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.




FEBS Letters Blames Society and History for their Sexist Meeting … #Boycott

What a joke.

I was pointed on Twitter to a meeting run by FEBS Letters to "celebrate" their 50th Anniversary.  The meeting has some 20 speakers highlighted of which only one is a woman.

See for example
and

And I guess in response to criticism they now write

We acknowledge that it is disappointing that there is currently only one female speaker in our line up. The FEBS Letters editorial team based its speaker selection on authors of some of the best papers published in FEBS Letters over the past 50 years, based on citations and downloads. Unfortunately, women are strongly underrepresented in this list, as a result of the fact that women in science were few over the last century. In addition, other women invited to speak at the event were not able to accept the invitation. The result below is thus currently a historical and social reflection of the past 50 years. FEBS Letters is looking at ways to address this.
That is right - for their own meeting they are blaming history and society.  How about this.  How about you take some $#$*()!@#()$!@ responsibility for the meeting you are running rather than blaming society and history for your lack of diversity?  And how about this - I call for a boycott of this meeting. Nobody should help them celebrate when this is their approach.




UPDATE - made a Twitter Moment with various Tweets on the topic