1.
Bedtime process is
Finished. Or just started? Time
Will tell us shortly.
2.
Going to bed now
Or in a few hours after
Whining tons? We'll see.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Two forty-five PM
Last week, I attended a wonderful meeting on a local campus very relevant to my work in medical informatics. It was well-organized and interesting and I am glad I went. However, there was one major issue.
I'm not naming the meeting, as I don't want to unfairly point fingers at this specific conference or its fantastic team of organizers; unfortunately, they are no worse than many of the conferences (or courses, or online webinars) I have been to this year. But until things change, I think we have to talk about it.
Here's what happened. There was an array of speakers and panels changing every 45 minutes. Speaker after speaker, panel after panel, the meeting continued. The day proceeded. We broke for a delicious lunch and networking. We returned to the amphitheater for another session. And another. But it wasn't until 2:45 pm that a woman finally appeared on the stage. The meeting started at 8 am, but there were no women speaking, presenting, appearing, until almost seven hours later. And I don't want to sound snarky, but I’ll the woman who did appear two hours after lunch was not an expert or a professor. She spoke competently and confidently about her work, but she was a recent college graduate representing a company on the one industry-related panel of the day -- and the three others on her panel were all men. Only at 3:30 was there a female full-fledged expert in the field speaking to the room. The first, and the last, through the end of the day.
The room was not all male. While informatics, computer science, and data science have a higher percentage of men than women, there are more women in medicine overall these days, and there are plenty of women doing exciting things in these fields. The room contained many of them. Yet in ten hours of presenters, we heard from one.
The one time I got up to ask a question, a few men were called on before me. I stuck it out, channeling Sheryl Sandberg, and then the moderator looked at the two last people raising their hands and said to the other gentleman, "Let's let the lady go first." I felt like he'd missed the point twice: picking man after man when he chose questioners, and then pointing out that I was a woman when he finally got to me.
Conference organizers: please think about whether you're fully representing the field when you invite speakers. Who are the best speakers you've heard? And who might be the best who you haven't yet heard from?
We've come a long way. But we have further to go.
I'm not naming the meeting, as I don't want to unfairly point fingers at this specific conference or its fantastic team of organizers; unfortunately, they are no worse than many of the conferences (or courses, or online webinars) I have been to this year. But until things change, I think we have to talk about it.
Here's what happened. There was an array of speakers and panels changing every 45 minutes. Speaker after speaker, panel after panel, the meeting continued. The day proceeded. We broke for a delicious lunch and networking. We returned to the amphitheater for another session. And another. But it wasn't until 2:45 pm that a woman finally appeared on the stage. The meeting started at 8 am, but there were no women speaking, presenting, appearing, until almost seven hours later. And I don't want to sound snarky, but I’ll the woman who did appear two hours after lunch was not an expert or a professor. She spoke competently and confidently about her work, but she was a recent college graduate representing a company on the one industry-related panel of the day -- and the three others on her panel were all men. Only at 3:30 was there a female full-fledged expert in the field speaking to the room. The first, and the last, through the end of the day.
The room was not all male. While informatics, computer science, and data science have a higher percentage of men than women, there are more women in medicine overall these days, and there are plenty of women doing exciting things in these fields. The room contained many of them. Yet in ten hours of presenters, we heard from one.
The one time I got up to ask a question, a few men were called on before me. I stuck it out, channeling Sheryl Sandberg, and then the moderator looked at the two last people raising their hands and said to the other gentleman, "Let's let the lady go first." I felt like he'd missed the point twice: picking man after man when he chose questioners, and then pointing out that I was a woman when he finally got to me.
Conference organizers: please think about whether you're fully representing the field when you invite speakers. Who are the best speakers you've heard? And who might be the best who you haven't yet heard from?
We've come a long way. But we have further to go.
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