#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.  

Don't forget to positively highlight meetings w/ "good" gender ratio of presenters

As many know, I spend a decent amount of effort critiquing conferences that have poor speaker diversity (mostly focus on gender ratio).  Well I am also trying to start calling out in a positive way those meetings that do a good job with speaker diversity. And here is one: 2014 Xenopus Genetics meeting in Pacific Grove.  I was pointed to it in an email that was in response to a Tweet I posted (not sure if I have permission to say who this was from - will post if they say it is OK). (UPDATE 9/20 - it was Ian Quigley).

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

From what I compute - the ratio was 30:22 male: female.  I do not know what the ratio of the "pool" of speakers is but regardless, having 42% female speakers is a more even ratio than I have seen for most life sciences meetings.  So they deserve some props for this.

Female speakers highlighted in yellow.  Male in green.  

Keynote Lecture: Rebecca Heald

Special Lectures from John Gurdon and Marc Kirschner

Invited Speakers

Enrique Amaya, University of Manchester

Ruchi Bajpai, University of Southern California



Bill Bement, University of Wisconsin

Mike Blower, Harvard Medical School

Cliff Brangwynne, Princeton University

Josh Brickman, The Danish Stem Cell Center DanStem

Ken Cho, University of California, Irvine

Hollis Cline, The Scripps Research Institute

Frank Conlon, University of North Carolina

Lance Davidson, University of Pittsburgh

Eddy DeRobertis, University of California, Los Angeles

Amanda Dickinson, Virginia Commonwealth University

Carmen Domingo, San Francisco State University

Karel Dorey, University of Manchester

Jim Ferrell, Stanford University

Jenny Gallop, University of Cambridge

Jay Gatlin, University of Wyoming

Jean Gautier, Columbia University

Xi He, Harvard University

Ralf Hofmann, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Jubin Kashef, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Mustafa Khokha, Yale University

Mary Lou King, University of Miami

Laurent Kodjabachian, Developmental Biology Institute of Marseille (IBDM)

Branko Lantic, Cardiff University

Dan Levy, University of Wyoming

Soeren Lienkamp, University of Freiburg

Karen Liu, King’s College

Laura Ann Lowery, Boston College

Ann Miller, University of Michigan

Brian Mitchell, Northwestern University

Anne-Helene Monsoro-Burq, Institute Curie

Kim Mowry, Brown University

Shuyi Nie, University of Georgia

Christof Niehrs, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)

Nancy Papolopulu, University of Manchester

Sabine Petry, Princeton University

Susannah Rankin, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation

Bruno Reversade, Institute of Medical Biology, A* Singapore

Dan Rokhsar, University of California, Berkeley

Hazel Sive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Elena Silva Casey, Georgetown University

Francesca Spagnoli, Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC)

Elly Tanaka, Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden

Gert Veenstra, Radboud University Nijmegen

Monica Vetter, University of Utah

Sara Woolner, University of Manchester

Phil Zegerman, University of Cambridge

Aaron Zorn, Cincinatti Children’s

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.