The "Ben Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences" should be renamed as a "#Manward"

Uggh.So in 2011 I won this award called the "Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. " I was happy about it at the time. I got a book and a plaque and was toasted at a meeting in Boston. A few years ago I and others noted that the award had been given only to men. Then Helen Berman won the award in 2014 and it looked like maybe the process was starting to not be so biased.But I got alerted to the ongoing issues again by an email a few days ago. And not only have the other winners all been men, all four nominees this year are men too.Past Winners2002 – Michael B. Eisen2003 – James Kent2004 – Lincoln D. Stein2005 – Ewan Birney 2006 – Michael Ashburner 2007 – Sean Eddy 2008 – Robert Gentleman 2009 – Philip E. Bourne 2010 – Alex Bateman 2011 – Jonathan A. Eisen 2012 – Heng Li 2013 – Steven Salzberg 2014 – Helen M. Berman 2015 – Owen White 2016 – Benjamin Langmead 2017 – Rafael Irizarry 2018 – Desmond HigginsThat comes to 16:1M:F. Yuck. This just is not reflective of the contributions of people to open access in the life sciences. There are many many many women who have made important contributions in this general area. When I won the award I was happy but I did notice the gender bias of the winners although that was when I was kind of just waking up to the issue of gender bias in STEM. I...
Source: The Tree of Life - Category: Microbiology Authors: Source Type: blogs