There have been two important posts over at the Feminist Philosophers blog in the last couple of days: one with the results of the poll they conducted on reasons that may be leading women to decline conference invitations, and one on a NY Times article reporting on MIT's experience with an active policy to promote gender balance among its faculty, 12 years down the road. Both are very important topics on which I would like to say a lot more, but I'll be having an impossibly busy week (mostly attending an excellent albeit suboptimally gender-balanced conference on truth in Amsterdam), and I did not want to let these two important posts pass unnoticed.
Concerning the results of the poll, what came out as the main reason why women decline invitations was: lack of funding! I was very surprised, if nothing else because I never considered that it technically qualifies as a 'conference invitation' unless the expenses are being paid for by the conference or other sources. Jender correctly points out that women are less likely to have good travel funds available, for a variety of reasons, so this may well be a big obstacle for a considerable number of women. So this translates into an obvious advice to conference organizers seeking to establish a better gender balance: if funding is limited, it may be a good idea to prioritize the women invited as those who will receive financial support.
Another reason that was often mentioned was clash with other obligations. Here the practical advice is to invite women well in advance; it is very plausible that, due to domestic and other kinds of obligations, women have much less flexibility to make travel plans than men. Another practical advice is to let female invitees have a say on possible dates for the event before deciding on the final dates; this is of course good advice concerning both male and female speakers, but it all seems to indicate that it would be particularly important for women.
I will try to find some time to say more on the MIT experience at some point.
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