Differences in the Proportion of Women to Men Invited to Give Seminars: Is the Old Boy Still Kicking Five Years Later?

The current interest in gender equality prompted one of us (King) to develop a seminar on gender issues in science. One topic was gender differences in pay, productivity and prestige. Women biology faculty make considerably less money than their male counterparts (Benditt 1992), even after controlling for discipline, type of institution, rank, and years of experience (Babco 1987). Female ESA members make about $5000 less annually than male members, even after controlling for age and time since degree was granted (Lawrence et al. 1993). Most women and men scientists do not differ in publication rate. However, average publication rates of men as a group are higher than average publication rates of women partly because those few scientists with extremely high publication rates are consistently men (Zuckerman 1987; Primack and O'Leary 1989). Publications by women and by men are of similar quality, based on number of citations per paper (Zuckerman 1987; Primack and O'Leary 1989; but see Long 1992 for evidence of greater citation of women's publications). These publication and citation patterns hold true not only for scientists as a group, but also for ecologists in particular (Sih and Nishikawa 1988; Primack and O'Leary 1989). Whether women and men differ in the prestige they receive is difficult to determine, in part because prestige is hard to define. One measure of prestige is an invitation to give a seminar or participate in a symposia at a national meeting. In 1988 Gurevitch demonstrated that women were less likely to be speakers in symposia at the 1987 ESA meeting when only men were involved in soliciting speakers. Five years have passed since Gurevitch's article, here we ask, has the situation changed at the annual ESA meetings? Our purpose follows that of Gurevitch: 1) to compare the proportion of women authors presenting invited papers versus voluntarily submitted papers at the 1991-1992 and 1993 ESA meetings, 2) to determine whether women were more likely to be invited when a women was among the symposium organizers and 3) to see if the proportion of women symposium speakers has changed since 1987.