Within the gendered conference campaign, a lot of emphasis is placed on the idea that the line-up of invited speakers at conferences should have a good gender balance. One underlying assumption seems to be that, if there is a good number of women as invited speakers, other women will feel more compelled to submit papers to the conference than they would otherwise, as the message being sent is that the particular conference in question will offer a woman-friendly environment. Moreover, drafting the list of invited speakers is (usually) fully under the control of the organizers, so it is the ideal moment for them to exert a positive influence in terms of gender balance.
But what happens next? As some of you may know, I am organizing a workshop on extended cognition taking place next week, with a rather good gender distribution for the invited speakers (60%-40%). I sent out a call for papers, and very much to my surprise, out of the circa 30 submissions I received (which I thought was an excellent number, much beyond what I had expected), only ONE was by a woman. Given that I only had 5 to 6 slots for contributed papers, the competition was rather fierce, and this paper didn’t make it to the final list. I thus ended up with a workshop having NINE male speakers, and only TWO female speakers – a rather frustrating outcome.
I am now asking myself: what’s going on here? Where did it go wrong? I did open a thread a while ago asking for names of women working in the area (extended cognition), and quite some names have come up. Many of them are of women working overseas, so I can see that submitting a paper to a workshop in Amsterdam may not be on their priority list (although I did get many male submissions from overseas!). But some of them work in Europe and, thematically, would have been obvious candidates to submit a paper, and yet they did not. Why not? Should I have spoken to them directly to solicit contributions? I always feel this is a bit of a delicate move, because it may seem to signal a guarantee that the contribution will be accepted. (By the way, while I’m all in favor of keeping gender considerations in mind when dressing the list of invited speakers, I think that this should not be a concern when selecting contributed papers; ideally, they should be reviewed anonymously anyway.)
It then occurred to me: perhaps women are more cautious when submitting papers to conferences than men? This week I wrote a blog post over at M-Phi on how women often seem to be a lot less confident concerning job applications than men: they set themselves much higher thresholds, and often think they do not fit a job description sufficiently when in fact they do. Could something similar be happening with conference submissions? Do women need the extra encouragement to submit papers to conferences that they seem to profit from when applying for jobs? In other words, when sending out CFPs, should we say, as we sometimes say in job ads, that women are particularly encouraged to submit? (But see Helen's post of today on insincere affirmative action notices.) Or are they not submitting papers as often as men simply in virtue of practical considerations such as lack of travel funding and the difficuties with being away from home, for those who have families? I really have no idea, and would be very interested in hearing what others may have to say. Ultimately, if women are not submitting papers to conferences as much as men are (proportionally), then this too may be hindering their position in the profession, so it’s something worth thinking about it.
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