BiasWatchIndia: an initiative to document gender bias in Indian STEM academia and conferences

Indian scientific conferences and meetings often lack appropriate gender representation. To better understand this disparity, we use publicly available information to calculate the base rates of women faculty in seven scientific fields and compare these against the gender ratio in Indian STEM conferences. Between June 2020, when BiasWatchIndia went live on Twitter, and August 2021, we calculated the base rates of women faculty in STEM in 97 Indian Institutes and Universities to be 13%. While Biology has the highest base rate at 26%, Engineering took the lowest spot amongst the seven fields at 9%. We sampled 239 field-specific conferences and 54 general science conferences between Jun 2020 and Aug 2021. The median women speaker ratios at these conferences were consistently lower than their field-specific base rates, except in Earth Science and General Science conferences, indicating that on average women were underrepresented in Indian STEM meetings. In fact, 60% of these conferences had women speaker ratios below field base rates and ~40% had zero women speakers. Taken together, these numbers highlight the gender inequity in Indian scientific conferences, over and above the prevalent low base rates of women faculty in Indian academia.

About the Speaker:
Prof. Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan is currently the EMBL Australia Group Leader at the Single Molecule Science Node, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Previously she was at the Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering, IISC, Bengaluru, and Microsoft Research India, Bengaluru. She did her Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany, and B.E. (Hons.) Computer Science and M.Sc. (Hons.) Biological Sciences from BITS Pilani. She won several awards and recognitions during her illustrious professional career. 2020 INSA Young Scientist Medal, SERB Women Excellence Award, RI Mazumdar Young Investigator Award, 2018 EMBO Young Investigator, Associate of the IAS, 2016 SERB Early Career Research Award, 2015 DBT Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award, 2014 DST INSPIRE Faculty Award, to name a few. She is the 2019 Member of the Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Cell Science.