Nice story from Dan Potter on KQED about Women Science PhDs

Nice story on KQED from Dan Potter: Women Getting Science Ph.D.s Still Face Gender Barriers    

Time to boycott Oxford Global meetings due to blatant sexism

I don't even know what to say or do about this it is so stunningly pathetic.  I saw this Tweet earlier in the day:

Oxford Global’s Pharmaceutical IT Congress: All 38 speakers male! (it seems)
http://t.co/ctu18mKLAw
@phylogenomics @GenderAvenger #YAMMM

— Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) May 13, 2015

I figured even in an era of blatant sexism in science, this must be a mistake right?  How could there be a conference with 38 male speakers and 0 female speakers.  So I went to the site: Who is Speaking – Oxford Global's 13th Pharmaceutical IT Congress, September 2015.  And, well, as far as I can tell Elisabeth Bik has the numbers right.  (See a list at the end of this post).  They even have a running slideshow of the speakers faces.

This is even worse than the 25:1 ratio of the qBio meeting I lost it over a few years ago.  I have never seen anything like this. I note - a 38:0 ratio is nearly impossible by chance in any field and I think pretty clearly an indication of massive bias of some kind.

I note - this is not the first case of a mostly male meeting from Oxford Global.  See for example:
Oxford Global Sequencing Meetings: Where MEN Tell You About Sequencing #YAMMM

I think it is time to just boycott meetings meetings from Oxford Global.  The only way they will change is if people stop speaking at or going to their meetings.  So please - stop going to their meetings.  Stop speaking at their meetings.

Speakers 2015:

• Sebastien Lefebvre 
  Director Data Engineering and Technology – Global Data Office, Biogen Idec
• Uwe Barlage
  EDC Project Leader, Bayer Healthcare
• Marc Berger
  Vice President, Real World Data and Analytics, Pfizer
• Michael Braxenthaler
  Pharma Research and Early Development Informatics, Global Head Strategic Alliances, Roche, & President, Pistoia Alliance
• Arnaub Chatterjee
  Associate Director - Data Science, Insights and Partnerships, Merck
• James Connelly
  Global Head, Research Data Management, Sanofi
• Jos Echelpoels
  Director IT, Regional Initiatives, Janssen
• Brian Ellerman
  ‎Head of Technology Scouting and Information Science Innovation, Sanofi
• Peter Elsig Raun
  Director & Head Business Analysis, Lundbeck
• Dimitrios Georgiopoulos
  Chief Scientific Officer UK, Novartis
• Charles Gerrits
  Vice President, Innovative Patient-Centric Endpoints and Solutions, Sanofi
• Yike Guo
  Professor of Computing Science, Imperial College London and Chief Technology Officer, tranSMART Foundation
• Sergio H. Rotstein
  Director, Research Business Technology, Pfizer
• Juergen Hammer
  Global Head Data Science, Center Head Pharma Research and Early Development Informatics, Roche
• Jan Hauss
  Head Central Analytics Informatics, Merck
• Athula Herath
  Statistical Director, Translational Sciences, MedImmune
• Nigel Hughes
  Director Integrative Healthcare Informatics, Janssen Research and Development
• Michael Hvalsøe Brinkløv
  BI Architect, IT Platforms & Infrastructure, Lundbeck
• Robert J. Boland
  Senior Manager, Translational Informatics & External Innovation R&D IT, Janssen
• Adrian Jones
  Associate Director, Business Intelligence Systems, Astellas
• Srivatsan Krishnan
  Director and Head of R&D Operations and IT, Bristol-Myers Squibb
• Philippe Marc
  Global Head of Preclinical Informatics, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research
• Dermot McCaul
  Director, Preclinical Development and Biologics IT, Merck
• Pantaleo Nacci
  Head Statistical Safety & Epidemiology/PV, Novartis Vaccine and Diagnostics Srl (a GSK company)
• Gerhard Noelken
  Global Business IT Lead for Pharmaceutical Science, Pfizer WRD
• Emmanuel Pham
  VP Biométrie, Ipsen 
• Andrew Porter
  Director, Enterprise Architecture, Merck
• Gabriele Ricci
  Vice President of TechOpps IT, Shire
• Anthony Rowe
  Director, Translational Informatics and External Innovation, Johnson & Johnson
• Martin Ryzl
  Director, GIC Analytics Platform Engineering, Merck
• Wolfgang Seemann
  Senior Project Manager, Bayer Business Services
• Aziz Sheikh
  Professor of Primary Care Research & Development and Co-Director Center for Population Health Sciences, The University of Edinburgh
• Yan Song
  Associate Director, Bioanalysis Operations, AbbVie
• Devry Spreitzer
  Director, Global Electronic Systems Quality Assurance, Astellas
• Jason Swift
  Head R&D Information UK, AstraZeneca
• Kevin Teburi
  Director – iMed Team Leader, R&D Information, AstraZeneca
• Simon Thornber
  Director, Data Analytics, Informatics and Innovation, GlaxoSmithKline
• Tjeerd Van Staa
  Professor of Health eResearch, University of Manchester

