide her perspective.


I thought I was doing what she asked.  To give her side of the story.  I did not think I was obliged to agree with her but she then wrote back something which I just do not understand.
I just went to remove my response to your post realizing the fact that you are not really interested din the reality of these situations to find you had removed it and, no surprise, recharacterized it all in your own words. That’s not open discourse Professor Eisen now is it, more evidence that you simply like being the finger pointer and are not actually interested in honest and open engagement. 
This was so strange because she never posted a comment to my blog.  I went and checked SPAM and comments awaiting moderation and -- nothing.  I was very very confused.  So I wrote back

Mollie 
I have no idea what you are talking about here. 
When did you write a response and post it to my blog?  Did you submit a comment? I have no record of that. How could you then remove it?  How could I then remove it?  You have not as far as I know posted any comment anywhere. I have certainly not removed a single thing you posted to my blog nor would I. 
She then wrote
Oh my goodness. You literally wrote on your blog that the organizer responded on your blog and then recharacterized what I said and you are now playing DUMB?
So so weird.  I did not delete any comment.  She never made any comment.  And now her explanation what that she was claiming I had written that she made a comment.  But I did not write that.  My guess is she either (1) thought that her email to me was automatically posted to my blog (seems unlikely that she thought that) or (2) that I had posted her comments to my blog directly and then deleted them.  Seemed like 2 was the only plausible option But since she had already told me she did not want me to post her comments directly to my blog this seemed weird. So I wrote back again.  

No Mollie 
I wrote "The organizer of the meeting Mollie Roth has written to me to object to my post"
I did not say you wrote on my blog. 
And when I asked you in email if I should post your comments to my blog directly you wrote 
"If you were sincere Professor Eisen you would amend or include further information you have been provided on your blog post yourself. Of course I am going to contradict what you said or have a different perspective but it really only has substantial meaning if you are willing to say “ok hang on, here are some things I did not know” and further inform the conversation yourself. " 
Clearly saying you did not want me to just post what you wrote.
I did not hear back immediately so I wrote a follow up:
Here is a proposal.  I will post the entire contents of these emails to my blog in the interest of transparency.  Are you OK with that?
And she wrote back:
It is your blog Professor, you are free to do with it anything you wish, clearly
So here we are.  I still do not know what she meant by me deleting her comments from my blog, which I did not do.  But in the interest of transparency I am posting all of our emails here.

--------------------------

UPDATE 4. 3/21/18

Mollie Roth, the organizer of the meeting sent an email to all the speakers of the meeting and cc'd me.  In the interest of transparency, especially since she accused me of deleting comments that she never posted here, I feel comfortable posting her email here.
Dear Speakers  
It has come to our attention that you may have received a message from a Professor Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis encouraging you to boycott the Arrowhead conference next month because of the lack of gender diversity on the speaking faculty. 
Unfortunately Professor Eisen is absolutely correct, the speaking faculty is predominantly male this year. Highlighting the role of women in this industry has been a top priority since I started this conference four years ago and prior years were much more gender balanced. Professor Eisen is well aware of this from our prior discussions on the issue. His dissatisfaction this year is equal to mine - in spite off having identified and invited numerous women to speak, they did not respond to my invitation or accepted and subsequently had to withdraw or in two cases decided to send men in their places.
Several of you have been in touch asking what WE are going to do to address this issue. I will turn that question around as gender diversity in the sciences is all of our responsibility - what are YOU going to do to address this?  
I encourage all of you to identify a women in your organization and send her to speak in your place if this issue is of concern to you. There is only so much I can do as an outsider to drive this issue, it requires everyone working together. 
If this is possible, please let us know as soon as possible and we will switch out her name and bio for yours on the online agenda and before it goes to press for printing. It would be my great pleasure to highlight this happening next month. 
And I will extend the same invitation to Professor Eisen who is copied here that I did privately, please consider lending your substantial knowledge and expertise on this issue to making this gender diversity happen not simply in your academic writing but in the real world. I welcome your time and assistance in pulling together the faculty for the conference next year. The experience will no doubt further inform your understanding of just how difficult this task is to accomplish in the real world. 
If you have any questions or continuing concerns, please do not hesitate to be in touch. 
Best regards
Mollie
Mollie Roth, J.D.
Managing Partner
PGx Consulting
Founder and Chair
Arrowhead Translational Microbiome Conference
www.microbiomeconference.com
I wrote back
Mollie (cc'ing speakers) 
Thank you very much for working to improve the diversity of speakers at this meeting. I think asking for help in identifying and selecting speakers that represent a broader sample of diversity is a great idea. In addition, I would be more than happy to help you organize a conference next year.   
Contrary to your comments, I have extensive experience planning and running conferences in various STEM area including the microbiome space.  And though it can be difficult to achieve, for these we have had excellent diversity of speakers.  You can see a partial list here.  
For each of the meetings I have organized in the last 5 or so years (I became interested to speaker diversity about 10 years ago but have been more committed to it in the last 5) we have been able to achieve a strong representation of diversity among the speakers.  This is however not easy in every case and takes a strong commitment to diversity and sometimes significant amounts of work. 
I would suggest that for your future meetings you do some of the things recommended in the articles I list at the bottom of my web page on Diversity at Conferences. One example article worth looking as is this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4238945/.
Some examples of things that can improve the diversity of speakers include 
  1. Develop a diversity policy and publicly post it stating your commitment to diversity for speakers. I would be happy to help you develop one.  Many people basically copy a template that has come up from the technology world. I note this should not just be about gender diversity but about diversity broadly (i.e., racial, ethnic, gender, career stage, background, country, type of institution, etc). An example is https://us.pycon.org/2017/about/diversity/
  2. When people turn down invitations, ask them why and whether you could do anything to make it more likely the next time for them to accept.  It may be that some simple changes might make it more likely for people to accept.
  3. Broaden the invitation pool by expanding topics or types of people you invite.  This could, for example, include having a student or post doc presentation in each session, or including sessions focused on related topics such as press coverage of the field, or such.
  4. Ask people in the field for help in identifying speakers.  Ideally this would happen at the planning stage but could happen any time.
  5. Record and share data about speaker diversity.
  6. Make use of and contribute to diversity related lists for speakers.  For example Elisabeth Bik, now at uBiome maintains a great website and list of women in microbiome and related fields who could be invited speakers. See https://microbiomedigest.com/sample-page/women-in-microbiology-for-keynote-lectures/ . There are many other such lists around and they can be very useful. 
I would be happy to work with you on crafting a speaker diversity statement for your future meeting(s) and work with you on planning a meeting. 
Again, thank you for working to improve the diversity of this meeting.
Jonathan Eisen 


