‘Gender Balance’ in Makeup of Panels a Sensitive Issue

A young historian hoping to polish his resume decided to organize a panel for the American Historical Association’s 1991 meeting. He soon received a letter asking him to revise his proposal because it was not “gender balanced.”

“If you can find a female participant,” the letter said, “we will be pleased to consider your proposal.”

AHA officials quickly retracted the letter, calling it a mistake. The association, they insisted, has no quota system. Its policy is to seek, but not require, “gender integration” of panels at the annual meeting. Nonetheless, the exchange has stirred a debate among historians over whether the policy is ambiguous and coercive.

In disciplines from history to the sciences, academic associations seem to agree these days on the need to have a diverse group of speakers at conferences and annual meetings. They routinely include that message in conference brochures and calls for papers. But they pursue the goal in different ways, and with varying degrees of success.

Exactly how academic conference organizers should go about bringing in women and minority scholars as speakers and paper presenters continues to raise some politically sensitive questions. Among them: Is the goal a legitimate form of affirmative action? Does it bring important and often neglected insights to a conference, or does it sacrifice scholarship for “politically correct” social goals?

To scholars like Melody Siegler, an associate professor of biology at Emory University, explicit policies to involve more women as conference presenters are much needed. She recently attended a neuroethology conference at which, by her count, only 8 of the 78 panel presenters were women.

“I think it’s a very legitimate form of affirmative action,” she said. “There are plenty of qualified women who get overlooked. If there’s a way to determine what the representation of women in a field is, there should be an attempt to at least have that many women or more on the program.”

Glenn M. Ricketts, research director of the National Association of Scholars, disagrees. “This is an extension of the kind of affirmative-action principles we’re opposed to in hiring and the curriculum,” he said. “You’re always supposed to learn a double lesson: In addition to plasma physics, don’t forget to learn your gender lesson today.”

The AHA flap came to light last spring, when an article written by Thomas L. Haskell, a history professor at Rice University, appeared in the AHA’s newsletter. In it, he described the incident involving the young historian, who was not named. Mr. Haskell questioned the AHA about the letter sent to the young scholar. He was later told that a graduate student who had been assisting conference organizers had mischaracterized the policy. (The young scholar unsuccessfully sought to include women, but his panel was ultimately rejected for unrelated reasons.)

In his article, Mr. Haskell wrote that while the letter’s wording may have been an “accident,” it was an accident “waiting to happen” because of the evasive language of the rule, known as Guideline 6d.

The guideline is one of several followed by the association’s program committee as it plans the annual meeting. It instructs the committee to “actively seek to avoid gender-segregated sessions” and to insure that “whenever possible sessions include members of both sexes.” Another guideline encourages panel proposers to include “ethnic and racial minorities and junior historians.”

“The guideline seems to presume that anyone proposing a single-sex panel is guilty of bias,” Mr. Haskell said in an interview. He added that he had received two dozen letters supporting his position. “No one wants to be treated as a token and no one wants to be forced to prove they’re not biased.”

Mr. Haskell has proposed an alternative that he said would be less coercive. His proposal would stress that a diverse panel is a “virtue,” but would specify that panelists be chosen “mainly for the intellectual cogency and relevance” of their work.

AHA officials said they had considered Mr. Haskell’s proposal but decided to keep the guideline as is. The goal is to insure that a variety of viewpoints are heard on conference panels, said Linda Levy Peck, a professor of history at the University of Rochester. She helped craft the guideline in the mid-1980’s, when officials realized that roughly half of the panels at the annual meetings were “gender segregated,” she said.

“What you basically were having was a lot of all-women sessions and all-male sessions,” she said.

No more than 15 per cent of the proposals received for the 1991 meeting involved single-sex panels, and most were revised to include both men and women, said Linda B. Hall, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico and head of the program committee for the 1991 meeting. Only eight panels were all-male, and just one was all-female.

