A conference where all the speakers are women - happening this week #YAMMM #manels #STEMDiversity #GenderBias

It was now six years ago that I wrote here wondering if it would be a good idea to have a conference where all the speakers were women.See The Tree of Life: A conference where the speakers are all women?I wrote about this because of the general issue with excessive numbers of conferences where most or all of the speakers were men. I had come up with a term for such meetings -YAMMM. Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting. I even made some little pics / images to represent such YAMMMs.And I blogged and Tweeted about such meetings a lot (and still do). See STEM Diversity posts and related links here for example.When I wrote the post I was wondering if this would be a good counter to the problem of these YAMMMs (also called manels by others). The feedback (much of it on Twitter) was really useful, mostly. And over the years I pondered doing such a thing but to be honest, never felt really comfortable with the idea. I worried about some of the possible negative sides of doing this, such as how the speakers might get unwanted attention and critiqued for being selected solely because of their gender. And I also worried about whether this would be viewed in some way as a form of "reverse discrimination".But I did try to do other analogous things where one reversed the normal gender skew (which is almost always towards males). For example, when I found out, kind of at the last minute, I was speaking at a meeting with a very very ske...
Source: The Tree of Life - Category: Microbiology Authors: Source Type: blogs