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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in YAMMM, YAMMMM

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09Mar / 2018

Frustrated by YAMMMMs: Yet another mostly male microbiome meeting

UPDATE 3/9/2018 - See Comments.  Carly Rosewarne coined the term last year ...
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A while back I coined the term "YAMMM" - yet another mostly male meeting - to reflect my frustration in seeing meetings where most of the presenters were male:

What to do when you realize the meeting you are speaking at is a YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting)?

I have since written dozens of posts about such meetings.  Sadly this is not an unusual thing.  Fortunately there has been a growing movement in many communities, including in science, to critique and not support such "MANELs".  Progress is definitely being made.  But it is piecemeal and in my opinion we must still keep up the fight for meetings and conferences to better reflect the diversity of people doing interesting and important work that should be heard.  I am sure many fields still are seeing slow progress in this area but one that frustrates me personally is the microbiome arena.  So today I am coining a new term - YAMMMM (note the extra M).  Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting.

I decided to update my mini image about this so I went to world and entered some common male names and some numbers for them.

Charles: 10
Robert: 20
Joseph: 20
David: 5
John:10
Doug: 20
Michael: 5
James: 20
William: 10
Jake: 5
Sam: 5
Richard: 10
Chris: 20
Anthony:5
Paul: 5
Mark: 5
Donald: 10
Brian: 5
Kevin: 10
Edward: 10
Timothy: 15

And Voila:
 

I then added a little header




So if you see a YAMMMM - please feel free to use this image.





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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in manels, microbiomes, YAMMM, YAMMMM

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30Oct / 2017

YAMMM alert: Yet another mostly male meeting – Frontiers in Microscopy at Janelia Farm

So I got invited to a meeting at Janelia Farm today. Alas I cannot go because it is while I am teaching in the Spring. But in pondering the meeting (which is not posted currently on the Janelia site) I decided to snoop around and see what their other meetings looked like. And, as I generally do, I also scanned the meetings to see if they seemed to have diverse participant pools. And, well, the first meeting on their Spring meeting list alas did not look so good from a diversity point of view.
This is the meeting: Frontiers in Microscopy Technologies and Strategies for Bioimaging Centers Network
This unique meeting will bring together directors of imaging centers and program leaders of open access infrastructures. Our goal is to create a platform to explore the frontiers in imaging technologies, discuss common challenges, and strategize how the global imaging community can build a common network to tackle the era of “big data” as well as rapid technological advances in microscopy.
First glance did not look great so I dug into it a bit more. I tried to infer the gender of the people listed on the site by looking for their personal web sites or other descriptions of them to see what gender pronouns were used. When that was not available I guessed based on name or appearance. I know this is not ideal / perfect but it usually does a decent job of estimating gender balance for a meeting.

Here is what I inferred (and color coded). 
  • Male
  • Female

Organizers
  1. Teng-Leong Chew, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI 
  2. Antje Keppler, European Molecular Biology Laboratory 

Ok that is good. It has been shown that having a good gender balance of organizers can help lead to a good balance for a meeting. 

