Personalized Medicine World Conference 2015: 55 speakers 7 of which are women #YAMMM #StemWomen

Well, umm, Ralph Snyderman, despite the email invitation I will not be attending PMWC 2015 Silicon Valley.  Why not?  Well how about the fact that you have 55 speakers listed, only 7 of which are women.

Previous year's meetings are not much better.  For example, for the 2014 Meeting in Silicon Valley the Track 1 session (which they call the premier session or something like that) has a ratio of 52:5 Male:Female.

#YAMMM Alert: Drug Discovery and Therapy World Congress, a meeting made for @realDonaldTrump & other men

Note - see update at bottom of post

Elizabeth Bik sent me a link to this meeintg: DRUG DISCOVERY & THERAPY WORLD CONGRESS 2015 with a comment about the ratio of males to females in the keynote speakers.  And it is painful.  Of the plenary and keynote speakers, 15 are male and 1 is female.  Below I show pics of the plenary and keynote speakers:

Plenary and Keynote Speakers at Drug Discovery and Thearpy World Congress

Female Plenary and Keynote Speakers at Drug Discovery and Thearpy World Congress

Two bonus people who could have been giving keynote talks but who actually are not.

The gender bias at this meeting puts into perspective the push by the NIH to get drug researchers to inlcude more female subjects in their studies.  See for example, Why Are All the Lab Rats Boys? NIH Tells Drug Researchers to Stop Being Sexist Pigs.  Here is a thought, maybe we can get some of these speakers to cancel speaking at the meeting and also maybe we can get nobody to attent the meeting.  Sigh.  Yet another mostly male meeting.  Also known as "YAMMM".

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UPDATE October 14, 2014.

Well, this is one of the strangest and lamest things I have seen associated with a conference in a while.  Elizabeth Bik just emailed me to show me an invite she received to the "Global Biotechnology Congress 2015."  And here is the bizarre thing.  It is at the same time as the Drug Discovery meeting discussed here.  Same place.  Same speakers.  It is apparently the same meeting with a new name.

Same bad gender ratio of course too.

Did they do this to avoid people discovering my post about the awful gender ratio?  I don't know but seems like it might be so.  What a joke.  Well, I can guarantee people will associated this meeting name with the previous one.  

A distasteful & disgraceful "Are there limits to evolution?" meeting at the University of Cambridge #YAMMM

Well, I saw this Tweet the other day

Another for @phylogenomics's list of YAMMMs (Yet Another Mostly Male Mtg). Ratio = 1F speaker to 23M speakers. http://t.co/qgEfwtBS2B
— Hopi Hoekstra (@hopihoekstra) September 16, 2014

And though there was a bit of a discussion on Twitter I felt I had to follow up with a blog post. When I saw the post I was at a conference (Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes) where I could get Twitter access but for some reason very little web access. So I could not dig around until now (I am home). 

This meeting is a complete disgrace and an embarassment for the field of evolutionary biology, for the University of Cambridge which is hosting the meeting, and for the Templeton Foundation which is sponsoring it.

Why do I say this? Well, pretty simple actually. The meeting site lists the Invited Keynote speakers for the meeting.  Notice anything?  How about I help you by bringing all the pictures together.

Notice anything now?  How about I help you some more by masking out the men and not the women.

Impressive no?  25 speakers - 23 of them male.  I guess that means there are no qualified female speakers who coudl discuss something about evolution right?  It would be worth reading "Fewer invited talks bu women in evolutionary biology symposia" to get some context.  What an incredible, disgusting, distasteful and disgraceful meeting.  

I recommend to everyone who was considering going to this meeting - skip it.  Also consider writing to the University of Cambirdge and the Templeton Foundation to express your thoughts about the meeting.  This certainly is a fine example of Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM).  Well, maybe I should word that differently - this is a disgusting example of a YAMMM.  

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See meeting w/ severely bad speaker gender ratio but don't feel comfortable posting?send me details & I will post phylogenomics@me.com
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) September 19, 2014