Stag Parties Linger

Have you noticed?  Most invited symposium speakers are men.  Why?  Because men work behind the scenes to get themselves invited?  Or are there simply fewer prominent women in science?

Isabell, Truman and Harcourt analyze the problem by comparing the proportion of female poster presenters and symposium speakers at 21 annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, focusing on the field of primatology which has had more women than men since the 1970s.  Women give more posters than talks, while the converse is true for men.  Even more surprising is the discovery that symposia that with male-only selection committees have half the number of women speakers than symposia organized by women or mixed-gender committees.