NIH Director Francis Collins Has a Plan to Help Eliminate “Manels”

If you want Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, to speak at your next event or conference, he has one important condition. Any panel in which he participates has to include a diverse range of speakers from different backgrounds and show a fair gender distribution. “If I don’t see that,” he says, “I will respectfully, or not so respectfully, decline. And not come.” Collins laid out his requirements in an announcement, published on June 12, titled “Time to End the Manel Tradition.” It was the latest effort to address a glaring inequity in the scientific field: the tendency for speakers and panels to be composed entirely of men—“manels.” While STEM efforts focus on ensuring girls and women receive equal consideration and opportunity to train and enter scientific fields, more established scientists and researchers, like Collins, are raising the alarm about male-dominated practices that need to be changed immediately. “You can control who speaks at your meeting; it’s the easiest thing we can fix,” says Jonathan Eisen, director of the Microbiome Special Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who has been tweeting and blogging about gender equality at scientific conferences since 2012. That’s when he was considering attending a biology conference in Hawaii and noticed that of the 25 scheduled speakers, 24 were male. “I literally felt like throw...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized gender bias Science Source Type: news