DOI: 10.5061/dryad.b8gtht7nj
title: Forward steps, lingering gaps: Gender representation among distinguished speakers at professional conferences

description: Professional conferences are an ideal venue for assessing progress towards
 equity goals within and across disciplines. We examined gender disparities
 among distinguished speakers at North American ecology conferences from
 2000 to 2023. Women's representation has increased, especially in the
 past decade, but they remain underrepresented relative to their proportion
 among graduate students. Disparities persist across institutions,
 disciplines, and career stages, particularly for late-career women.
 Additionally, the COVID pandemic did not notably impact the representation
 of women in these roles, and non-binary genders remain minimally
 represented, underscoring ongoing challenges in achieving inclusive
 representation. While the gap has not yet closed and the number of
 non-binary speakers is vanishingly small, the emerging positive trend for
 women speakers is encouraging. Plenary speakers serve as role models for
 early-career scholars, and giving these talks advances their careers and
 celebrates the important scientific contributions women are making at high
 levels in their field.
description: To assess gender representation among distinguished speakers, we
 followed the methods outlined in Farr et al. (2017). We defined
 distinguished speakers as plenary and keynote speakers, award recipients,
 and panelists (hereafter distinguished speakers). We collected information
 on distinguished speakers from the same list of conferences listed in
 (Farr et al. 2017), with the exception of a new conference hosted by the
 Society for Urban Ecology. All conferences on the list took place in North
 America between 2000-2015 (Farr et al. 2017) and 2016-2023 for the new
 dataset. We collected the following data for each conference: the society
 hosting the conference; conference title, subfield, and year; whether the
 conference was in-person, virtual, or hybrid; speaker names, titles,
 career stage, field of expertise, and pronouns; what type of talk the
 speaker gave (i.e., award recipient, keynote, panelist or moderator, or
 plenary); the speaker’s organization; and the type of institution with
 which the speaker was affiliated. We collected pronouns for each speaker
 from their speaker biography. In this manuscript, we refer to speakers
 with she/her pronouns as women, those with he/him pronouns as men, and
 speakers with they/them pronouns as gender non-binary. The number of
 speakers identifying as non-binary (n=1) was extremely limited; thus, we
 were unable to include non-binary speakers in our statistical
 analyses.
description: # Forward steps, lingering gaps: Gender representation among distinguished
 speakers at professional conferences
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b8gtht7nj](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.b8gtht7nj) ## Description of the data and file structure Data are entered in an Excel spreadsheet. Column heading categories and descriptions are listed in Table 1. Entries of n/a indicate that data were not available, or in the case of Speaker Field of Expertise 2, a 2nd field of expertise was not applicable to that speaker. **Table 1.** Summary of categories of data collected for distinguished speakers invited to speak at professional conferences in ecology from 2000-2023. | **Society(ies)** | **The society that the conference was associated with** | | :------------------------------ | :--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Conference |  The conference name | | Year | 2000-2023 | | Attendance Type | In-person; virtual; hybrid | | Career Stage | Early; Mid; Late | | Speaker Field Expertise 1 and 2 | The first and second fields of expertise listed in the speaker's bio. | | Field Expertise Simplified | The speaker’s field of expertise simplified into one of the following categories: Arts and Humanities, Life and Physical Sciences, Policy, Social Sciences | | Talk Type | Award Recipient; Keynote; Moderator/Panelist; Plenary | | Institution Type | Academia; Government; Private Sector; Museums/Zoos/Aquaria/NGOs | | Pronouns | She/her; He/him (only 1 speaker used they/them pronouns and they were removed from the dataset to protect anonymity).  |