Some past meetings from Oxford Global to consider

http://www.bmsystems.net/download/BioMarkers-BMsystems-conferenceprogramme.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20120514151415/http://www.ngsasia-congress.com/

The flawed and offensive logic of "Academic Science Isn’t Sexist" in the @nytimes

OK.  It is Halloween night and I am tired and need to get my kids to sleep.  But someone on Twitter just pointed me to an opinion piece just out in the New York Times: Academic Science Isn’t Sexist - NYTimes.com and after reading it I felt I had to write a quick post.

The opinion piece is by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci and discusses work by them (and coauthors).  In particular they discuss findings in a massive report "Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape" by Stephen J. Ceci, Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy M. Williams in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.  I note - kudos to the authors for making this available freely and under what may be an open license and also apparently for making much of their data available behind their analyses.

The opinion piece and the associated article have a ton of things to discuss and ponder and analyze for anyone interested in the general issue of women in academic science.  I am not in any position at this time to comment on any of the specific claims made by the authors on this topic.  But certainly I have a ton of reading to do and am looking forward to it.

However, I do want to write about one thing - really just one single thing -  that really bothers me about their New York Times article.  I do not know if this was intentional on their part, but regardless I think there is a major flaw in their piece.

First, to set the stage -- their article starts off with the following sentences:

Academic science has a gender problem: specifically, the almost daily reports about hostile workplaces, low pay, delayed promotion and even physical aggression against women.  Particularly in math-intensive fields like the physical sciences, computer science and engineering, women make up only 25 to 30 percent of junior faculty, and 7 to 15 percent of senior faculty, leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame.

This then sets the stage for the authors to discuss their analyses which leads them to conclude that in recent times, there are not biases against women in hiring, publishing, tenure, and other areas.  Again, I am not in any position to examine or dispute their claims about these analyses - to either support them or refute them.

But the piece makes what to me appears to be a dangerous and unsupported connection.  They lump together what one could call "career progression" topics (such as pay, promotion, publishing, citation, etc) with workplace topics (hostility and physical aggression against women).  And yet, they only present or discuss data on the career progression issues.  Yet once they claim to find that career progression for women in math heavy fields seems to be going well recently, they imply that the other workplace issues must not be a problem.  This is seen in statements like "While no career is without setbacks and challenges" and "As we found, when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal" and "leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame."

Whether one agrees with any or all of their analyses (which again, I am not addressing here) I see no justification for their inclusion of any mention of hostile workplaces and physical agression against women.  So - does this mean that a woman who does well in her career cannot experience physical aggression of any kind?  Also - I note - I am unclear I guess in some of their terminology usage - is their use of the term "physical aggression" here meant to discount reports of sexual violence?   This reminds me of the "Why I stayed" stories of domestic violence.  Just because a women's career is doing OK does not mean that she did not experience workplace hostility or physical or sexual violence.  I hope - I truly hope - that the authors did not intend to imply this.  But whether they did or not, their logic appears to be both flawed and offensive.

UPDATE 1. November 1, 8:30 AM

Building a Storify about this.

UPDATE 2: Nov 3, 2014. Some other posts also criticizing the NY Times piece

• Emily Willingham: Academic science is sexist: We do have a problem here
• PZ Myers: Yay! Sexism in science is over!
• Red Ink: Let Me Fix That For You, New York Times
• Matthew Francis in Gailieo's Pendulum: No, academic science hasn’t overcome sexism (Nov 1, 2014)

UPDATE 3: Nov. 4, 2014.  More posts about the NY Times piece

• Nick Desantis in the Chronicle for Higher Education: Op-Ed Called ‘Academic Science Isn’t Sexist’ Spurs Criticism (Nov 3, 2014)
• Athene Donald in the Guardian: Is the sexist scientific workplace really dead? (Nov 4, 2014)

Kudos to Tedmed for the gender ratio of speakers for this year's event

Well done Tedmed.

Here are the speaker pages below.  Notice anything?

The gender ratio of speakers is actually well balanced.  Well done Tedmed.  Well done.