Four speakers, all distinguished scholars, all men: That was the plenary lineup at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting, held last month in Berlin. The lopsided demographics set off an active conversation on Twitter about the imbalance. A group of self-described early-career scholars got together and wrote a statement of polite but firm protest, which a senior scholar read on their behalf at the society’s business meeting.
One skewed year doesn’t demonstrate a bigger problem. But the debate among Renaissance specialists is just the most recent example of a broader conversation that has been gathering momentum as scholars at conferences, on email lists, and on Twitter do their own tallies of speakers and panelists at professional gatherings. Many of those counts turn up disparities that don’t favor women.
With conference programs archived online and digital channels of communication at hand, it’s easy to collect and share such data. The growing push to do so includes junior and senior scholars, and it crosses disciplines.
For instance, Jonathan Eisen, a professor of microbiology at the University of California at Davis, has tracked diversity in STEM fields for several years. His commentary on the issue includes a running list of conferences with poor gender ratios among speakers.
“People are more willing to be vocal about this and be counting” than they used to, says Dorothy Kim, an assistant professor of English at Vassar College. “I think people have started to be more aware.”
The Renaissance Society conversation parallels one that Ms. Kim and several other medievalists have had on MedFem, an email list about feminist approaches to medieval studies. They have compared notes on the male-female lineups at conferences in their field, including the Medieval Academy of America’s annual confab and the International Congress on Medieval Studies held every year in Kalamazoo, at Western Michigan University.
The results are mixed. The Kalamazoo meeting had 19 men and 11 women as plenary speakers from 2000 to 2014, according to the organizers. The academy has come close to gender parity among plenarists at its annual meeting since 2003, with 20 women and 24 men.
Some leaders of other scholarly organizations have also taken note of imbalances. “In the past year or two, I have noticed the return of the all-male panel in a number of organizations,” says Lena Cowen Orlin, a professor of English at Georgetown University, via email. She’s executive director of the Shakespeare Association of America. “It’s as if everyone has decided that we have achieved gender parity and can relax on this score. In fact, that’s not the experience of many women in the profession.”
Her association “has not been faultless in this area,” she adds, noting the male lineup of plenary speakers at this year’s annual conference, in Vancouver, British Columbia, in April — a situation the program committee will be mindful of as it plans for next year, she says.
A Broader View
Gender balance has gotten a lot of attention this spring, but some other forms of diversity have been turning up on conference agendas as well.
Kim F. Hall, a professor of English and of Africana studies at Barnard College, points out that the Shakespeare Association held its first Scholars of Color reception at the Vancouver meeting. “It gave people an opportunity to feel less isolated,” she says. “It felt like an affirmation of our presence and an encouragement to go on.”
The effect of that goes far beyond conferences. “You need queer students, working-class students, students of color — you need them to see what we do as a viable option for them,” Ms. Hall says. “What are you doing in your classrooms to encourage this as a viable path? If you don’t want to hear from your female colleagues, are you listening to your women students?”
The Shakespeare Association also found a novel way to direct more attention to another group that’s not always at the conference table: junior scholars. It added a “Next Generation Plenary,” or NextGenPlen, to the Vancouver lineup to showcase the work of researchers early in their careers.
“Both the NextGenPlen and the Scholars of Color social are new ways of trying to recognize and support those scholars (contingent faculty, junior faculty, graduate students, students of color) who often face particular challenges in the current field,” says Mario DiGangi, the association’s new president, who is a professor of English at the City University of New York’s Lehman College, via email.
Matthew Harrison, a Ph.D. candidate in English at Princeton University, took part in the NextGenPlen. He describes how the association used a blind-submissions process to pick the session’s five junior scholars. The speakers’ panel included three women and two men.
The association did a good job of putting out the call for applications, says Mr. Harrison, who sees the NextGenPlen as part of an attempt “to make the conference more useful to younger scholars and more diverse scholars.”
Such efforts are sorely needed, in his view: “This is a profession that has a diversity problem. It gets certainly whiter and to a certain extent maler as you move up the pipeline.” In academe “it’s a million small cuts and a million small exclusions.”
He’s been to the Renaissance Society meeting in the past and took part in the online conversation this year about gender diversity. “The RSA, prior to 2012, did a much better job of having women give plenaries,” he says. “And so in my mind the question isn’t, Are there factors that led to this gender bias? It is, How did no one notice?”
‘False Reflection’
A combination of factors produced the 2015 plenary imbalance, according to Joseph Connors, president of the society and a professor of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University. This year the group deferred to the institution holding the conference, Humboldt University of Berlin, on some speaker selections.
One of the society’s affiliates, the Erasmus of Rotterdam Society, traditionally gets to pick the person who gives the Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture, which is among the annual meeting’s marquee talks, along with the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture and a session on trends in Renaissance studies.
“Had any or all of the four plenaries in Berlin been entirely in the hands of the RSA, I think we would have paid attention to gender balance,” he says. “It’s certainly an issue to stay alert to, and we will.”
Over time, he adds, the numbers look better; 15 women have given the Phillips lecture since it began, in 1988, according to the Erasmus Society.
It wasn’t lost on those doing the gender count that the two high-visibility talks are named for female scholars. In their statement, the early-career scholars say they were dismayed by how few women have given plenaries at the meeting.
This “does a disservice to the contribution of women to the field.,” they say. “It also sends a terrible signal about how diverse voices and bodies are recognized and valued by the most important society in Renaissance studies.”
One of the statement’s drafters, Kirsty Rolfe, who was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, says misrepresentation of the field is an important part of the issue for her. “It’s not that female scholars of the appropriate caliber weren’t there to be asked, but that they weren’t asked,” she says via email.
And putting sessions with crowd-drawing scholars like Lyndal Roper and Natalie Zemon Davis in small rooms didn’t help. “It added up, with the plenary issue, to a bad impression, and to something that doesn’t look like my experience of Renaissance studies at all,” Ms. Rolfe says. Still, she adds, “gender imbalance is just part of Renaissance studies’ diversity problem.”
More than 180 people retweeted the early-career scholars’ statement after another of the drafters, Sjoerd Levelt, an associate research fellow at the University of Exeter, put it on his Twitter feed.
The Renaissance Society responded with a statement of its own, thanking the early-career scholars, acknowledging the problem, and affirming its commitment to gender parity. The male headliners of recent years are “superb speakers all, but not a mirror of the society as a whole,” it said.
Lisa Jardine, director of the Center for Editing Lives and Letters and a professor of Renaissance studies at University College London, read the junior scholars’ statement. “I agreed with every word of it,” she says.
She praises them for making a mannerly intervention, and she calls the society’s response serious and considered. “That’s a good model for academic debate, I feel,” she says. “And, yes, it definitely would not have happened without Twitter.”
The society doesn’t have a gender-parity problem overall, she says; women are well represented in most conference sessions. “That’s why the plenaries were so out of line,” she says. “As for other diversities, the RSA hasn’t even gotten started.”
Jennifer Howard writes about research in the humanities, publishing, and other topics. Follow her on Twitter @JenHoward, or email her at jennifer.howard@chronicle.com.