Invited Participants
  1. Holly Aaron, University of California, Berkeley
  2. Pablo Ariel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  3. Richard Cole, NY State Department of Health, Wadsworth Center
  4. Hunter Elliott, Harvard Medical School
  5. John Eriksson, Turku BioImaging
  6. Scott Fraser, University of Southern California
  7. Jeremy Freeman, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
  8. Ronald Germain, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/NIH
  9. Gary Greenburg, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
  10. David Hoffman, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
  11. James Jonkman, Advanced Optical Microscopy Facility
  12. Luke Lavis, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
  13. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
  14. Elisa May, University of Konstanz
  15. Robert Price, University of South Carolina
  16. Joshua Rappoport, Northwestern University
  17. Jean Salamero, Institut Curie
  18. Hari Shroff, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering/NIH
  19. Robert Singer, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
  20. Jason Swedlow, University of Dundee
  21. Aaron Taylor, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
  22. Paul Tillberg, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI
  23. Jean-Yves Tinevez, Institut Pasteur
  24. Michael Unser, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  25. Jennifer Waters, Harvard Medical School
  26. Simon Watkins, University of Pittsburgh
Well, this is pretty skewed.  That comes to 22:4 male; female.

Or 85% male.

The meeting I was invited to had a pretty good gender balance of invited participants.  So maybe this microscopy meeting is an anomaly.  But it made me wonder - does HHMI or Janelia Farm haver a diversity policy for meetings?  I could not find anything in Googling around or looking at their web sites.  If they do not have one, I think they should consider developing one.  I did find many examples of what seems to be a commitment to supporting diversity in STEM by HHMI.  But this meeting is definitely not doing a good job of that.  HHMI can do better.



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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in gender bias, meetings, YAMMM

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24Jul / 2017

Another white men’s microbiome meeting from Kisaco #YAMMM #manel #STEMDiversity

Well, this is really unpleasant.

Last year I blogged about a what I called "The White Men's Microbiome Congress." The gender balance of the meeting was so bad I called for a boycott. And my call seemed to have some impact as many people refused to participate and then the meeting organizers from Kisaco Research responded, apologized for the gender bias, and made some attempts to at least try to fix things. For example they posted on my blog:
We recognize that it is our responsibility to help ensure that the speaker faculty reflect the diversity and culture of the field and science as a whole. In this instance we failed to live up to our own standards of sensitivity and diversity, for which we sincerely apologize. Kisaco Research is deeply committed to producing events that represent the diversity of the scientific fields we work with. We are embarrassed that this has been previously overlooked and are currently working to make this, and all other programmes, ones that the top scientists are proud to be a part of. 
And they did seem to try to make the meeting I critiqued less biased.

And thus it was really disturbing to me when someone sent me the invite they received to a microbiome meeting organized by this group and pointed out that it had the same issue. I went to the web site for this new meeting - the "3rd annual European microbiome congress (see The Microbiome Congress – Europe – Kisaco Research). And it confirmed my fears.



95% of the highlighted speakers are male (as always, I note, assessing the gender balance of a meeting is not always straight forward.  In this case I looked at the web sites of the speakers and other descriptions of them to see what pronouns were used to describe them.  I think my assessment is accurate but I apologize if I made mistakes). And all of them appear to be white.  It is a meeting for white men to speak at.  The field of microbiome studies is rich and diverse in many ways - including in the scientists and others who work on the topic.  It would not have been hard to come up with a more diverse set of speakers.  In fact, the field is so diverse in terms of researchers that I think this speaker line up - especially in light of the previous meeting - is evidence for bias.   I am not sure where that bias comes in (it could be at invitations, at acceptances, or other places) but it is pretty clear this is not a random selection of top microbiome researchers.

As this is a pattern from Kisaco Research I am calling for the following
  • People should boycott this meeting. That is, do not attend this meeting.
  • People should Boycott all Kisaco meetings. This is a pattern for Kisaco, and not a good one.  Nobody should attend any of their meetings
  • The meeting sponsors should withdraw support for this meeting. The listed sponsors include Synthetic Biologic, Qiagen, ProDigest, Affymetrix and Zymo Research. I encourage people to contact them about this and pressure them to rescind their sponsorship.  I have already contacted Zymo, for which I am an advisor.  I will let people know how they respond. 
  • The speakers should cancel their participation.  A meeting cannot go on without the speakers. The listed speakers include:
Of course, it would be better to prevent such things from happening in the future.  Some things to consider that will start to shift away from meetings with poor diversity of presenters:
  • Make diversity of presenters one of the factors you consider when deciding whether or not to accept invitations to speak at or attend a meeting. Some ways to make an informed decision here include
    • looking at past meetings by the same organizers
    • asking for a list of presenters for the meeting one is invited to
    • asking if the meeting has any policies on diversity
  • When you are involved in organizing a meeting work to make it a stellar meeting that also happens to have a diverse collection of presenters (diverse in background,  race and ethnicity, kills, perspectives, gender, types of institutions, careers stages, country of origin, and more). 
  • Develop diversity policies for meetings in which you are involved
  • If you are on the sponsorship side of things - require meeting organizers to have a diversity policy and to show their prior track records before you offer support
  • Develop and support practices and policies that would help make meetings more diverse 

Also check out some of these articles and posts

It is entirely possible to run meetings where there is no bias against particular groups in the presenter line up.  It is also possible to embrace diversity and all of its benefits and make a meeting that is simply better than a meeting where diversity is not embraced.  It does take some effort.  But it is worth it.

UPDATE. Making a Storify of some responses




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This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.
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Posted by in diversity, kisaco research, manel, microbiome, racism, Sexism, STEMWomen, YAMMM

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