“We did urge everyone to gender-integrate their panels,” Ms. Hall said, “but we certainly did not reject any panels on that basis.”

While Ms. Hall supports the policy in principle, she thinks the line between requiring gender integration and strongly encouraging it is blurry, and would like to see the association give conference organizers more guidance.

Many other academic associations, from the American Sociological Association to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, say they do not have official written policies on gender and racial representation at conferences. Instead, they take an informal approach.

The sociology group seeks a diverse membership for the committee that plans the program for its annual meeting, said Carla B. Howery, its deputy executive officer. At the 1991 meeting, roughly half of the presenters and speakers were women and minority scholars, she said.

Conference planners do not “meddle” in a particular session if all the paper presenters turn out to be white males, she said. “We don’t believe in some kind of knee-jerk tokenism on every session,” she said.

In the sciences, few academic associations appear to have written policies on the issue. Groups like the AAAS and the American Chemical Society say bringing in more women and minority scholars to meetings is a goal, but their first priority at conferences is to showcase the best science.

At the AAAS, all proposals for panels go through a blind peer-review process, said Robin Yeaton Woo, its director of meetings. “If a panel organizer blatantly omits a woman or a minority who is a leader in a field, it’s usually picked up in peer review,” she said. The difficulty, she said, is in areas of science “where there are no women or minority investigators of the stature needed.”

Some federal officials are taking a stronger stance. At the National Science Foundation, the biological-sciences directorate has a three-year-old policy that encourages applicants seeking federal funds for a research conference to include women on the program or risk being denied the financial support.

Mary E. Clutter, assistant director for biological sciences at the NSF, who devised the policy, noted that about one-third of the doctorates in the life sciences in 1989 were awarded to women.

“Our policy doesn’t establish a quota,” she said. “We simply say women should be among the invited speakers, given the numbers of women in these fields. If they’re not, we want to know why not.”

Ms. Clutter said her directorate had provided about $2-million in fiscal 1992 to support 104 meetings.

Eve I. Barak, a program director for the cell biology program in Ms. Clutter’s directorate, hears firsthand the comments of scientists asked to add women to their conference program. Reaction ranges, she said, from “a sense of outrage to a sense of `Well, if that’s what it takes to get the money, O.K.”’

Ms. Barak said she would not deny money to a conference that had exceptional scientific merit but few women as speakers. But it might receive less money than it requested, or it might be asked to submit a more balanced program next time, she said. For those conference organizers who claim they can’t think of any women to invite, Ms. Barak provides names.

Ms. Barak said she had denied federal funds to one recent conference where 2 of the 26 selected speakers were female. She would not name the conference but said she knew the field had many qualified women scientists in it, so she asked the organizers to modify their agenda.

“They came back with a list of 3 women out of 26,” she said. “I didn’t give any money. This is the second time in a row that conference came in with inadequate female representation. There are better things to do with the taxpayers’ money than to have the same old people talk to each other again year after year.”

Many other areas of the NSF, such as the mathematical and physical-sciences directorate, do not have such explicit policies.

“I don’t think the NSF can establish a policy that forces areas of science where there are zero to a few women to have women speakers at their meetings,” Ms. Clutter said. “That doesn’t mean these people shouldn’t invite women to be speakers but we shouldn’t withhold funding.”

Sometimes conference organizers’ efforts to include women fall short. John G. Hildebrand, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Arizona at Tucson, headed the committee that organized the neuroethology conference that Ms. Siegler of Emory attended. The program had 10 plenary lectures, he said, for which he wanted to select five women and five men. Although some members of his committee objected, saying the invitations should be made on purely scientific grounds, he said it was not difficult to come up with top women in the field. But the conference ended up with only two women as plenary speakers, largely because many of the women approached were already overburdened with speaking invitations, he said.

“We actually did come up with a slate of five men and five women,” Mr. Hildebrand said. “But more women declined the invitation than men.”