Sunday, January 30, 2011

I wonder if it was such a great idea ...


... for the Indian Women Scientists Association to give the two prominent places in the Inaugural Session of its All India Meeting of Women in Science to ...

... men!

[here's the program (doc)]

More often than not, inaugural sessions in conferences feature one or two prominent people who are neither organizers nor participants. These celebrities -- ministers, directors, vice chancellors, and the like -- usually don't stick around for the rest of the meeting, and their primary job is to add a certain aura to the proceedings, to help get some press coverage for the meeting, and if the organizers are lucky, to help get some coverage for their organization and its vision-mission-objectives. In the event, the press coverage of this meeting doesn't mention even a single woman who spoke in the inaugural session.

Even without the press coverage problem (the organizers don't have any control over the level of cluelessness of the reporter, etc...), I wonder about the symbolism of having two men giving the inaugural and keynote addresses at the Meeting of Women in Science.

And this is not the first time I have wondered about this ...

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