Forward steps, lingering gaps: Gender representation among distinguished speakers at professional conferences

Professional conferences are an ideal venue for assessing progress towards equity goals within and across disciplines. We examined gender disparities among distinguished speakers at North American ecology conferences from 2000 to 2023. Women's representation has increased, especially in the past decade, but they remain underrepresented relative to their proportion among graduate students. Disparities persist across institutions, disciplines, and career stages, particularly for late-career women. Additionally, the COVID pandemic did not notably impact the representation of women in these roles, and non-binary genders remain minimally represented, underscoring ongoing challenges in achieving inclusive representation. While the gap has not yet closed and the number of non-binary speakers is vanishingly small, the emerging positive trend for women speakers is encouraging. Plenary speakers serve as role models for early-career scholars, and giving these talks advances their careers and celebrates the important scientific contributions women are making at high levels in their field.

Methods
To assess gender representation among distinguished speakers, we followed the methods outlined in Farr et al. (2017). We defined distinguished speakers as plenary and keynote speakers, award recipients, and panelists (hereafter distinguished speakers). We collected information on distinguished speakers from the same list of conferences listed in (Farr et al. 2017), with the exception of a new conference hosted by the Society for Urban Ecology. All conferences on the list took place in North America between 2000-2015 (Farr et al. 2017) and 2016-2023 for the new dataset. We collected the following data for each conference: the society hosting the conference; conference title, subfield, and year; whether the conference was in-person, virtual, or hybrid; speaker names, titles, career stage, field of expertise, and pronouns; what type of talk the speaker gave (i.e., award recipient, keynote, panelist or moderator, or plenary); the speaker’s organization; and the type of institution with which the speaker was affiliated. We collected pronouns for each speaker from their speaker biography. In this manuscript, we refer to speakers with she/her pronouns as women, those with he/him pronouns as men, and speakers with they/them pronouns as gender non-binary. The number of speakers identifying as non-binary (n=1) was extremely limited; thus, we were unable to include non-binary speakers in our statistical analyses.